ABSTRACT
Anthropologist Terence Turner famously stated that dress is a “social skin … the necessary medium through which we communicate our social status, attitudes, desires, beliefs, and ideals (in short, our identities) to others … it also to a large extent constitutes those identities, in ways to which we are compelled to conform ….”2 Dress is a language about the body that is at once individual and communal. It is potentially rich with meaning and its (repeated) performance can render those meanings authentic both to others and to ourselves. An early Christian text, the Gospel of Philip attests to the symbolic potential of dress in this regard. The gospel does not advise Christians about their mundane clothing by participating in the anti-adornment rhetoric that we find in much early Christian literature. In fact, it has little concrete information about the dress and grooming habits of ancient Christians. Instead, it in we find metaphorical deployments of dress, more specifically clothing imagery. In the context of second-and third-century debates about the fate of the human body in the afterlife, the gospel employs clothing imagery as part of its rhetorical tactics.
