ABSTRACT
Over the course of this study, the historical Demetrius has emerged as an elusive figure, whose long career lies beyond the reach of the modern historian in all but the most elementary aspects. Much of what is known is derived from his hagiographic dossier, which is best read as a palimpsest that retains various layers of composition, redaction, and even radical contradictions just beneath what initially appears as a homogenous narrative. What can be stated with certainty is that the sources of the first Christian millennium – Greek, Latin, Sahidic Coptic, and Eutychius’s Arabic account – consistently depict the archbishop as a Hellenized Alexandrian from a prosperous family. By the late eleventh century, however, the early Coptic-Arabic hagio-biographic tradition presented the archbishop as an illiterate peasant – the normative hagiographic depiction that has endured. The dominance of this tradition has influenced, if not established, the basis for the bulk of academic and lay interpretations of the clash between Demetrius and Origen until today. That is not to say that Demetrius was as learned as the magister – few are on that same short list; nonetheless, whatever the actual cause of tensions between the two men may have been, it was not due to the pitting of a towering intellect against an authoritative peasant out of his league. Minimally, both shared a common Hellenic idiom and the basics of a sound education. The traditional depiction has also led some scholars to the extremely problematic (even pejorative) labeling of the presumably illiterate Demetrius as the first real Coptic patriarch of Alexandria, a perspective that clearly views all Copts as ignorant peasants, overlooking the great diversity within that community across the span of time.
