Abstract
Returning to the subject of primary and secondary education, we have noted that the master of theBouriant Papyrus and Dioscorus were taught using ancient methods and pre-Christian authors. Does this mean that the schools remained impervious to the development of Christianity, which was the most profound and radical mutation that Antiquity had to undergo ? Certainly not : there was indeed a Christianization of lectures, but it was unevenly effective according to level, milieu and language. Following a discussion of the problematic notion of " Christian school papyri ", I have proposed, on methodologically more solid foundations than those experimented with in the past, a corpus of texts enabling us to analyze the phenomenon of the Christianization of teaching between the 4th and 8th centuries.
Learning to read through words : the rise of Christianity
While the way letters and syllables were taught remained unchanged, it was with word lists that Christianization penetrated the world of schools, through a process of substitution of words linked to classical paideia by others taken from Christian texts or referring to Christian personalities or realities. The P.Bingen 17 (which I date from the 6th century and not, as the editors do, the 4th) illustrates not only this phenomenon of Christianization, but also the choices made between the biblical books : veritable cultural microcosms, these lists reflect the Old Testament books that were most widely read. However, some words are equivocal, referring to both pagan and Christian traditions.
Learning to read and write through texts : the coexistence of the classical and Christian models (1)
What about selected texts ? While we have seen that the master of Papyrus Bouriant stuck to the old classical authors, others made different choices. Recent studies on the subject have even shown that this was by far the most common attitude.
