by Scott McGill
4.1 The Problems of “Coptic Literature” and its History
Although scholars have written several excellent overviews (in English Orlandi 1986, 2006; Wilfong 2001; Emmel 2007), a full history of Coptic literature lies in the future, thanks primarily to the fragmentary state of its preservation (Emmel 2006). Literary historians have as their top priority the publication and identification of the countless fragments of frequently dismembered Coptic manuscripts that libraries and museums in Egypt, Europe, and North America possess. Especially after the Arab conquest, the production and reproduction of literary manuscripts in Egypt became concentrated in a few large monastic communities, especially the White Monastery near Panopolis (Orlandi 2002) and the Monastery of the Archangel Michael in the Fayum (Depuydt 1993; Emmel 2005). Copying may have reached a peak in the ninth and tenth centuries, but the gradual replacement of Coptic with Arabic as the living language of Coptic Christians caused manuscript production to decline and eventually to cease, except for liturgical aids. Existing Coptic manuscripts fell into neglect and suffered damage. Finally, when European collectors began to acquire the manuscripts, they seldom did so in large complete groups. Instead, codices from the same Egyptian hoard usually ended up in different locations, with portions of already dismembered individual codices dispersed (Louis 2008). Reconstructing the manuscript tradition of Coptic literature remains the field’s most urgent task.
Even if and when scholars complete that task, writing a history of Coptic literature will still face the difficulty of contextualizing numerous works that are pseudonymous and even whose original language is uncertain (Orlandi 1986, pp. 70–73). Many martyrdoms, encomia, homilies, apocrypha, and other works that survive in Coptic are anonymous or bear authorial attributions that scholars doubt, usually to prominent church fathers who wrote in Greek, such as Athanasius of Alexandria, John Chrysostom, or Basil of Caesarea. Was, for example, a homily on Michael the Archangel attributed to Basil in a ninth‐century manuscript originally composed in Greek or Coptic (Depuydt 1991, 1:10–16, 2:10–17)? When was it composed, and was the original context Egyptian? At what point did the attribution to Basil enter the history of transmission? Although many sermons can be assigned to “cycles” that date to the seventh or eighth centuries (Orlandi 1991), an individual sermon that shows affinities with traditions found in late ancient Greek and Coptic sources may in truth come from any number of settings in the late ancient and early Byzantine East from the fourth through the ninth centuries. At some point it found a receptive audience in the monastically dominated environment of Coptic Christianity.
If pseudonymous homilies provide a challenge to contextualization, so too do some works that bear attribution to a known Coptic Christian. For example, four fragmentary White Monastery manuscripts from the ninth to eleventh centuries (now dispersed among eight different libraries) attribute two sets of homilies, one on Matthew and another on Luke, to Rufus, who is known to have been bishop of Shotep in the final decades of the sixth century. If the attribution is correct, then the homilies illustrate a literary revival among Coptic Christians during the patriarchate of Damian (578–607), when the anti‐Chalcedonian church achieved a new level of unity and strength after a period of disarray. Moreover, the works are indebted to Alexandrian traditions of exegesis associated with Origen and Didymus the Blind and show knowledge of these authors and of others such as Irenaeus and Evagrius of Pontus, and so they would testify to the persistence of this theological current well into the post‐Chalcedon era and to a lively intellectual culture in Upper Egypt (Sheridan 1998). On the other hand, some scholars have argued that these Alexandrian, even “Origenist,” elements indicate that the homilies are Coptic translations of Greek works from the late fourth or early fifth century (Luisier 1998; Lucchesi 2000). In that case, as one scholar puts it, we would gain “some works of considerable interest for the history of the Origenist controversy” but “lose one of our native Coptic authors” (Emmel 2006, p. 180).
The controversy surrounding the homilies of Rufus raises the question of what we mean by “Coptic literature” in general. If we restrict the term only to literary works that were composed in Coptic, we could not be certain whether the homilies of Rufus and countless other works belong to that category at all. In fact, Lucchesi (2000, p. 87) has argued that we should assume the existence of a Greek original behind every Coptic text until we can prove the contrary. In that case Coptic literature dwindles to very little, and its contents become deeply uncertain. For these reasons, most scholars maintain a capacious sense of Coptic literature as embracing nearly all the literary works that survive in the language. The bilingualism that appears on every page in the form of Greco‐Coptic words represents Coptic literature’s distinctive character as a literature on the border between Greek and Egyptian, between traditional Egyptian religion and Christianity, and between absolute literary authorities (like the Bible) and creative innovation.
4.2 Translation and the Origins of Coptic Literature
Christianity is a religion of translation: In late antiquity as today, Christians were eager to translate their scriptures, rituals, and practices from their original languages and idioms into those of the cultures they sought to missionize. The use of Greek characters to write vernacular Egyptian dates to the second and possibly even first century CE: The earliest examples are horoscopes, spells, and invocations that reflect traditional Egyptian religion (Old Coptic). Christians took up the practice to translate and teach the Bible and so “brought Coptic out of the cloistered environments in which it had been used by non‐Christians,” elevated its literary quality, and made it available to Egyptians to write personal documents and literary works (Choat 2012, p. 589). The earliest Coptic (as opposed to Old Coptic) manuscripts date to the third and early fourth centuries and contain glosses on Old Testament texts, select biblical works, and hymns. To represent a language that was primarily oral in the third century, Coptic uses the 24 letters of Greek, along with a small set of Egyptian characters drawn from the Demotic script to express sounds lacking in Greek. Dialectical variation characterized Egyptian as it was spoken up and down the Nile, and thus Coptic, too, features a variety of regional dialects (Funk 1991). Nonetheless, in late antiquity Sahidic emerged as the prestige dialect, probably thanks to its central location in Middle Egypt, to its relative similarity to the other dialects, and to Christianity’s drive toward standardization (Layton 2011). After the Muslim conquest, Bohairic, based in northern Egypt, became dominant and remains (along with Arabic) the liturgical language of Coptic Christians. A critical edition of the Sahidic Bible, whether Old or New Testament, is a major desideratum in Coptic studies, which projects at Münster and Göttingen hope to fill. The significance of the Bible for Coptic language and literature exceeds that of the King James Version for modern English: Its grammar, syntax, and vocabulary profoundly shaped all the literary works that followed. The New Testament (especially the Gospels), Psalms, and Proverbs are the most frequently found biblical works in early manuscripts, which provide important evidence also for the Greek text of the Bible before it was standardized in the Byzantine period (Wilfong 2001).
A vast portion of the earliest attested Coptic texts (from the fourth and fifth centuries) consists of additional works translated from Greek and perhaps Syriac/Aramaic. Christianity was not the only missionary religion active in Egypt: So, too, Manichaeans sought converts, formed communities, and translated their sacred literature. For example, the apparently seven codices that make up the so‐called Medinet Madi Library probably date to the first decades of the fifth century (Robinson 2013; Gardner, BeDuhn, and Dilley 2015). The poor state of their preservation has made conserving and editing the codices a major challenge; a team of scholars is currently making progress on one of the most damaged but perhaps most historically fascinating codices, which contains a work entitled The Chapters of the Wisdom of My Lord Manichaios and which is now in the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin. Written in the Subachmimic or Lycopolitan diale
ct, the Medinet Madi texts have traditionally been considered translations from Syriac/Armenian, but the possibility of Greek originals for at least some cannot be ruled out. Whatever their original social location, the works suggest a thriving Manichaean literary culture in Coptic during the early fifth century, for they include teachings of Mani and episodes from his life, psalms, homilies, letters, and even a church history.
More famous by far are the 13 codices discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945 (Brakke 2005), which contain an astonishing variety of early Christian works, most of which ancient church leaders would have considered heretical. Although the hoard of manuscripts is often referred to as a “library,” scholars have no definitive evidence for the context of the manuscripts’ creation and collection. While many if not most have argued for a monastic setting (Lundhaug and Jenott 2015), monks were not the only ascetically and intellectually inclined Christians in late ancient Egypt. The scripts, writing materials, and dialects of the manuscripts are diverse. It has been estimated that the handwriting of as many as 14 different scribes can be detected in the codices. Although all the texts are in Coptic, some are in the Sahidic dialect and others in Subachmimic, with great variation even within these two broad categories. It seems likely, therefore, that the manuscripts were copied at different locations and subsequently collected by a person or group. Several of the leather covers contain cartonnage, scraps of discarded papyrus glued together to make the cover firm: The latest of the scraps can be dated to 348 CE, and thus the codices must have been constructed later than 350, and an increasing number of scholars argue for some time during the early fifth century.
The 46 different tractates contained in the Nag Hammadi codices vary widely in their genres and theologies. Although most can be considered Jewish or Christian in the sense that they draw on the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and other Jewish and Christian literature, others, such as a fragment of Plato’s Republic, certainly did not derive from a Jewish or Christian milieu. All of the texts were originally composed in Greek and subsequently translated into Coptic; thus, they could have originated in locations throughout the eastern Mediterranean or among Greek‐speaking communities in the West. Many of the tractates are apocalypses or revelations, in which a divine figure (e.g. Jesus) or authoritative human being (e.g. Adam) reveals future events, cosmological secrets, or theological doctrines to an elect person or group. Other works are or include theological treatises, sermons, prayers, hymns, and wisdom books. Several tractates are called “gospels,” but none resemble the Gospels of the New Testament, which present a narrative of Jesus’s ministry emphasizing his passion and death. Rather, the Gospel according to Thomas, for example, presents a collection of Jesus’s sayings, in the manner of the biblical book of Proverbs, without any narrative.
Literary historians must ask what motivated the translation of these works from Greek into Coptic. Advocates of the monastic hypothesis for the codices’ origin suggest that the translations were intended for Egyptian monks with poor knowledge of Greek (Lundhaug and Jenott 2015). Others argue that, because many of the works present complex mythologies and theological arguments and are studded with Greek loan words, it seems likely that most readers interested in such literature would have known Greek as well as Coptic. Moreover, much of the Coptic is poor (especially if the translations date to the fifth century), and many of the translations muddled. Some have suggested that the translators were neophytes in Coptic (at least in writing it) and were practicing. Or perhaps the works reflect a fascination with Egyptian as an ancient language of mystic lore, the best medium for works that often transmit esoteric knowledge (gnōsis) (Emmel 2008). In some monastic settings Coptic, the language of Antony, Pachomius, and other admired pioneers, may have had greater prestige than Greek. Whatever the motivation, the translation of these works brought them into the world of Coptic literature, where they encountered resistance and influenced religious thought in ways that scholars are only beginning to explore.
4.3 Original Coptic Literature: From Pachomius and Shenoute to the Muslim Conquest
Literature composed in Coptic originated in Christian monasticism, that is, organized ascetic life apart from the traditional household. Epiphanius reports that Hieracas, the leader of an ascetic community in Lycopolis in the early fourth century, wrote psalms in Coptic, but if he did, they have been lost (Goehring 1999, pp. 110–133). A set of letters attributed to Antony, the famous hermit who died around 356, survives in several languages, and he may have written them in Coptic (Rubenson 1995). Several works on the monastic life bear the name of Paul of Tamma, who appears to have lived in the late fourth century (Orlandi 1988). We are on more secure ground with the writings of Pachomius and his colleagues in the Koinonia, the federation of monasteries that he founded and led until his death in 346. The Koinonia was a bilingual community that generated rules, biographies, letters, and homilies in both Greek and Coptic (Veilleux 1980–1982). Pachomius himself may have written some of the early rules in Coptic, and he certainly composed most if not all of his letters in Coptic. Some of the letters are obscure, written in a code that modern historians labor to decipher (Joest 2014). Letters and rules are the earliest and among the most basic genres of monastic literature – and thus of Coptic literature as well.
The Pachomian Rules form the first point on a trajectory that leads to the Rule of St. Benedict (Veilleux, 1980–1982, vol. 2; Rousseau 1985, pp. 48–53). They come down to us as a whole only in Jerome’s Latin translation of 404, in which they divide into four sections, or books. Although it is reasonable to assume that some of this material in written form dates back to the lifetime of Pachomius, the Rules doubtless are the product of several decades of development and ad hoc legislation. For the most part individual rules take the form of legislative commands: The monk or the housemaster or the superior or whoever “shall” or “shall not” do something. Frequently a particular situation is presupposed with a conditional clause: “If anyone does” this, “he shall” do that. Literary influences include legal texts and wisdom literature, both biblical and Egyptian. Although there appears to be some rationale behind the creation of one or more of the sections – for example, “Precepts and Institutes” may address specific officials, not monks in general – the rules often follow no clear organizational scheme and so reflect their origins in ad hoc legislating over a long period of time rather than in a single author’s vision. Still, one can see here the beginnings of the classic regula of the Benedictine type.
Apart from rules and letters, then, there were few precedents in native Coptic when Shenoute made his literary debut in the 380 s. Shenoute was a monk in a monastery founded by his uncle Pcol near Atripe, across the Nile from Panopolis and not far from the leading Pachomian monastery at Pbow. As the (deceased) founder’s nephew and a young man of obvious education and rhetorical talent, Shenoute must not have been just any monk, but he held no known official position when he produced his first major work – a long open letter to his monastic community that accuses its leadership of covering up major instances of sin and announces the author’s decision to withdraw to a hermitage in the nearby desert (Emmel 2004a, 2004b, pp. 558–565). Now the opening work in the first volume of Shenoute’s Canons, this piece resembles other early Coptic works in its genre (letter), its extensive quotations from the community’s rules, and its reliance on the Bible for its vocabulary and imagery. And yet it is startlingly new: The style mixes polished rhetoric, biblical diction, and colloquial informality; the voice is both completely assured of its moral rectitude and deeply anguished in its emotional pitch; and the author tells a series of mysterious parables that sound vaguely scriptural but are, rather, allegories for communal events.
Shenoute’s innovation consists, on the one hand, in the brilliance of his variations on existing Coptic literary forms (letter, rules, homilies) and works (the Bible) and, on the other, in his use of Greek rhetorical techniques to extend the complexity of Coptic syntax and to develop a distinctive literary voice.
In a sermon from late in his career (440 s), Shenoute acknowledges that “there are many people who speak the word because they want the people who hear them to praise them as orators,” rather than “so that souls might be saved,” and that some hearers are more interested in critiquing the preacher’s rhetorical skills than in benefiting spiritually. Shenoute insists that he speaks as he does only “because I want our labor to profit us, both speaker and listener” (Brakke and Crislip 2015, p. 278), but one can imagine that it was not only the content of Shenoute’s teachings that drew crowds to hear his occasional public sermons or that caused prominent politicians and military leaders to visit him and request a private oration. It is difficult to know, however, how in the 380 s Shenoute’s first letter would have been published or to imagine how its addressees would have received it. In any event, it opened a remarkable literary career that spanned some seven decades and that achieved a level of excellence that no other native writer of Coptic would ever approach.