Who are the Copts?

1. Introduction

It is too simplistic to say that the Copts are that part of the Christian church in Egypt. To understand who they really are, one has to understand a bit of history, and their history goes back a long way, about 6000 years. They are the descendents of the pharaohs and all those who lived on the banks of the Nile, who built the pyramids and the sphinx. Their language was written in hieroglyphics, which we see in their tombs with pictures of their everyday life. In 332 B.C. Alexander the Great conquered Egypt and established the city of Alexandria, over which the Greek-Macedonian pharaohs, the Ptolemy’s, ruled. The language of the educated people became Greek, but the ordinary person still spoke his language, Coptic. The word Copt is derived from the Greek for Egypt, Aigiptos, the ‘gipt’ becoming Copt. They adopted the Greek alphabet, with four extra letters to accommodate four consonants in their language that were not in Greek. Alexandria became the great centre of learning in the Mediterranean world, superseding even Athens. The library of Alexandria was famous throughout the world. It attracted people from all over the then known world, including a large number of Jews, originally displaced by the Babylonians. Around 250 B.C. the Old Testament was translated into Greek by about 70 scholars, the reason for its being called the Septuagint. The Ptolemaic period ended in 30 B.C. with the Roman invasion by Anthony. However, the chief language remained Greek, or rather a common form of it spoken throughout the Mediterranean world, now known as Koine Greek. This is the language in which the New Testament was written. The Romans, unlike the Greek-Macedonians, conquered all of Egypt and established fortified settlements down the whole length of the Nile, and Roman ruins are to be found as far south as Assuit.

2. Early Christian period

Egypt was very fertile soil for Christianity to take root. It is believed that Mark arrived in Alexandria in A.D. 41, and preached throughout Egypt till his martyrdom on Easter Sunday 68. There is a friendly rivalry between the sees of Assuit and Alexandria as to which had the Gospel first. An elderly priest in St. George’s church, Assuit, told me that Mark travelled over the desert from Libya to Assuit, then down the Nile to Alexandria. Whoever it was, Alexandria became the dominant city, because of its previous claim to being the great centre of learning. The modern city of Cairo was then only a collection of villages with a Roman colony, named Babylon (there is part of down town Cairo called Babylouk, and, even today, that part of old Cairo, where the churches are, is called Babylon) and 1 Peter 5.13 suggests that Peter may have visited the Roman colony with Mark, and may have written his first letter from there, or so Egyptian Christians believe today. Who really knows?

However, the most important visitor to Egypt was not Mark, but Jesus himself, as an infant after the slaughter of the Holy Innocents. To the Copt the story of the flight into Egypt does not begin with Matthew 2, but rather with Isaiah 19. This chapter begins:

The burden against Egypt. Behold, the LORD rides on a swift cloud, And will come into Egypt; The idols of Egypt will totter at His presence, And the heart of Egypt will melt in its midst.

This is the prophesy of the Lord’s visiting Egypt, born on a swift cloud, His holy mother, as Copts have interpreted it, and the idols of Egypt, those of the Pharaonic religion, falling in his presence. There are numerous traditions of the child Jesus entering an Egyptian temple and the gods falling on their faces. The heart of Egypt shall melt meaning that there will be nothing remaining of the old religion in the light of the Gospel. Chapter 19 continues with a series of curses upon the old religion, but the mood changes.

In that day there will be an altar to the LORD in the midst of the land of Egypt, and a pillar to the LORD at its border.

The chapter concludes:

In that day Israel will be one of three with Egypt and Assyria--a blessing in the midst of the land, whom the LORD of hosts shall bless, saying, "Blessed is Egypt My people, and Assyria the work of My hands, and Israel My inheritance."

Blessed is Egypt my people is the one promise that every Egyptian holds very dearly and cherishes it in his or her heart, for no other nation, except Palestine, has been blessed by God in this way, with His own presence. Last winter we made three ‘pilgrimages’ to those parts of Egypt reputed to have been visited by the Holy Family.

Alexandria became the centre of Christian learning with such names as Cyprian, Origen and the one that we all know of, Athenasius, who defined the apostolic faith at the Council of Nicea, 325, in the creed which we call the Nicene Creed. That was a high water mark in church history. Perhaps a low water mark was the Council of Chalcedon of 451. At that point the Egyptian church was ostracized by the remainder of the church over a dispute over the person of Jesus Christ. Was the Jesus of history the same person as the Christ whom we worship? The same dispute has been raised by so-called scholars in the church today. The Egyptians said emphatically Yes he was, or rather is, and were known as the Monophesites, from the Greek for ‘one nature.’ They were opposed by Nestorius, a patriarch of Constantinople, and his followers, who said that Jesus had two natures. The fight was so rancorous that the Egyptians were eliminated from any further discussion or council in the church. We saw in the church in Sakha, a town in the Delta, the supposed relics of Bishop Severus, who as patriarch of Antioch, instructed his monks to kill Nestorians in Alexandria. Interestingly, there has been reconciliation between the Coptic Church and all the Western churches over this issue, but not with the Eastern Orthodox Churches, which, though never Nestorian, still do not wish to heal the wounds between themselves and Coptic Christians. There may have been politics behind the fight, since Constantine established Constantinople, which became the dominant centre of Christianity in the East, superseding Alexandria and that other Biblical see of Antioch, in which the disciples of Jesus were first called Christians, and so there may have been no small rivalry. One monk at the Mar Makarios, or St. Makarios, monastery, off the desert road between Cairo and Alexandria, facetiously told me that there were seven candidates to be the Pope in Rome, and the Egyptian was eliminated on the first ballot! Disputes in the church are not a modern phenomenon.

Who then are the Copts? They are firstly Egyptians descended from Pharaonic times. Many of them are Christians, but the term ‘Copt’ also includes not only those in the Coptic Orthodox Church, but also Catholic Copts and Evangelical Copts, indicating a later Western influence in Egypt. There are also Coptic Orthodox Christians in Ethiopia, not Egyptians. There are Egyptian Copts, no longer Christian, since they have converted to Islam, and Arab Copts, who have converted the other way. So the term is no longer as homogeneous as it once was. For the remainder of this essay, however, by Copt I shall mean those in the Coptic Orthodox Church.

3. The Persecutions

The Coptic Church has suffered persecution as no other. In the first three centuries the whole church was persecuted by the Romans, the most severe being that under the Emperor Diocletian, 284 to 303. In our visit to Samannud, a town in the Delta, we learned that during those years, 8000 from that one town, many of them children, had died rather than to bow to an image of the emperor. One of these was the 12 year-old boy, Abanub, whose relics and icon are preserved in the church. The priest removed them from the case and held them for us to touch, so that we might receive baraka, or blessing. Miracles of healing are attributed to Abanub, especially of sick children. He is also esteemed as an example to them, and people have said that on occasions he has jumped out of his icon to play with them. The church is dedicated to the Virgin Mary and to Saint Abanub, who is commemorated on July 31st, the anniversary of his martyrdom. Many of the faithful make a pilgrimage on that date, and many today are healed through intercession to him. So important is the Diocletian persecution that Copts date there calendar from the year 284, rather than the date of the birth of Christ.

From 451, the Council of Chalcedon, to the Muslim invasion in 640, Egyptian Christians suffered more from their fellow Byzantine Christians, than they did in their subsequent history under Islam, to which we shall return later. Immediately following the invasion, however, Christians did have to put over their doorways: Mohammed is a messenger of God. Jesus is a messenger of God. God is neither begotten, nor does he beget. They also had to pay a tax for protection, not from Muslims, but from their fellow Christians!

4. Monasticism

Perhaps the Egyptian church is best known for the monastic movement. Men and women, wishing to get away from the sinful luxuries of the city, or from the persecutions, took themselves off to live in the deserts, some as hermits, some in communities. They lived in caves, and we have visited some at Deir el Hinnis in Upper Egypt. It was quite a climb from the edge of the Nile valley up to the top of the hill, where the caves were carved by nature, several smaller ones where one or two lived, and one larger one which was their church. This was famous since on the walls were the earliest pictorial record known of the Flight into Egypt, not in the best state of preservation. The first known monk was St Anthony, who lived alone near the Red Sea. He started the movement which became widespread throughout the church, and today there are monasteries worldwide, even in the Protestant churches. Monasteries dot the Egyptian landscape, the most famous one being at Muharraq, in Upper Egypt, which we have visited on the trail of the Holy Family. Some of the monks took the Gospel to Europe, from where it came to North America, so we are in their debt. The milkman who delivered our milk had the name Maurice, and I asked why he had a French name, rather than Arabic, thinking he may have had a French mother. He proudly reminded me that Maurice was an Egyptian who had evangelized the Alpine region, and St. Moritz was named after him.

In recent years the numbers of professed monks and nuns has grown substantially, from only 5,000 in the whole of Egypt fifty years ago, to more than 120,000, a greater growth rate than the population of Egypt, which in the same period has grown from 22 million to 69 million. Fr. Philoxenos, whom we met in his monastery of Muharraq, told us that the quality of those professed had increased too, meaning that there were monks and nuns with higher levels of education. He himself had followed his Sunday School instructor, for whom he had a very high regard, into the monastery. When asked what was the attraction to be cloistered, Fr. Philoxenos replied, “I have no needs; I fear nothing.” All his material needs were met, even though he owned nothing. He had the use of a watch and a mobile phone, but he said they belonged to the monastery. He said their days, according to the rule of St. Anthony, were divided between prayer, work and his private life, which was spent alone in his cell. Their day began at 2.30 a.m. and ended with Vespers at four p.m.. There appeared to be no set times for prayer, as in the Benedictine Rule, but he said there were ten masses every day, to fit everybody’s schedule. The masses at al-Muharraq were celebrated in Coptic rather than Arabic, which became the common language of the people after the Arab invasion. Their work varied from working inside the monastery walls, in his case to entertain visitors, to working outside, managing the farms. No one, however, lived outside the walls of the monastery. They all spent a considerable part of their day alone in their cell, most of that time in prayer. After ten years in the order he had been consecrated a priest, which enabled him to say the mass. It was not his decision to become a priest. He had been recommended by his superior, and he had simply obeyed. He said that there was no place in the monastery for anyone unwilling to obey the superior, or to accept celibacy and poverty. If anyone were unhappy with his life as a monk he should commit his mind to the work assigned to him, and work harder at it, and his mind would eventually change. From his demeanor he appeared to be a man extraordinarily content.

5. Relations with non believers

The Muslim invasion of 640 brought some respite to Copts from the constant battles with the remainder of the church. In fact there has been, and is today, a symbiotic relationship between Islam and the Coptic Church. Except for a brief period in the 11th century, Muslims and Christians have co-existed in Egypt exceptionally well. In 969 there was a second Muslim invasion by the Fatimids, direct descendents of the Prophet Mohammed. They founded the city of Cairo, making it the capital of Egypt, and in 970 they founded there the al-Azhar mosque, which became, and still is today, the centre of Islamic studies in the Muslim world. The patriarch of Alexandria also moved to Cairo, even though he retained the title as patriarch of Alexandria. However, in 1016 Caliph al-Hakim (996-1021 – the same man, who in 1009 had ordered the destruction of the church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem) declared himself to be the earthly incarnation of God, which created some problems for Christians, and many lost their lives. After his death Christians were treated with greater consideration and held high positions in the governments of the Fatimids, and all subsequent Islamic dynasties, right up to the present time. Not even under salâhu d-din yussuf , or Saladin, a Kurd who was born in Tikrit, modern Iraq, in 1138 and died in Damascus in 1193, did the Christians in Egypt suffer as they had under Caliph al-Hakim. It was Saladin who suppressed the Fadimid rulers of Egypt in 1171, and built his palace, the Citadel, which still stands overlooking Cairo today. He also captured Jerusalem in 1187. So great was the divide between the Coptic church and the Western churches that in 1250 they did not go to the aid of the ill fated 7th Crusade of Louis IX of France, the Crusader “saint,” who got bogged down in the streets of the delta city of Mansoura.

Although relations between the leaders of Islam and the church are very cordial, that in the villages has not always been so. These are exacerbated by fiery tempers, and innocent people, on both sides, do get murdered. However, tempers in Egypt do quickly calm down and everybody gets on with their life, even though there may be some smoldering resentment. These stories are often grossly exaggerated in the media. An example of a recent dispute is the case of a holy tree. Just south of Gebel el-Teir, towards Upper Egypt, we saw about a four foot length of a dead trunk of a tree lying on its side on the edge of the road. This was supposed to have been one of several trees that worshiped the Lord, as he passed, bowing their branches to him. However, the church tradition here was less than twenty years old. The tree was no doubt considerably older, (but it did not look to be 2000 years old) but did not attract anyone’s attention till about twenty years ago. During its time as a holy tree it received much veneration from pilgrims, both Christian and Muslim, and the local farmers benefited from the tips left behind. Then just four years ago it was cut down. Some Westernized Copts and the Western media were quick to charge that Muslims wished to erase the Coptic identity from the area. However, Dr. Cornelis Hulsman, a Dutchman, who escorted us on our Holy Family pilgrimages, went there to determine for himself what really had happened. By interviewing all the parties, the priest of the village, government officials and the local farmers, he discovered that a squatter on the land, on which the tree was growing, had heard that the government might put a fence around it, as one might around a heritage site, and he was afraid that he might lose what little land he had to grow his meager amount of food for himself and his family on, as there would be no compensation. There have been some disputes in the villages with more serious consequences, but it is not a systematic persecution as in the days of the emperor Diocletian or Caliph al-Hakim.

6. The Enlightenment, or lack of it

The Egyptian church, being isolated by its geography and history from the West, has never suffered from the so called Enlightenment. Evidence and reason play no part in the faith of the church. There are numerous holy trees that have bowed to the Lord. In the church at Sakha we saw a stone on which the Lord is supposed to have left an imprint of his foot. At Gebel el-Teir he is supposed to have left an imprint of his hand, but local people say that it was either stolen by the Crusaders, or by the English, and is now in the British Museum. There is a belief that Christ after his resurrection went with his disciples to Muharraq to plant the altar that was foretold by Isaiah that there would be an altar of the Lord in the midst of Egypt. (Muharraq is geographically in the middle of Egypt.) To a Western observer, such as myself, all this borders on the incredulous. Dr. Cornelis Hulsman, our tour leader, had previously discussed the skepticism of Western observers with the priest of Samannud, who replied:

It is possible to believe almost anything as long as it is not against the Bible and dogmas of the church. The Coptic Orthodox faith is not intellectual. It is more feeling; believing with your heart. That is not related to someone’s education. Many educated Copts believe with their heart.

Father Philoxenos, whom we have met before, expressed it this way:

Not every fact of history is recorded in historical documents...We first depend on the Bible, then we have the doctrines of the apostles, and the third source is the tradition. These are the three sources of faith of the Coptic Orthodox Church.

You see, Coptic people are a very religious people. We have a strong belief in the Bible, in the church, the sayings of the church, and the history of the church. We can’t deny that there are many stories that are exaggerated. We don’t deny this. But we have faith in our church fathers and in what they say. This is a very strong source for the people of Egypt.

The first source we depend on is faith. If historical evidence adds something that confirms it, it is fine, it is acceptable. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t matter because I already have the faith in my heart.

...We are not talking about a research or a Ph.D. on the Holy Family. We are talking about faith, blessings, miracles, about something spiritual...But this is not accepted in the Western world. They ask for documents, proof, and if you don’t have proof it can’t be true. That is a different way of thinking.


In correspondence with Dr. Hulsman since our trips he wrote that Bishop Thomas, of al-Qussia, with whom we stayed in his diocesan guest house, made the comment that Copts have added through the centuries “salt and pepper” to their stories, to make the traditions more attractive for listeners. They may term themselves “salt and pepper Christians,” but they are Christians none the less, even though they do think so very differently from us.

What do modern day Copts teach the faithful? We had a “fireside” chat, but with no fire, from Bishop Thomas on servant hood, which he said was being in Christ. He spoke of it as being totally immersed in Christ, as if God says: You are in me, and I am in you, quoting John 14:20. He asked if these words were merely symbolic, or actual. He illustrated his answer by floating a glass in a jug of water. By filling the glass with water it sank to the bottom. As the glass was filled with water, we needed to be filled with Christ, the living water, and totally immersed in him. He said that this would change our whole identity; we will become bigger (the glass looked larger in the jug); our vision will change; our lives will become more stable, unmoved when the rest of the world is shaking, and he shook the jug and the glass hardly moved. He said this was not just fantasy, but reality. With our new identity it would even be possible to love our enemies, and only thus could we serve them. When someone asked how this could happen, he replied that we are born to be surrounded by God with his image imprinted in us. But what prevents it is that we prefer the temporal security of the world to the eternal security that God alone can give. This teaching complemented what Fr. Philoxenus had told us earlier; that he lacked nothing and that he feared nothing. The true servant has turned his back on the security the world offers to receive only that which God offers, and his life has been totally satisfied. The bishop repeated several times that only in Christ could he love his enemies.

7. Coptic Worship

How do Copts worship? We attended the Palm Sunday liturgy at Saranka, a predominantly Christian village just a few kilometers from al-Qussia, where it was still possible to hold the procession of palms out doors. There was a lot of excitement as we processed through the narrow unpaved street, waving palm branches. I half expected Bishop Thomas to ride a donkey, but he walked ahead of us. When we arrived in the church, the front two rows were reserved for his party, ourselves and a few others. Behind us on both sides of the church were all men, no women. Some ladies were up in the gallery, but most were not allowed into the church at all. There would have not been enough room for everybody. There was one nun who was allowed in. At the time of the communion, first the men all filed one by one through a door on the left side of the iconostasis, (the screen in the front of the church with a lot of icons on it, separating the body of the church from the sanctuary, where the priests celebrate the liturgy) and then only the women were allowed into the church and they went through a door on the right side, and, after communion, outside again through a side door, back into the courtyard. All the women and girls were dressed in their best Sunday outfits, but the men wore their galabeahs. There was a strong odour in the church of their donkeys, stronger even than the sweet smell of the incense. At the time of the peace I touched many rough and calloused hands, and it occurred to me that perhaps the Lord’s hands were similarly calloused. The lines on their faces told me that theirs was a physically rough life. These were tough men. I felt intimidated by them. If the Lord Jesus had been like them, Gentle Jesus, meek and mild would be far, far from the truth. We began the worship at 7.30 and it ended around noon. This was unusually long, but three hours is the average time for a liturgy.

8. Conclusion

So, who are the Copts? They are an ancient people who became Christian very early in the history of the church. For very complicated reasons they became separated from the rest of the church, both Western and Eastern. Although there has been some rapprochement with the West, there has been very little with the East, in spite of the fact that in many respects they are so very similar. They have, however, learned how to live with Islam, not by compromise of the faith, nor by confrontational Jihad, the only way we in the West know how to combat Islam, but by servant hood. This is the essence of the Good News that Jesus commissioned us to take to the world; but how do we get this across to those who do not see things as we do? A former Anglican bishop of Cairo, Kenneth Cragg, used to preach and write about this difficult question. He said that the best example of church evangelism in a hostile environment was that of the Coptic Church of Egypt, a servant church. A servant church is perhaps a doormat on which those whom it serves clean their feet. This is anathema to our inflated Western egos; but it is Christ like, is it not, who at the Last Supper washed his disciples’ feet. There, I think, they have much to teach us, for this, how to be a servant, basically, is the teaching of Jesus.