Coptic studies are cultivated by a limited number of scholars, many of whom know each other personally through the activities of the International Association for Coptic Studies. Various members of the association inevitably choose a more restricted field of investigation, and I am privileged in this regard to share an interest in Coptic historiography with David Johnson, a prominent member of the association who organized its fifth international congress in Washington, D.C., in 1992, and to whom this volume is dedicated. In this connection, I believe that I can offer no better homage to him than a summary of my...

Although a significant number of Coptic sermons¹ have been published in the last fifty years, very little attention has been devoted to the literary and rhetorical analysis of this form of literature since the publications of C. D. G. Müller.² It may therefore be useful to begin by summarizing the state of the question as Müller left it.

After tracing the development of the Greek sermon (Predigt) from the New Testament to the fifth century (Cyril of Alexandria, Theodoret of Cyrrus),³ Müller investigated four groups of Coptic “sermons.” The first group consists of homilies on biblical themes, the second of...

Jerome (Epist. 22.34)¹ and Cassian (Conlat. 18.4,7)² independently list three different classes of Egyptian monks. Each list includes two classes, which are noted with approval. Jerome names first the cenobites (coenobium), who, he says, are called sauhes in Coptic.³ The anchorites (anachoretae) are Jerome’s second class of monks. Cassian’s list also includes cenobites (coenobitae) and anchorites (anachoretae) as the first two of the three classes. Both Cassian and Jerome describe a third, somewhat disreputable group of monks, called remnuoth by Jerome and sarabaitae by Cassian. Jerome and Cassian present the terms as Coptic words. Both terms have occasioned much interest...

The text of a discourse by Shenoute of Atripe first came to scholarly notice in the 1980s, through the work of Tito Orlandi. His 1982 article “A Catechesis Against Apocryphal Texts by Shenute and the Gnostic Texts of Nag Hammadi”¹ called attention to a little-known text and emphasized the Gnostic references, an understandable approach at that time. In 1985 his edition and translation Shenute contra Origenistas emphasized different content.² The text is important, in part, because it was written in Coptic by a fifth-century monastic leader and deals openly with some of the theological controversies that disturbed Egypt in the...

This essay is an attempt to apply George Boole’s ideas on the nature of thought to grammar in general and to Coptic and Egyptian grammar in specific. In presenting a line of argument, utmost parsimony is envisioned, in an effort to emulate that “character of steady growth which belongs to science” (Boole, Investigation [see note 1], 2). Parsimony involves refraining from extending concepts to areas where one cannot confidently do so. Specific phenomena are for the first time defined fully in line with the laws of thought as described by Boole. These phenomena include the question, the distinction between two...

In September 1983 a conference was held in Claremont (with a day trip to Santa Barbara) devoted to the theme, “The Roots of Egyptian Christianity,” with an international array of scholars participating. That conference, organized by James E. Goehring and myself and sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, inaugurated a research project based at the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity in Claremont and directed by me. This project is devoted to the study of Christianity in Egypt from its origins in Alexandria to the time of the Arab Conquest in 641. The conference proceedings were published in 1986...

One of the most important of hermeneutical consequents of Logos theology was a proclivity for allegory as a mode of interpretation.¹ The concept of a Logos as both the site of absolute creativity as well as the revealer of absolute Truth, of Sophia, will promote allegory as a legitimate and choice mode of interpretation. Logos theology, which, as we shall see, is predicated on the notion of an Author, a speaker behind the written text, as well as a dual existence for language as signifier and signified, conduces to interpretation as a hermeneutic of depth. The ontology of human language...

Festschriften constitute, in effect, letters of congratulation in the form of short studies offered to an eminent scholar at the culmination of a career. It may be appropriate, then, to offer as a small part of this Festschrift for an esteemed colleague a study of a letter of Evagrius of Pontus (d. 399) which, small as it is, illuminates the general topic of the work as a whole, namely, the language, literature, and world of early Christian Egypt.

Ironically, the subject of this particular study survives only in languages foreign to that world; and the author of the work under...

I want here to offer reflections on some “post-Pachomian” texts that might clarify possible relations between Pachomius’s followers and the creators or collectors or depositors of the “Nag Hammadi Library.”¹ That relations were possible has long been acknowledged because of the proximity of the Nag Hammadi site to the Pachomian monasteries of Seneset and Pbow.² Among the more stimulating scholars who have tackled the issues recently, Alexandr Khosroyev has shown how ambiguous and shifting a relationship there would have been between Pachomius’s successors and any other religious group.³ Similarly, Bernward Buchler has shown not only that Pachomius’s principles matched what...

An excerpt on the sixth-century Pachomian archimandrite Abraham of Farshut¹ preserved in a fragmentary manuscript from the White Monastery in Upper Egypt records the cleansing of a meeting place in the Pachomian community’s central monastery of Pbow following the departure of representatives of the emperor Justinian I.² The account represents part of a longer polemic against the emperor for his support of the monastic elements within Egypt that embraced the Chalcedonian ideology. According to the Coptic orthodox story, the presence of the emperor’s men had polluted the meeting place. Upon their departure, Abraham instructed his monks to wash the room...

The Panegyric on Macarius of Tkow, which David Johnson has bequeathed to generations of historians of late antiquity through his expert CSCO edition, is certainly as deceptive a document of early Christianity as it is rich in peculiar details. Consumed as it is with anti-Chalcedonian polemic and the promotion of an obscure Monophysite holy man, the Panegyric’s depiction of traditional Egyptian temple religion as something still abiding in the region of Tkow (chapter 5) would seem to be mere window dressing for the construction of Macarius’s heroic sainthood.¹ “Not only did the man vehemently oppose Chalcedonian officials,” the text seems...