Studies in Coptic Culture

Transmission and Interaction

Mariam Ayad, Mariam Ayad, Mariam Ayad

• Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781617977657
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología de la religión

Coptic contributions to the formative theological debates of Christianity have long been recognized. Less well known are other, equally valuable, Coptic contributions to the transmission and preservation of technical and scientific knowledge, and a full understanding of how Egypt's Copts survived and interacted with the country's majority population over the centuries. Studies in Coptic Culture attempts to examine these issues from divergent perspectives.Through the careful examination of select case studies that range in date from the earliest phases of Coptic culture to the present day, twelve international scholars address issues of cultural transmission, cross-cultural perception, representation, and inter-faith interaction. Their approaches are as varied as their individual disciplines, covering literary criticism, textual studies, and comparative literature as well as art historical, archaeo-botanical, and historical research methods.The divergent perspectives and methods presented in this volume will provide a fuller picture of what it meant to be Coptic in centuries past and prompt further research and scholarship into these subjects.

1 The Coptic Acts of Ephesus

Richard Price

The First Council of Ephesus, held in ad 431, was attended by numerous bishops from all over the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire, but they never met together, and the council split up into two rival assemblies—the Cyrillian council (as I shall call it), chaired by Cyril of Alexandria, and the council of the Easterners, chaired by John of Antioch. Consequently, there was nothing for the government to publish, and the two rival camps made and circulated their own Acts, consisting of the minutes of the sessions of their part of the council, together with supportive documents. In the sixth century, editors produced large document collections for the council (drawn from both sources), some in Greek, some in Latin.

The Coptic Acts are a selection of documents probably made early on, perhaps in the second half of the fifth century, and probably originally in Greek though certainly with an Egyptian readership in mind.¹ They survive only in part. We have two manuscripts, both in the Bibliothèque nationale (Paris), one of which has been dated to the eleventh and the other to the twelfth century. The older of the two gives us the first part of the original text. The other one, which is still more fragmentary, provides very little new material and is consequently of little interest. These two manuscripts were published (together with a French translation) by the distinguished Egyptologist Urbain Bouriant in 1892.² A further fragment, consisting of a single leaf of four pages, is in the Vienna Papyrussammlung, and dates to the eighth century; it was published in 1914 without translation or commentary.³ It has consequently been entirely ignored. I hope to publish a translation and commentary of it in the near future. It comes from a much later part of the work; the page numbers run from 297 to 300, while Bouriant’s best MS breaks off at page 96.⁴ The full original text will have been far longer than what survives.

The contents of this material fall into three categories:

(1) The first half of the chief manuscript is primarily a narrative, describing the visit to the court of Constantinople just before, and during, the council by a Pachomian archimandrite from Upper Egypt, Apa Victor.

(2) Within this narrative are contained a number of documents that do not survive in any other version, Greek or Latin.

(3) The text also contains some documents of which we possess the originals in the Greek Acts of the council. These include substantial minutes of the first session of the Cyrillian council (June 22), which deposed Nestorius. Both Paris manuscripts break off in the middle of these minutes.

The material in the last of these categories is of some, but limited, importance. It is clear that the Coptic was based on a recension of the text older than the extant edition of the Greek Acts, which were re-edited in the sixth or seventh century. For example, it includes within the minutes the full text of documents read out at the session of June 22, while the extant Greek edition places these separately in a preliminary documentary collection.⁵ In contrast, the fragment on the Vienna papyrus gives the list of Oriental bishops whom Cyril’s council declared suspended on July 17 as a separate document, while the Greek (as also the Latin Acts) includes it within the sessional minutes, inserted in the middle of a sentence. ⁶This insertion is so clumsy that the Coptic Acts probably preserve the original position of the list.

Scholarly debate has, naturally enough, paid far more attention to my second category—documents that do not exist elsewhere. At this point, I should mention the significant critical studies. The first of them appeared in Russian as early as 1892, a substantial article by the great Early Church historian Vasily Bolotov.⁷ This was based not on the Bouriant edition (which had not yet appeared at the time he was writing) but on an English summary and partial translation of the chief manuscript, made by an anonymous scholar and published in the Church Quarterly Review in 1891.⁸ The second significant study is by Wilhelm Kraatz and appeared in Leipzig in 1904; it provides an accurate German translation of the whole of both the main manuscripts, and a lengthy critical discussion. The translation is a notable improvement on Bouriant’s French one, but the commentary is far inferior to Bolotov’s.⁹ The third appeared in Vienna in 1928, a long article by the great Eduard Schwartz, who had just completed his massive critical edition of all the Greek and Latin acts of the council.¹⁰ It is curious that the two best studies were made by scholars who were unable to read the text in the original Coptic—Bolotov, because he was writing before the Coptic had been published, and Schwartz, because he did not know Coptic and was dependent on the German translation.

To return to the new documents found in the Coptic Acts: They consist of four letters from Cyril of Alexandria to Apa Victor, a memorandum from Cyril’s supporters criticizing Count Candidianus (the emperor’s representative at the council), and pages of acclamations by crowds at Constantinople (clearly taken from official records).¹¹ Kraatz thought that almost all this material was authentic. Bolotov, however, rejected most of it, on the grounds partly of incompatibility with the data in the Greek Acts and partly of improbability, but accepted the memorandum about Candidianus and the acclamations. Schwartz’s judgment was that some of these documents are fakes, and that all of them have been tampered with, but that they contain some information that possesses verisimilitude and could not have been invented by a Coptic writer. On the identity of the authentic nuggets of real historical value he is in agreement with Bolotov.

It is these nuggets that are important for historians of the Council of Ephesus. It is not, however, the point of chief interest to those engaged in Coptic studies. I shall simply mention one nugget of particular interest—the text of numerous acclamations uttered by a crowd in Constantinople in response to the emperor’s confirmation of the deposition of both Nestorius and Cyril, for recording and transmission to the court, which used popular acclamations as a means to sound out public opinion. The ones given here include references to a victory over barbarians in Africa and to the empress Pulcheria’s role as a champion of orthodoxy. Of these, the first must refer to the military expedition from Constantinople against the Vandals in Africa, which can be dated to July 431. A later forger would either have been ignorant of this or avoided mention of it, since soon afterward Aspar’s army was utterly routed. On the other hand, the mention of Pulcheria cannot be genuine, since (contrary to later legend) she, at this stage, supported Nestorius, as I have argued elsewhere.¹² The mixture of historicity and fiction in these acclamations is typical of these Acts. It means that historians of the council should use them, but with caution.

This leaves us with my first category—the narrative relating to the visit to Constantinople by Apa Victor the archimandrite of Pbow, the administrative center of the Pachomian monasteries. The Acts relate how, just before the council was due to open, Victor is sent to Constantinople to represent Cyril’s interests at court. On his arrival, the emperor Theodosius II immediately invites him to the palace and seeks his advice on what directives to send the council. He returns to the palace a day later, when the emperor shows him a draft of his letter to the council and accepts his corrections of it. Some days later, a memorandum arrives from Ephesus, which is taken to the emperor by Victor, accompanied by the two bishops Comarius and Potamon (known from other sources to have been leading agents of Cyril at Constantinople). The emperor refuses to receive the memorandum from the bishops, but yields to Victor’s insistence that he listen to a reading of it. The conversation between him and Victor moves on to John of Antioch’s late arrival at the council. The emperor explains that John was delayed by a famine in Syria, to which Victor replies that bishops should only concern themselves about the faith. The emperor admits the truth of this criticism and then reveals his own plan for the council, but Victor persuades him to await the arrival of fuller information. When the full record of the session of Cyril’s council that condemned Nestorius arrives at Constantinople, Victor takes it to the emperor, and urges him to dissolve the council now that its main work is done. This is the last we hear of Victor in the extant section of the Acts.

No competent modern scholar believes a word of this story. Among the numerous objections to its historicity is the fact that, throughout the council, Theodosius II was in fact hostile to Cyril. He would certainly not have accepted every suggestion made by one of Cyril’s agents.¹³ Kraatz suggests that Victor did indeed go to Constantinople but failed to influence the emperor. But the best judges, Bolotov and Schwartz, think the whole story of his mission an invention. Schwartz makes the ungenerous comment that this fiction came naturally to Copts, “deren hervorstechende Eigenschaften Aufgeblasenheit und Verlogenheit sind.” ¹⁴

The myth about Victor’s decisive role has rightly been compared by all commentators to the similar myth about the role played at Ephesus by the famous Apa Shenoute. The story related in Besa’s Life of Shenoute is that, when Nestorius came to a council meeting (which in fact he never did), he removed the book of the Gospels from its throne and sat down on it himself, at which Shenoute went up and struck him. Nestorius fell to the ground and was immediately possessed by a demon. At this, Cyril elevated Shenoute to the rank of an archimandrite, and the whole council exclaimed “Worthy, worthy, worthy archimandrite.”¹⁵ In a later fiction, published by Amélineau from the Cyrillian pseudepigrapha, both Victor and Shenoute accompany Cyril to Constantinople, where they dictate to the emperor the convocation of a council at Ephesus.¹⁶ These fictions had evidently the same purpose: to ascribe an important and dramatic role at Ephesus to the Egyptian monastic leaders of the time. To describe them as mendacious would be to miss the point. Rather, there was a conviction that the great monastic leaders must have had a role, and an important one, at the council. The silence of the literary record could not be allowed to impoverish history, even if the details had to be supplied by the imagination.

Not only the fictional character of this narrative but the mere presence of substantial narrative sections raises the question of the genre of the work. Is it a narrative illustrated by documents, or is it rather a set of conciliar acts, supplemented by narrative sections? One would like to know the title of the work, but that is lost, together with the first page of the principal manuscript. The anonymous Englishman who first published a full account of the contents of this manuscript described it as follows (p. 93):

The document is not, properly speaking, a history of the Council of Ephesus; it is an account of what passed in the town and city of Constantinople during the days immediately preceding and following the first session of that Council. It only contains the Acts of the Council incidentally.

On this account, the minutes of the session of June 22 were only included because they were on one occasion read out to a crowd in Constantinople, which is indeed the context in which they are introduced in the Coptic Acts.¹⁷ Bolotov, however, took the opposite view and described the narrative sections as introductions to the documents, akin to the annotation, admittedly far briefer, that we find in other conciliar collections.

The matter of comparative length is surely decisive. The minutes of June 22 take up just over half of the entire text of our chief manuscript, even though that manuscript is fragmentary and breaks off in the middle of them, at roughly the halfway mark—which reduces the part where narrative plays the leading role to a mere third of what is known for certain to have been in the work. And even in the part centered on narrative the inserted documents make up the greater part of the text. To this we may add the implication of the Vienna papyrus, from which we can deduce that the full text was far longer than what survives; since it is only a short fragment, too much cannot be made of it, but it is still significant that it consists of conciliar documents, preceded by only the briefest of headings.

This matter of the genre of the Acts and the proportions between the different sorts of material they contained is relevant for the Tendenz of the Acts. Here, the concentration of scholars on the new material, namely the Victor narrative and the new documents, though natural enough for historians of Ephesus, has led to distortion. Kraatz understood the prime purpose of the Acts to be the glorification of Apa Victor. The concentration on him in the discussions of the text by Bolotov and Schwartz suggests the same thing. Meanwhile, the later sections of the work have been almost forgotten. But the fact that the narrative portion of the work was only a small part of it implies that glorification of Apa Victor, who features only in the narrative sections, was not its main concern. It is true that the lost part of the work, covering the later stages of the council, may have included further fabrications about Victor, but he is not likely to have recovered the center stage that he loses in our chief manuscript as soon as it gets on to the details of the conciliar proceedings. In all, we may conclude that the complete work will have been a commemoration not so much of Apa Victor as of the work of the Cyrillian council at Ephesus as a wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures and Tables
• Contributors
• Foreword: The Coptic Orthodox Church: A Historical Perspective in the Modern-day World
• Introduction
• 1. The Coptic Acts of Ephesus
• 2. The Role of Coptic Translators in the Transmission of Patristic Biblical Commentary in the First Millennium AD
• 3. Toward a Sociohistorical Approach to the Corpus of Coptic Medical Texts
• 4. Wine Production in Medieval Egypt: The Case of the Coptic Church
• 5. The Depiction of Muslims in the Miracles of Anba Barsauma al-‘Uryan
• 6. The Encomium on Bishop Pesynthios: An Evaluation of the Biographical Data in the Arabic Version
• 7. An Icon and a Gospel Book: The Assimilation of Byzantine Art by Arab Christians in Mamluk Egypt and Syria
• 8. Representations of Copts in Early Nineteenth-century Italian Travel Accounts
• 9. Copts in Modern Egyptian Literature
• 10. Coptic Icons: Expressions of Social Agency and Coptic Identity
• 11. Rehabilitating a Late Antique Mural Painting at the Red Monastery, Sohag
• 12. Transmission of Coptic Music from the Past to the Future
• Bibliography