CHALCEDON – Coptic Wiki

The Humanity of Christ

The Humanity of Christ That God the Son took upon Himself a real human nature is a crucial doctrine of historic Christianity. The great ecumenical Council of Chalcedon in A.D. 451 affirmed that Jesus is truly man and truly God and that the two natures of Christ are so united as to be without mixture, […]

The Deity of Christ

The Deity of Christ Faith in the deity of Christ is necessary to being a Christian. It is an essential part of the New Testament gospel of Christ. Yet in every century the church has been forced to deal with people who claim to be Christians while denying or distorting the deity of Christ. In […]

The Relationship of St. Shenoute of Atripe with His Contemporary Patriarchs of Alexandria

The Relationship of St. Shenoute of Atripe with His Contemporary Patriarchs of Alexandria WHEN WE SPEAK about the relationship of St. Shenoute with the Alexandrian patriarchs, we speak indeed about a traditional relationship between Coptic monasticism and the official church of Egypt. The basis of this relationship was already established at the dawn of Coptic […]

Shenoute’s Place in the History of Monasticism

Shenoute’s Place in the History of Monasticism A LITTLE MORE than 1,500 years ago, inside the massive church whose ruined hulk has come to be known as the White Monastery (Arabic Dayr al-Abyad), on an occasion near the middle of the fifth century when the monastery’s longtime leader Shenoute was about one hundred years old, […]

Pachomius and the White Monastery

Pachomius and the White Monastery IN THE fiRST volume of the Oxford History of the Christian Church, entitled The Church in Ancient Society: From Galilee to Gregory the Great and published in 2001, Henry Chadwick included the following brief paragraph on Shenoute in his chapter on “Monks: The Ascetic Life.” In the fifth century the […]

The Monastery of Apollo at Bala’iza and Its Literary Texts

The Monastery of Apollo at Bala’iza and Its Literary Texts Dayr al-Bala’iza, situated at the edge of the desert on the west bank of the Nile some eighteen to nineteen kilometers south of Asyut, gained initial recognition among Coptic scholars through the large cache of manuscripts, both literary and documentary, discovered at the site during […]

John of Shmoun and Coptic Identity

John of Shmoun and Coptic Identity After the Council of Chalcedon in ad 451 and in particular after the Arab conquest of Egypt in ad 641, the need to demonstrate Coptic self identification became more important than before.[1] Usually, there is the need to stress one’s identity and define or form its features when one […]

John of Lykopolis

John of Lykopolis As Sebastien Lenain de Tillemont observed over three centuries ago, among all the solitary saints in Egypt “there is after St. Antony no one whose renown is greater than that of St.John of Lycopolis” (Tillemont 1732, vol. 10:9). Tillemont also observed that,besides the principal accounts of john of Lykopolis found in the […]

Egyptian Gnosticism from Its Cradle in the Alexandrian Quarters of the Second Century

Egyptian Gnosticism from Its Cradle in the Alexandrian Quarters of the Second Century to Its Jar Tomb in the Upper Egyptian Town of Nag’ Hammadi Introduction The aim of this study is to try to interpret the fate of Gnosticism in Egypt through a simple investigation of places where texts were found and the historical […]

The History of Christianity in Egypt

The History of Christianity in Egypt THE TERM COPT COMES DIRECTLY FROM THE ARABIC QBT, which appears to derive from the Greek aigyptos (Egypt) / aigyptioi (Egyptians), a phonetic corruption of the ancient Egyptian word Hikaptah, one of the names of Memphis. Initially the word described a non-Arabic-speaking non-Muslim. By implication, a Copt was also […]