Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

COPTIC

The last stage of Egyptian, linguistically an independent branch of the Afro-asiatic language family, which spreads from the eastern tip of the Arabian Peninsula to the northwestern coast of the African continent. In the early centuries of the Christian period, experiments were made in writing Egyptian, as spoken at that time, with the Greek alphabet. This writing system, along with its linguistic structure, is called Coptic. Demotic, the last stage of hieroglyphic writing, was complicated, difficult to read, and retained syntax that was no longer spoken. The advantages of the Greek alphabet, readily at hand to an educated writer, were simplicity, currency, and the addition of vowels in place of a strictly consonantal system. The Greek alphabet, however, was rearranged to fit the phonetics of spoken Coptic, and several Demotic phonograms were added to supply sounds that were not in Greek: š, f, h, j, č, ti, and in some dialects, ḫ. Coptic language, due to several hundred years of hellenization, also employs a sizable vocabulary of Greek derivation. Use of Coptic declined in the centuries following the a.d. 640 Arab conquest of Egypt.

Coptic sentences fall into three patterns. “Nominal” sentences consist of a nominal predicate plus a subject pronoun and are characterized by the absence of the verb “to be.” “Bipartite” sentences have a noun or pronoun as subject followed by a predicate consisting of a prepositional phrase, adverb, infinitive or stative verb, or the future auxiliary “going to.” “Tripartite” sentences have, in strict order, a tense marker, subject, and verb, which are followed by objects, modifiers, or other sentence elements. Through a system of “second” tenses, negators, and converters, Coptic sentences are able to describe a wide and subtle range of expression. Nevertheless, Coptic does not use several features found in Greek, which should be kept in mind when studying biblical and biblically related texts, since these are, for the most part, translations from Greek. Coptic does not have a neuter gender, true adjectives, participles, a passive voice, or a verb “to have,” and in other respects, such as word order, translation Coptic does not adhere to the Greek.

The codification of the writing system, translation, and copying of texts is linked, and is generally coterminous, with the development of the Christian church in Egypt and, in the earliest centuries, Christian schools outside the church such as the Valentinians. The propagation of religious teachings through written texts resulted in the use of several dialects, at least a dozen, extending up the Nile Valley from the delta to Thebes. By the 4th century, Sahidic, the dialect from around the middle of the country, began to dominate as an orthodox “standard,” and most modern Coptic language reference works employ this dialect. The famous library of texts from Nag Hammadi provides useful examples of this transitional stage. From the 8th to the 11th centuries, with the gradual replacement of spoken Coptic with Arabic and the removal of the patriarchate to the desert monasteries south of Alexandria, the dialect of this region, Bohairic, was preserved and still survives, but only as a liturgical language for the Coptic Orthodox Church. “Coptic” (Copt is simply an arabicized pronunciation of the [ultimately Greek] word “Egypt”) now refers broadly to Christian Egypt, and Coptic studies encompasses linguistics, archaeology, liturgy, history, and literature.

For the study of the Bible, Coptic versions of NT texts date as early as the 3rd/4th centuries. Coptic versions of many LXX passages also exist, as do important NT apocrypha found at Nag Hammadi, such as the Gospel of Thomas, as well as OT pseudepigrapha, including the Apocalypse of Elijah. Alongside these are interesting bodies of patristic, hagiographic, and magical literature in Coptic from early Christian Egypt that give us a lively picture of scriptural traditions.

Richard Smith

Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

COPTIC

Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000)