When Pope Shenouda III, patriarch of the Coptic Orthodox church in Egypt, was banished to a desert monastery by the late President Anwar Sadat in September 1981, the millions of Egyptian Christians under his spiritual authority turned not only to the Bible for comfort but to the records of their nearly 2,000-year history as well. Several times over the centuries, many other leaders of the Copts had been sent into internal exile, even to the same desert monastery - at Wadi al-Natrun - to which Pope Shenouda was restricted. Each time the patriarch was eventually able to return to his post, though often only after the passage of many years. For Shenouda III it was forty months before Sadat's successor, President Hosni Mubarak, allowed him to resume his pastoral responsibilities.
The reports in the Western press of Pope Shenouda's plight were, for some readers, their first acquaintance with the existence of one of Christianity's oldest branches, the Egyptian church. The word 'Copt' is from the Arabic Qibt, which in turn is derived from the Greek word Aigyptos, meaning Egypt. Coptic simply means Egyptian. Aigyptos is the Greek form of the ancient Egyptian ptah, which originally referred to the local creator deity of Memphis, an old capital of Egypt, then later came to mean Egypt itself.
The Coptic Church traces its beginning to the evangelical work of Saint Mark in the earliest era of Christianity and reveres the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt. The first Christian theological school, which had a profound influence on the development of the Christian doctrine and creed, was founded by Mark in Egypt, at Alexandria, then the most commercially prosperous and learned city in the Mediterranean world. The Egyptian church also gave birth to the monastic movement in A.D. 268. Saint Anthony, the founder of monasticism, was an Egyptian from Beni Suef. By the time of the Islamic Conquest in A.D. 641, between 30 to 50 percent of the entire population of Egypt lived in and around monasteries. Even today monasteries that were built in the third century A.D. are still in use in Egypt.
Development of the Coptic Orthodox Church
Prior to the coming of Islam, the Egyptian church had suffered Roman persecutions in the third and fourth centuries under the emperors Decius, Valerian, and Diocletian, until Constantine's Edict of Toleration in A.D. 313. There was also conflict with other Christians, in particular the Roman and Byzantine churches. Although the creed of Athanasius, patriarch of Alexandria, was adopted by the entire church and though Christianity became the official region of the Roman Empire during the reign of Theodosius (A.D. 380-395), a successor to Athanasius, Patriarch Dioscorus, was excommunicated by the Council of Chalcedon (A.D. 451) for doctrinal differences.
Dioscorus refused to accept the Chalcedonian formula of the two natures of Christ, insisting upon his single incarnate nature. This was deemed heretical by the council. The Roman and Byzantine churches began calling the Egyptian church the Monophysite (one nature) church. The Copts simply referred to themselves as the Egyptian church. In modern times the Coptic Church came to call itself the Coptic Orthodox Church to distinguish itself from the Coptic Catholic Church (those Copts who had converted to Catholicism) and from the Egyptian Eastern Orthodox Church, whose adherents are mostly Greek.
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