Introduction to This Volume
How this book is arranged
This is the hundred and second volume of a series that gathers the writings of the early Church. The first volumes of the series follow the writers in order of date; this volume belongs to the later part of the series, which gathers the Coptic and Armenian writings of the Christian East, which were read in monasteries and churches and do not belong to any one of the great Fathers. This volume holds two lives of Egyptian saints, the martyr Isaac of Tiphre and the abbot Shenouda, and three collections of Coptic texts translated by E. A. Wallis Budge: apocryphal writings, homilies, and martyrdoms and lives of the saints.
Within each work the text is divided into chapters and numbered sections, so that any passage can be found again and cited. The small bold figures in the text are the section numbers.
The translations
The text is in English only. Wherever a modern English version has been prepared for SermonIndex it is used here; otherwise the book prints an older public-domain translation. In both cases the wording is the translator’s own: older translations have not been altered beyond dividing them into sections. The sources for every work are listed at the back of the book, together with the licence under which each text is released. All the works in this volume are printed in older public-domain translations. The translations by Budge were read by machine from scans of the printed books and have not been proofread against the pages, so a misreading may remain. Page numbers, footnotes and the Coptic text itself are left out, and Coptic words that the machine printed in Greek letters are omitted. The martyrdom of Isaac of Tiphre and the Life of Shenouda were transcribed by Roger Pearse.
In this volume
Coptic is the last stage of the ancient Egyptian language, written in an alphabet taken from the Greek, and it was the language of the church in Egypt from about the third century. The works in this volume were written for the monasteries and churches of Egypt, where they were read aloud on the feast of a saint or a martyr, and they were first made known to English readers by E. A. Wallis Budge of the British Museum.
The volume opens with the martyrdom of Isaac of Tiphre and a Syriac life of the abbot Shenouda. The three collections that follow are Budge’s translations of Coptic texts that were first published by the British Museum: the apocrypha, which include the Book of the Resurrection that is ascribed to Bartholomew and the life of Pisentius of Coptos; ten homilies and four related homilies in Syriac and Ethiopic; and the martyrdoms and lives of Victor, Eustathius, Cyrus, John the Monk, Onnophrios and others. Many of these works are legendary, and the names of their authors are those that the manuscripts give; they show what the Christians of Egypt read, believed and loved.
Dates and authorship
The Coptic texts are the work of many hands and of many centuries, and the dates given in them are uncertain. Many were written long after the saints they praise, and many carry the name of a famous bishop although he did not write them. Each work begins with a short introduction that says what is known and what is not.