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The Bible in the Last Form of the Egyptian Language

The Coptic Versions

Also called the Sahidic version, the Bohairic version

The Scriptures translated into Egyptian, written in Greek letters, from the third century onward — the version an Egyptian villager was hearing read aloud when Antony walked out into the desert, and the one of the three earliest translations whose language has an indefinite article.

Type
A family of translations, not one object, surviving in papyrus and parchment codices from the third or fourth century onward. Codex Glazier, a fifth-century Middle Egyptian copy of the first half of Acts, survives complete
Language
Coptic — the last stage of Egyptian, written in Greek letters. Sahidic and Bohairic dominate; Fayyumic, Akhmimic, Lycopolitan and Middle Egyptian survive in smaller quantities
Contents
The Old and New Testaments, in different dialects and to different extents. The Sahidic text of John omits John 5:4 and John 7:53-8:11 outright; the Bohairic manuscripts that carry the second passage often flag it in Arabic marginal notes as taken from elsewhere
Written
The earliest translation before about AD 270. Sahidic complete by the fourth century, with a standardised version most likely made during the tenure of Archbishop Theophilos. Bohairic attested from the fourth century in an older form and standard from about the eleventh Disputed dating
Origin
Egypt. Sahidic from the Nile valley of Upper Egypt, Bohairic from the western Delta, Middle Egyptian probably from the region of Oxyrhynchus
Found at
Egypt, in many places and over two centuries of collecting rather than in one find. Codex Glazier and Codex Schøyen are both written in the Oxyrhynchite dialect, and neither has an excavated findspot; the Schøyen Collection traces its own codex to a Pachomian monastery in the Dishna region
Found in
No single year. G. Horner's editions were published 1898-1905 for Bohairic and 1911-1924 for Sahidic; major Middle Egyptian codices came to light in the twentieth century
Found by
No single finder. The Bohairic and Sahidic New Testaments were edited by G. Horner; the Coptic Old Testament is being edited now at Göttingen
Now held at
Dispersed. Codex Glazier is Morgan Library MS G.67, New York; Codex Schøyen is MS 2650 in the Schøyen Collection; Coptic biblical papyri are in the Chester Beatty in Dublin and in many other collections
Facsimile
View the manuscript

Egyptian, Written in Greek Letters

Coptic is the last stage of the Egyptian language, written in the Greek alphabet with a handful of extra letters kept from demotic. When Christianity spread past the Greek-speaking cities of Egypt into the villages, it needed a Bible in that language, and it got several — because Coptic was not one thing. P. Nagel, writing in the Claremont Coptic Encyclopedia, lists Akhmimic, Lycopolitan, Middle Egyptian, Fayyumic, Sahidic and Bohairic among the literary dialects, and notes that of these "only the Sahidic (or, simplified, the Upper Egyptian) and the Bohairic (simplified, the Lower Egyptian) attained more than regional diffusion."

There is one date that gives the whole thing a floor, and B. M. Metzger states it in the same encyclopedia: the earliest version "must precede about A.D. 270, the date at which Saint" Antony "was converted after hearing Matthew 19:16ff. read in Coptic in a village church in southern Egypt" — the name is printed in the encyclopedia's small capitals as a cross-reference, so it is set outside the quotation here rather than silently restyled. A. Shisha-Halevy adds that Sahidic "was probably the first Coptic dialect into which the Scriptures were translated, apparently in the third century; by the fourth, the translation was completed." F. Feder, whose 2023 update to the same encyclopedia is the most recent survey here, places the standardised Sahidic Bible later still, as a response to the canon list in Athanasius's festal letter of 367, most likely during the tenure of Archbishop Theophilos.

Bohairic came from the other end of the country, the western Delta, and won late. Metzger dates the changeover to "about the eleventh century, Bohairic replaced Sahidic as the liturgical language of the church", and Shisha-Halevy describes a spread that began after the Arab conquest and was largely complete by then. Feder's summary of where it stands now is worth quoting because it is present tense: "The Bohairic version is the current Coptic Bible of the Coptic Church … and the Bohairic language is the only Coptic dialect still in use in the liturgy." The minor dialects mostly did not last — the Middle Egyptian version, Feder writes, "did not survive the fifth century and was replaced by the Sahidic Bible."

Why Egyptian Evidence Counts

A translation is second-hand evidence for the wording of a Greek sentence, but the Coptic versions are second-hand evidence made very early and in the right place. They were translated in Egypt, where the oldest Greek manuscripts also come from, and they were translated before the great fourth-century codices were written. So where a Coptic manuscript agrees with Codex Vaticanus against the later Greek tradition, that is a second Egyptian voice for a reading.

The affiliation is not one thing, and Metzger states it carefully rather than tidily. Of the Sahidic: "The textual affinities of the Sahidic version are mixed. Alexandrian readings predominate, but there is also a strong 'Western' element." Of the Bohairic: its affinities are "chiefly with the Alexandrian type of text, with some revision toward the Byzantine text." And the Middle Egyptian copy of Acts in the Morgan Library, Codex Glazier, "contains the text of Acts 1:1-15:3 in a form that presents many so-called Western readings." Metzger also names the limits from the other side. Coptic is "a language of strict word order"; it has no indirect discourse; and, in his words, "Nor can Coptic truly represent the Greek passive voice, since it possesses only the active voice." There are Greek distinctions a Coptic manuscript simply cannot report.

Two individual books are worth knowing. Codex Glazier, Morgan Library MS G.67, is a small fifth-century parchment codex preserved complete, carrying the first half of Acts in the Middle Egyptian dialect. Codex Schøyen, MS 2650, is a fourth-century papyrus Matthew in the same dialect, which its owners call "the earliest Matthew in any Coptic dialect" — and it is contested: its first editor, H.-M. Schenke, concluded — in the summary given by the collection that owns it — that the text "does not represent a free text transmission, but that it is a correct translation of an entirely different Gospel of Matthew", with a lost Hebrew gospel behind it; while J. M. Leonard's Cambridge thesis reached, on the same page, "the opposite conclusion that the Greek text is exceptionally pure, attesting to the best Greek original text so far known". T. Baarda and M.-É. Boismard also published against Schenke. Both sides here are quoted from the owning collection's own page, which has an interest in the manuscript mattering, and the argument has not been settled.

"A God" at John 1:1

Coptic has an indefinite article, and Greek does not. That single grammatical fact is why the Sahidic version of John 1:1 gets argued about at all, because where the Greek reads theos ēn ho logos with no article on theos, the Sahidic writes the noun for God with the Coptic indefinite article. The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society has made this a plank of its case for the New World Translation's rendering, and its argument deserves to be stated from its own page rather than from a critic's summary of it. Coptic is useful, the article says, because "Syriac and Latin, like the Greek of those days, do not have an indefinite article. Coptic, however, does"; it quotes T. O. Lambdin's Sahidic grammar that "the use of the Coptic articles, both definite and indefinite, corresponds closely to the use of the articles in English"; and it concludes that the Sahidic "uses an indefinite article with the word 'god' in the final part of John 1:1. Thus, when rendered into modern English, the translation reads: 'And the Word was a god.'"

The first thing to say is that the observation about the manuscripts is correct. The Coptic article is there. What is at issue is what a Coptic indefinite article does, and the most useful witness on that point is the man who edited the whole Coptic New Testament, in volumes finished in 1924, long before anybody made this argument. G. Horner's Sahidic text of the Gospel of John prints the verse as: "In the beginning was being the word, and the word was being with God, and [a] God was the word." The square brackets are not decoration. Horner explains his own convention in the same volume: "Square brackets imply words used by the Coptic and not required by the English, while curved brackets supply words which are necessary to the English idiom." So the editor of the standard edition marked this article as present in Coptic and not required in English — and in the introduction to his Bohairic edition he had already written the rule out: "The indefinite article … is translated 'a'; when however it represents the absence of the Greek article or belongs to adjectives … and the adverbial paraphrase …, it must be omitted."

B. J. Wright and T. Ricchuiti published a study of the question in the Journal of Theological Studies in 2011, and their open summary sets out the method: they collected twenty-six places where the Coptic New Testament uses the word for God in a comparable construction, found that in twenty-one of them Coptic uses the definite article where the Greek has none, and argue that the remaining cases are explained either by the numerical sense of the Coptic indefinite article or by a qualitative use — describing an entity by its quality. Their conclusion is that the Copts understood the Fourth Gospel to mean that "'the Word' possesses the same qualities as the Christian God". They are also fair about the strength of their own case: "It is possible that JWs are correct about the Coptic text … Nevertheless, it does not seem probable." It is worth adding that they are New Testament scholars rather than Coptic specialists, which is a real qualification and not a dismissal.

Two claims that circulate on both sides of this argument should be named and set aside. Statements attributed to the Coptic grammarians B. Layton and A. Shisha-Halevy are quoted constantly by advocates on either side, and they trace back to private emails reported on blogs rather than to anything either man published; this article does not use them and neither should anyone else. What is left is a genuine and narrow question about how one language's article system maps onto another's, and it is a question the Coptic evidence sharpens rather than settles. The app's position is the historic Christian one that the Word is God, and the reason is not that the Coptic article can be argued away. It is that no translation's article system decides a Greek sentence, that the Fourth Gospel says the same thing again where no article question arises at all — Thomas, at the end of it, calls the risen Jesus "My Lord and my God!" — and that the Coptic-speaking church which wrote that indefinite article was itself Nicene: Wright and Ricchuiti make the point that the historic Coptic Church embraced the creed which says "true God from true God".

Scripture references

Sources

Further reading

Reflect

Antony heard one sentence of Matthew read aloud in his own language and walked out of the building and into a different life. When did something read aloud last change what you did next?

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