In the fourth century well-crafted manuscripts containing polished literary works written in standardized dialects of Coptic seem to emerge out of nowhere. One wonders about the nature of the enterprise that produced this new literary tradition, the people, the places, the time. No evidence survives. It is tempting to assume that it was Christian missionaries who rejected the complicated and declining Ancient Egyptian scripts in favor of the Greek alphabet for the purpose of spreading the Gospels to the Egyptian masses. However, the eminent Belgian Copticist Louis Theophile Lefort (1948: 165-70) proposed an entirely different scenario. Lefort is overly apologetic regarding its hypothetical character while realizing its potentially ‘‘enormous significance.’’ To me it seems by far the most plausible.
Lefort makes two observations of fact. First, certain books of the Old Testament, that is, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible known as the Septuagint, often exhibit an Egyptian expression where the New Testament exhibits one borrowed from Greek. It follows that the Coptic Old Testament must be older than the Coptic New Testament. Or, there was a time when the Coptic Old Testament already existed, and the Coptic New Testament did not yet. Second, certain passages in the Coptic Old Testament are nearly identical to their citations in the Coptic New Testament. It follows that one was quoting the other. Given the prior inference that the Old Testament came first, a further inference is that the Old Testament citations in the New Testament are not independently translated from the Greek but adopted literally from a pre-existing Old Testament text. No other explanation seems possible for the two facts.
The most important implication is that Coptic was created to translate the Old Testament. This implication cannot be reconciled with the widespread assumption that Coptic was developed to spread Christianity. Why would Christians have translated the Old Testament before the New Testament? The necessary alternative is Lefort’s hypothesis (1948: 169) that ‘‘Jews of Upper Egypt would be the inventors of the Sahidic alphabet and the first to have elevated the living language to the height of a literary language; in other words, they would be the creators of ‘Coptic.’ ’’ In order to translate the New Testament the first Christians, who were, after all, Jews, ‘‘would have had no need for the Demotic script because they would have found Coptic already existing in synagogues.’’ Nothing is more characteristic of Coptic literature than its Christian purport. But it was a Jewish creation.
World History
