What Is Coptic?

When you read the Gospel of Thomas, you are reading a translation of a translation: Greek into Coptic into English. Here is the language and why Egypt's Christians used it.

The last form of Egyptian

Coptic is the final stage of the Egyptian language, a direct descendant of the language of the pharaohs. The name comes from the Greek word for “Egyptian” (Aigyptios), which Arabic later shortened to qibṭ. Unlike hieroglyphic or demotic writing, Coptic is written in an alphabet based on Greek, with a handful of extra letters borrowed from Demotic for sounds Greek lacked. That made it easy to write and, for the first time, allowed vowels to be seen.

Why Egypt needed it

After Alexander the Great, Greek became the language of government and learning in Egypt, and Alexandria became one of the great centers of Christian scholarship. But ordinary Egyptians spoke Egyptian, and as Christianity spread beyond the Greek-speaking cities in the second and third centuries, the scriptures were translated for them. The Bible reached Egypt early, and Scripture itself connects the country to the Christian story:

Dialects

Coptic had several regional dialects. Sahidic, from Upper Egypt, was the main literary dialect for centuries, and it is the language of most of the Nag Hammadi library. Bohairic, from the Nile Delta, later became the language of the Coptic Orthodox Church's liturgy. Others, such as Akhmimic, Fayyumic and Subachmimic, survive in smaller numbers of manuscripts.

What survives in Coptic

The Egyptian desert preserved papyri that rotted elsewhere, so Coptic holds a remarkable share of early Christian literature: the earliest translations of the Bible, the monastic writings that grew out of Antony and Pachomius, the Nag Hammadi library, the Gospel of Mary and the Berlin Codex, and the Pistis Sophia. A Coptic fragment is also the source of part of the Acts of Peter.

A living liturgy

Coptic stopped being an everyday spoken language over the centuries after the Arab conquest of Egypt in the seventh century, though scholars debate exactly when. It is still the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church, whose members number in the millions. It also unlocked hieroglyphs: Jean-François Champollion, who deciphered them in the 1820s, knew Coptic and used it to recognize the Egyptian words behind the signs on the Rosetta Stone.

On this site

Seven Coptic texts are carried here in English translation on the Nag Hammadi and Gnostic Writings shelf: the Gospels of Thomas, Philip and Truth and the Secret Book of James from Nag Hammadi, the Gospel of Mary from the Berlin Codex, the Gospel of Judas from Codex Tchacos, and the Pistis Sophia from the Askew Codex. None is scripture in any church's canon.