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Updated: June 25, 2025
His amazing facility in the acquisition of languages stood him in such good stead that within a year of his first efforts he had mastered Koptic and assured himself that the ancient Egyptian language was really similar to it, and had even made a tentative attempt at the translation of the Egyptian scroll.
The Melchite church continued to use the old liturgy, which, as it had been read in Alexandria from time immemorial, was called the liturgy of St. Mark, altered however to declare that the Son was of the same substance with the Father. But the Koptic church made use of the newer liturgies by their own champions, Bishop Cyril, Basil of Cæsaræ, and Gregory Nazianzen.
Their condition, now freed from forced labour, called the "Courbash," as also from injustice, crushing taxation, and usury, which characterised former administrations, compares favourably with the peasantry of many countries in Europe, and is equal, if not superior, to that of the peasantry of England itself. Under the British protection there has been a renewal of the Koptic Christian race.
There are 187 schools attached to various Protestant and Catholic missions, and forty-three European private schools. The Koptic community supports one thousand schools for elementary education, twenty-seven primary boys' and girls' schools, and one college.
All these lands were leased to the Koptic farmers, and the respective rights of the new proprietors or tenant farmers and of the peasant proprietors were determined by decisive and invariable rules.
Among the monks of Egypt there were also some men of learning and industry, who in their cells in the desert had made at least three translations of the New Testament into the three dialects of the Koptic language; namely, the Sahidic of Upper Egypt, the Bashmuric of the Bashmour province of the eastern half of the Delta, and the Koptic proper of Memphis and the western half of the Delta.
This proved to be the Melchite patriarch, for in those days Koptic priests practised medicine and cultivated other sciences.
It was about this time, at least after Theodotion's translation of Daniel had received the sanction of the Alexandrian church, and when the teachers of Christianity found willing hearers in every city of Egypt, that the Bible was translated into the language of the country. We have now parts of several Koptic versions.
The patriarchal seat was empty for three years after the death of Simon. The Kopts next appointed a patriarch named Alexander, who held the office for a little over twenty years. The Koptic writers who recount the history of this patriarch mention their discontent with the governor Abd el-Aziz.
The Thebaic and Bashmuric versions may have been translated from the edition by Hesychius; but the Koptic version seems older, and its value to the Biblical critic is very great, as it helps us, with the quotations in Origen and Clemens, to distinguish the edition of the sacred text which was then used in Alexandria, and is shown in the celebrated Vatican manuscript, from the later editions used afterwards in Constantinople and Italy, when Christian literature flourished in those countries.
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