Early Egyptian Christianity from its Origins to 451 C.E.

• Author: Elm, Susanna

The history of Christianity in Egypt, particularly in its earliest stages, has long been an enigma. Specific information regarding the origins of Christianity in Egypt is virtually nonexistent, and legends abound, especially because the papyri are replete with second- and first-century sources regarding the region as a whole. Concrete information referring to Egyptian Christianity surfaces only in the late second century, presenting the scholar with a situation where much of the agenda has already been set.

In this proficient and comprehensive study, C. Wilfred Griggs presents an interpretation of the history of Christianity in Egypt that offers one possible solution to the problems surrounding its origins. Following Walter Bauer, he understands the history of Egyptian Christianity as the struggle between a loosely structured local Christianity versus a more stringently organized "Western Christianity" (defined here as Christianity in the Asia Minor-Greece-Rome sphere of influence) (p. 7). Griggs then equates this Christianity throughout with Catholicism. The tensions caused by the "imposition of Catholic ecclesiasticism upon Egyptian Christianity" towards the end of the second century lead in the "succeeding centuries to the natural, if not inevitable, result," the emergence of an Egyptian Coptic Church after Chalcedon (p. 229).

In accordance with this argument, Griggs attempts to reconstruct the history of Egyptian Christianity in the first two centuries on the basis of New Testament, papyrological and archaeological evidence. With the majority of modern scholars, he dates the arrival of Christianity in the region before the end of the first century. This Christianity developed "eclectic tendencies," i.e., it resembled the original Palestinian form more closely than the "Western" form, which arrived in Alexandria around 189 C.E. With bishop Demetrius. Arguing from the writings of Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and Tertullian, Griggs concludes that Demetrius' followers did not consider the earlier Egyptian forms of Christianity to be Christianity at all, which explains the conspicuous silence of the sources.

The "infusion" of the more stringently defined "Western" Christianity gave rise to the emergence of orthodoxy and heresy. In the following period the Cathechetical School in Alexandria not only emerged, but became doctrinally aligned with the Western Church and was brought under tight control of the bishop. At the same time a native Coptic...