Word: coptic
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HIDDEN 7,226 ft. high on the Abyssinian plateau, all but inaccessible to the outside world, lies a forgotten city in a land where, according to Homer, the sun is supposed to set. The holy city of Aksum, spiritual capital of the Ethiopian Coptic Church, was once a flourishing market on the trade routes of Greece and Rome, is now reduced to a clutter of huts and crumbling relics in the mountains 350 miles north of Addis Ababa. Yet in Aksum, Ethiopians believe, Sheba once reigned, and in Aksum for nearly 3,000 years Abyssinian kings and rulers...
...Church of the Holy Sepulchre was destroyed by the Persians in 616 and by the Egyptians in 1009. But more disastrous to the shrine than its pagan enemies have been its Christian friends. Today the church is occupied by six Christian sects-Syrian Orthodox (Jacobite), Greek Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox, Coptic, Roman Catholic, Abyssinian- all of them so caught up in denominational jealousies that they cannot agree on repairs or on anything else. They hold their services in spaces as carefully marked as those in a parking lot, and about as large (the areas were frozen by Turkish Sultan Abdul Majid...
...handsome, black-browed Justine, a nymphomaniac with a neurotic need of intrigue; large-eyed, blonde Clea, who, when stripped, looks as "naked and slender as an Easter lily"; and blind Liza, still dotty with love for her suicide brother Pursewarden. Here, too, are his strangely ineffectual men: Nessim, the Coptic millionaire, in trouble both with his wife Justine and the British government; Dr. Balthazar, the homosexual cabalist; Mountolive, the stiff-necked British ambassador; and Darley, the Irish schoolteacher, who tries to put together the carnal jigsaw puzzle of his friends...
...full translation by five scholars* of all 114 "sayings"-together with the Coptic-language text-has been published as The Gospel According to Thomas (Harper...
...disciple who insisted on verifying Jesus' bodily resurrection by touching his wounds (John 20: 25-28), is dated somewhere between A.D. 350 and A.D. 425. But, say the translators, the original "goes back much earlier. We are dealing here with a translation or an adaptation in Sahidic Coptic of a work the primitive text of which must have been produced in Greek about 140 A.D., and which was based on even more ancient sources...