Word: coptic
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Close to 1,000,000 Coptic Christians of Egypt, who believe themselves to be the world's oldest Christian sect, celebrated the election of a new pope last week. The man who will also be looked to for guidance by Coptic leaders in Ethiopia, the Sudan and Libya was chosen, according to ancient custom, by lot. In Cairo's Cathedral of St. Mark, a seven-year-old boy approached an envelope lying on the altar. Amid prayers, he opened the envelope and drew from it one of three slips, each bearing the name of a candidate...
...Coptic Church traces its tradition to St. Mark, who is believed to have brought Christianity to Egypt, and recalls the days when Alexandria was a rival to Rome as Christendom's foremost city. But the Copts' Monophysite theology (which holds that Christ has only a single nature in which the human and divine are blended) was eventually condemned by the Council of Chalcedon in 451, and with the emergence of Islam, Coptic Christianity virtually went underground for centuries...
...modern adherents preserve the ancient Coptic language in their ritual, proudly point to the art and architecture of their monasteries and churches and to their long line of theologians and ascetics. To that line belongs the new 56-year-old Patriarch, who spent five years in the desert as a solitary monk, then, in 1936, rented an abandoned mill in Cairo (for 3? a month), fitted it with a homemade altar and started preaching. His reputation as a holy man grew, and eventually the faithful built him a small church...
...That is how visiting Swiss Theologian Oscar Cullmann (TIME, March 23) described the subject of his lecture at Manhattan's Union Theological Seminary last week. Lutheran Cullmann was giving the public a first detailed and fascinating report on the so-called Gospel of St. Thomas, one of 44 Coptic manuscripts in leatherbound papyrus books found in 1946 in a tomb in upper Egypt some 60 miles from the city of Luxor...
...prewar Egypt so splendidly begun in Justine (TIME, Aug. 26, 1957) and Balthazar (TIME, Aug. 25, 1958). Most of the same characters are still loping through the bedrooms and back alleys of Alexandria: Pursewarden, the slightly mad novelist-diplomat; Justine, the dark-browed, amoral Jewess; Nessim, her millionaire Coptic Christian husband; Darley, the sad-sack Irish schoolteacher; Melissa, the tuberculous Greek dancer. But the protagonist of this new book is a relative newcomer, David Mountolive, who returns to Egypt as British ambassador after having lived there in his youth...