Introduction to This Volume

How this book is arranged

This is the hundred and third volume of a series that gathers the writings of the early Church. The first volumes of the series follow the writers in order of date; this volume belongs to the later part of the series, which gathers the Coptic and Armenian writings of the Christian East, which were read in monasteries and churches and do not belong to any one of the great Fathers. This volume holds the rest of Budge’s Miscellaneous Coptic Texts, which are encomia, discourses, martyrdoms and an apocalypse; Hugh Evelyn White’s translations of the fragments found at the Monastery of Saint Macarius in the Egyptian desert; the Coptic Life of Isaac of Alexandria; three writings of the Armenian scholar Ananias of Shirak; and the Key of Truth, the service book of the Paulician Church of Armenia.

Within each work the text is divided into chapters and numbered sections, so that any passage can be found again and cited. The small bold figures in the text are the section numbers.

The translations

The text is in English only. Wherever a modern English version has been prepared for SermonIndex it is used here; otherwise the book prints an older public-domain translation. In both cases the wording is the translator’s own: older translations have not been altered beyond dividing them into sections. The sources for every work are listed at the back of the book, together with the licence under which each text is released. All the works in this volume are printed in older public-domain translations. The translations by Budge, Evelyn White and Conybeare were read by machine from scans of the printed books and have not been proofread against the pages, so a misreading may remain. Page numbers, footnotes and the Coptic text itself are left out, and Coptic words that the machine printed in Greek letters are omitted. The writings of Ananias of Shirak were transcribed by Roger Pearse. The Life of Isaac of Alexandria is used under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence, and the other works are in the public domain.

In this volume

The first half of this volume holds the rest of Budge’s Miscellaneous Coptic Texts: encomia and discourses for the feasts of the Virgin Mary, of the Cross and of the archangels, the martyrdoms of Theodore and Mercurius, the histories of the monks of the desert by Paphnutius, the prayer of Athanasius when dying, and a Coptic Apocalypse of Paul. These were preached or read in the churches of Upper Egypt, and their authors are named as the manuscripts name them.

The Monastery of Saint Macarius stands in the Wâdi ’n Natrûn, the ancient Scetis, in the Egyptian desert. Hugh Evelyn White’s fragments come from its library and are translated as they stand, so that each begins and ends where the manuscript does. After them come the Coptic Life of Isaac of Alexandria, which is the patriarch’s life in the years of the Arab conquest, and three writings of Ananias of Shirak, a seventh-century Armenian teacher who wrote on the sciences and on the calendar of the church. The volume ends with the Key of Truth, the service book of the Paulician Church of Armenia, which is read here as a document of a small church that the Orthodox opposed.

Dates and authorship

The Coptic texts are the work of many hands and of many centuries, and the dates given in them are uncertain. Many were written long after the saints they praise, and many carry the name of a famous bishop although he did not write them. Each work begins with a short introduction that says what is known and what is not. The Key of Truth was copied in 1782 but contains much older material.