Chances are that during the last Christmas season you read the story of the Holy Family’s flight to Egypt as they attempted to elude the genocidal mania of Herod.

Unfortunately, the days are long past when Egypt offered a safe haven for those dedicated to the Christ-child. During the past year, Christians in Egypt have suffered mercilessly at the hands of an increasingly militant Islamic population.

2010 hardly got off the ground when the violence started. On January 7, Egyptian believers were celebrating their midnight Christmas Eve service in the Nag Hammadi cathedral. (Egyptian Christians, known as Copts, follow the Julian calendar instead of the Gregorian calendar, which puts their Christmas Eve in January.) When Mass was finished the Christians began to leave the building, only to be greeted with gunfire from Muslims waiting in the dark.

The “Nag Hammadi Massacre”, as it has come to be called, left eight Christians dead and nine others seriously wounded, all young people between the ages 15-23.

That was just the beginning to the year’s violence. Three days later Egyptian police raided the homes of Christians in the town and arrested 22 individuals.

As this latter event suggests, sometimes the brutality against Christians is perpetrated by the Egyptian police themselves. On November 24th, police used violence against Christians in Omraniya following a dispute over a building permit. The incident occurred on November 24 and left two dead, at least 67 injured and over 150 arrested.

Bishop David, of the Diocese of the North American Coast Coptic churches, commented on the incident, saying it was “the latest in a long series of attacks on Copts, for no reason but because they are Christians,” adding “and in most of these events justice did not takes its course.”
2011 hardly got off to a better start. Just 30 minutes into the new year a car bomb killed 21 people as worshippers were leaving a church service.

Though these violent events have been reported in the media, the greatest challenges facing Egyptian Christians remain largely unpublicized. Young girls are routinely abused by Muslim men yet are usually too frightened to report the crimes. If they complain to the authorities, they risk being harassed by the police. Moreover, Christian girls are often lured into Muslim marriages or kidnapped while the police turn a blind eye.

The greatest challenge is for the Muslims who convert to Christianity, who must then go into hiding for their very lives.

History of the Coptic Church

Who are these Egyptian Christians known as “Copts” and where did they come from?

While the term ‘Coptic’ used to refer to all Egyptians, ever since the Muslim conquest in the 7th century, the adjective has been restricted to the Egypt’s Christian population, currently roughly 5-15%. The term takes its name from the language that the first Egyptians spoke more than nineteen centuries ago.

Most of the Copts belong to the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria. A curious historical anomaly, this church is neither Protestant, Catholic nor Eastern Orthodox, while still existing under the umbrella of historic Christianity. With 20 million members worldwide and the largest Christian presence in the Middle East, the Coptic Church belongs to the branch of Christendom known as “Oriental Orthodoxy.”

The Oriental Orthodox communion is made up of the following six groups: Coptic Orthodox (Egypt), Ethiopian Orthodox (Ethiopia), Eritrean Orthodox (Eritrea, in Africa), Syriac Orthodox (Eastern Mediterranean), Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church (India) and Armenian Apostolic (Armenia).

Congregations affiliated with the above bodies are found across the world. The United States alone has 200 parishes and five Coptic Orthodox Bishops.

The Coptic church of Egypt is the Mother church and was apparently founded by St. Mark. The Church historian Eusebius (263–339) wrote that St. Mark came to Egypt in the first century while St. Jerome records that the Christian School of Alexandria was founded by him. The school became a vibrant center of Christianity during the 3rd century, attracting such scholars as Clement and Origen. Other Patristics, such as Jerome, heard about the school’s reputation and visited it.

While the Alexandrian church affirmed the first three ecumenical councils (the First Council of Nicaea, the First Council of Constantinople and the First Council of Ephesus), they were separated from the rest of the Catholic tradition when they rejected the Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD.

The disagreement was quite technical and revolved around how to relate the human and divine aspect of Christ. While the Chalcedonian formula used the language of Christ having two distinct natures, one human and one divine, the Coptic tradition preferred to follow the Christology of Cyril of Alexandria (c. 376 – 444) in speaking of Christ being from or of two natures. Christ, the Alexandrians urged, was full of humanity and divinity like a person is full of their father and mother’s nature. They argued that if Christ is “in” full humanity and full deity (as the Chalcedonian party argued) then He is separate in two persons and the logical result is the Dyophysitism of Nestorius. If however your nature is “of” your mother and your father, then singular personhood is preserved.

Interestingly, the entire dispute became focussed on only a single word consisting of two letters. It is a matter of debate whether the dispute was even substantive or merely semantic. Certainly in the past this disagreement was considered crucially important, as seen by the fact that the Oriental Orthodox were often subjected to persecution and even torture from Chalcedonian Christians for their refusal to say the definition of Chalcedonian.

Recent Ecumenical dialogue has yielded some important insights which suggest that the two groups may have been using different terminology to describe the same thing.

Suffering With the Copts

Having taken divergent paths, the Oriental Orthodox church has remained outside the radar of Western Christianity until recently. Living lives of humility and simplicity, they have quietly continued worshiping Christ for hundreds of years, attracting very little attention to themselves. Though Ecumenical dialogue has kept up strong links between the Orientals and the Eastern Orthodox living in Asia Minor, few Western Protestants or Roman Catholics have even known of their existence until recently. The persecution is helping to change that. Christians from all over the world are now rallying together to pray for their Oriental brothers and sisters.

I know of one reformed church in the Pacific Northwest which regularly prays for other churches. During a church meeting the pastor said they would “definitely not” be praying for their Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox brethren. Yet the same church, moved by the suffering of Christians in Egypt, has been faithfully interceding for the Coptic Christians during Sunday worship.
One of the most encouraging things to witness was a recent peace rally outside the United Nations building in New York (though unfortunately I was not able to attend). Oriental Orthodox clergy were joined by leaders from other denominations to register their support for our Egyptian brothers and sisters. Coptic leaders asked Christians all over the world to pray for them.

When December 4th was designated as “Coptic Church Ecumenical Day of Prayer and Solidarity for Christians Suffering in Egypt”, the five American bishops of the church movingly wrote

“This Day of Prayer and Solidarity is an ecumenical one, reflecting the words of St. Paul the Apostle “that there should be no schism in the body, but that the members should have the same care for one another. And if one member suffers, all the members suffer with it; or if one member is honored, all the members rejoice with it” (1 Cor. 12:25-26).”

These words should resonate with us all. During times of persecution we realize that the bonds we share in Christ are greater and more substantive than the differences which divide us. It may still be many years before the Copts are welcomed back into formal communion with other branches of Christendom (though there have been discussions with the Eastern Orthodox towards this end), yet it is a step in the right direction that all of Christendom is now suffering on behalf of the Copts. May the Lord hear our prayers and grant deliverance to our Egyptian brothers and sisters.

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