Coptic language

Most of the texts we work with who are interested in early Christianity and antiquity We have to learn ancient languages, so Greek, Latin.

For my sake, Coptic, the sources, the Nag Hammadi sources, they are in Coptic, so I have to learn that.

And it's always good to have, well, skills in language, in philology.

When it comes to new philology, it deals with a certain perspective on your material.

So he ended up burying it in the sand or getting rid of it without actually destroying the physical manuscript.

So objects were seen as possessing power, and these texts are full of crosses on the outside of them.

Sometimes also, my argument is anyway, in one of the chapters of the book, is that the cross, the sign, the Coptic sign T, is written as the small letter T, as a cross.

And in one of the codices, this letter T is enlarged in many places in the text.

Yeah, so primarily Greek and Hebrew.

Sorry, Greek, Hebrew, and Coptic are the languages that I operate in.

Coptic is like Egyptian.

Coptic is a form of ancient Egyptian.

So I know a little bit of Demotic, which is ancient Egyptian prior to Coptic.

And I've dabbled in some languages that are related to Hebrew.

So the Afro-Semitic languages like Akkadian and like Aramaic.

In fact, there's a pretty recent, very good translation of it by the publisher, Herminia, which is the most updated one, takes into consideration things like the Dead Sea Scrolls.

But though we didn't have a physical copy of the Gospel of Thomas, we had fragments of it that were found in Oxyrhynchus Egypt in the 1800s.

And then we found the full copy that's written in Coptic in the Nag Hammadi Library.

What we find when we dig up that actual piece of papyri and we read it, what it does is it confirms for us what Irenaeus condemned to begin with.

So every time we find these things, whether it's the gospel of truth, the gospel of Thomas, the gospel of Judas, the gospel of Peter, when early church writers are mentioning those, when we find the actual physical documentation, it doesn't blow up our understanding of Christianity.

And he chronicled kind of the development of the story of the Gospel of Jesus' Wife in a book called Veritas.

Yeah.

And it's a really interesting story because Karen King at Harvard University kind of staked her career on the authenticity of this particular fragment in Coptic.

And it was unanimously shown to be a forgery.

And so the whole process of these things, the irony of these motivations for translation within the early church leading up into, you know, the fourth, fifth, sixth centuries, a lot of my passion and area is in biblical manuscripts.

And you see how many translations there are in all sorts of languages, in Coptic, in Georgian, in Old Church Slavonic, in variations of Old Latin.

And the whole point of that was you need to be able to understand it.

And how do you do that? By reading it.

And this is why 2 Enoch is sometimes called Slavonic Enoch.

However, this all changed in March 2009, when the scholar Joost Hagen stumbled upon four overlooked and unpublished fragments of Coptic that were discovered at the cathedral fortress of Qasr Ibrim.

Located in ancient Nubia near the southern border of Egypt, this archaeological site is so remote and so dry that archaeologists even found a dried Roman sandal preserved there, dry enough to preserve some pretty ancient texts.

And although he didn't know it at first, Hagen soon realized that he was looking at a Coptic version of Second Enoch dating to around the 8th century.

the earliest material and literary evidence for a text that, up until then, was only known from late medieval manuscripts.

So why don't we call 2 Enoch an 8th century text based on this evidence? Well, there's a lot of reasons to believe that it's much more ancient.

Even though these fragments date to the medieval periods, many Coptic and Slavonic texts are translations from earlier Greek manuscripts, and scholars think this is the case with 2 Enoch.

Not only does it follow the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, called the Septuagint, whenever it alludes to the Bible and biblical names, but it also makes a play on words, or an acrostic of the name Adam, that only makes sense in Greek.

Voice actor Abubakar Saleem does an excellent job playing Bayek, and he, along with the other Egyptian characters, tend to give a more African-sounding accent to their performance, for lack of a better term.

Ancient Egyptian is an Afro-Asiatic language, and outside of its more modern Coptic form, we don't really know exactly what an ancient Egyptian accent would sound like.

So the developers opted to cast actors with Arabic, Hebraic, and African backgrounds to make it more authentic.

The structure of the language itself is based on the system of grammar pioneered by Sir Alan Gardiner in the 1920s.