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"THE COPTIC VERSIONS
Christian tradition is unanimous in assuming the very
early
spread of the Church in Egypt, and
recent discoveries of both
documents and art works in the sands and tombs of that land
have only tended to confirm this tradition. The Greek language
was very widely used, from the Mediterranean coast to the
borders of the Roman Empire on the Upper Nile, especially in
the cities. However, the farther up the Nile the larger the pro-
portion of the population that did not know Greek--at least,
not in so thorough a fashion as to read the documents of their
faith in it. Hence it is no surprise to discover that the earliest
Coptic Version (perhaps in part as early as the 3rd century) was
that made in and for Upper Egypt--the so-called "Sahidic"
dialect. It is simply the descendant of the ancient Egyptian
tongue, as spoken around and above the old capital, Thebes
(now Luxor), with a large admixture of Greek elements es-
pecially in all that belongs to
Christian
doctrine, life, and
wor-
ship. Next to the Sahidic, the Bohairic dialect of the Delta
has
played the most important part in the history of the vernacular
Bible. It ultimately drove out the other three dialects into which
all, or a part, of the Scriptures had been rendered. Bohairic
Coptic is the official language of the
Coptic
Church today but
has been a dead language for several centuries, gradually dis-
placed by Arabic. The entire New
Testament in Bohairic
Coptic has been edited both by foreign scholars and by the
Coptic Patriarchate for ecclesiastical use."--
1000 Tongues, 1939 [Info only]
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