ABSTRACT
The year 570 marks Coptic Egypt’s severing of religious ties with the Church of Constantinople when Patriarch Theodosius I established himself in the Monastery of Saint Macarius in Wadi Natrun, followed by many priests and monks. Until then the country’s resistance to oppression had been largely passive. Egyptians resented political control and the Melkites’ ostentatious display of power, but they had not fled to remote areas in large numbers, as had their forebears in the third century. Not only had they developed a strong sense of identity that had been lacking in the earlier period but monasteries firmly replaced some of the services of ancient temples. Each church, however small, had its own resident clergy that looked after the spiritual and social welfare of the community. However, after the massacre of 200 innocents by the imperial forces in 538, Egyptian Christians became increasingly disenchanted with the Melkitedominated Alexandria. Incensed that monasteries like that of Samuel at Qalamun had to erect huge keeps for personal protection against alien forces in their own country, and no longer able to support oppression, persecution, and monks being rounded up, brutally beaten and imprisoned – probably even murdered to set an example to others and enforce subservience – they took this major step. They appointed their own patriarch to take up residence in the Monastery of Saint Macarius in Wadi Natrun in the Western Desert. Thenceforward, Egypt witnessed the coexistence of two ‘Patriarchs of Alexandria’, one representing the Greek Orthodox (Chalcedonian) Church and the imperial government at Constantinople; the other the national church of Egypt, known after the Arab conquest as the Coptic Church. Both claim to orthodoxy; that is to say, to the canons and rules formulated by the councils of the early Church Fathers.
