Between roughly seven and ten million Coptic Christians live in Egypt today — the largest Christian community in the Middle East and one of the oldest continuously existing Christian populations anywhere. Most Western readers know very little about them, which is a gap worth filling.

Where they come from

The word “Copt” derives from the Greek word for Egyptian, which itself derives from the ancient Egyptian name for their capital of Memphis. The community traces its origins to the mission of Saint Mark, traditionally dated to around 42 AD — a claim of continuity that survives in the fact that the Coptic language, direct descendant of ancient Egyptian, remains the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church.

Egypt was substantially Christian from the third century until well after the Arab conquest in 641. The gradual conversion of the majority to Islam took centuries, and the Coptic community that remained was never displaced — it simply became a minority in its own country, a status it has held for roughly a thousand years.

What makes them distinct theologically

The Coptic Orthodox Church broke communion with the wider church at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, over a dispute about how to describe the divine and human natures of Christ. Along with the Armenian, Syriac, Ethiopian and Eritrean churches, it belongs to the family known as the Oriental Orthodox — distinct from the Eastern Orthodox churches, which broke communion with Rome centuries later.

In practice this means the Copts have been outside the two branches of Christianity most Western readers know — Roman Catholic and Protestant — and outside the Greek and Russian Orthodox traditions as well. It is one reason so few histories of Christianity written in English devote much space to them.

The modern situation

Copts have historically been active in Egyptian professional and commercial life at rates disproportionate to their share of the population. They have also faced sustained pressure from several directions: restrictions on building and repairing churches under Ottoman-era rules only partly reformed in 2016; occasional mass violence, including attacks on churches by Islamist militants during Egypt’s political turbulence in the 2010s; and a slower, quieter attrition through emigration, particularly to the United States and Europe.

Estimates of the community’s size vary widely because the Egyptian state does not publish confessional census data. Coptic sources put the figure higher; state and demographic sources lower. The uncertainty is itself a data point.

The current pope

The Coptic Orthodox Church is led by Pope Tawadros II, elected in November 2012 as the 118th successor to Saint Mark, in a distinctive ceremony in which the name of the final candidate is drawn by a blindfolded child from three names shortlisted by the church’s electoral college. He has generally sought stability and cooperation with the Egyptian state, sometimes drawing criticism from Copts who feel that stance leaves the community’s grievances underplayed internationally.

The Coptic Catholic Church, in full communion with Rome, is a much smaller separate community, and there is a Coptic Evangelical Church as well. When “Coptic” appears in coverage without qualification it usually means the Orthodox church.

Why this matters this week

The Coptic calendar sits in an unusual place. Their New Year falls in September — the feast of Nayrouz, based on an ancient Egyptian solar calendar — and the fast of the Virgin Mary runs from 7 to 21 August, ending in a feast whose traditions overlap in interesting ways with the Assumption observed by Catholics on 15 August and the Dormition kept by the Eastern Orthodox on the same date.

Different traditions, same period. It is a good reminder that “Christianity” is not one thing but several dozen — most of them older, more geographically scattered, and less politically dominant than the versions Western coverage habitually defaults to.

Sources

Coptic Orthodox Church official material; standard reference works on Oriental Orthodoxy including Otto Meinardus’s histories of Christian Egypt; Pew Research Center estimates on Middle East Christian populations.