Jesus of Nazareth, but Egypt First

Out of Egypt I called My son – Hosea 11:1 

In the Gospel of Matthew, the advent of the Messiah is followed by an abrupt departure.

Almost immediately after the Magi visit them, the Holy Family takes off for Egypt, Joseph having been warned in a dream that King Herod would kill his Son. The narrative then fast forwards through three and a half years of exile, terminated by yet another angel in a dream.

Orthodox. Faithful. Free.

Sign up to get Crisis articles delivered to your inbox daily

Email subscribe inline (#4)

But what Scripture leaves blank, Coptic Christian tradition fills in.

Alongside the familiar stories of the annunciation, the shepherds in the field, and the baby wrapped in swaddling clothes, the Copts have other stories—of the infant Jesus who held up his hand to stop a stone from falling on Mary, of idols that fell down before the Incarnate God, and of miraculous trees and spontaneous springs that sheltered and nurtured the Holy Family.

“It is something to be proud of—that they visited our places,” said Maryhan Nagy, a first-year university student whom I interviewed last summer at the Hanging Church in the Coptic quarter of Cairo. “It is a very great blessing to visit a place in which the Christ visited.”

In fact, several of them were within a short walk of the church.

The nearby Church of St. Sergius, for example, was built over a cave which, according to tradition, was a hiding place for the Holy Family. A chapel in the adjoining Greek Cemetery still has the well from which they drank two millennia ago. And one woman I met at the Hanging Church—so called because it is built over a Roman water gate—even claimed that the Holy Family had eaten the fruit from two palm trees in the outside courtyard.

No doubt, while some stories are more credible than others, the idea that Egypt has a special role to play in salvation history is affirmed throughout Scripture—not only in Matthew but also throughout the Old Testament, most notably Isaiah 19

Behold the Lord will ascend upon a swift cloud, and will enter into Egypt, and the idols of Egypt shall be moved at His presence, and the heart of Egypt shall melt in the midst thereof. … In that day there shall be an altar of the Lord in the midst of the land of Egypt, and a monument of the Lord at the borders thereof.

The heritage the Coptic Church has bequeathed to us lives up to this special calling. It is, after all, the church that gave us St. Athanasius—the first church father to develop a list of New Testament books and a reputed author of the Nicene Creed. It is also the home of Christian monasticism which St. Anthony and the other ‘Desert Fathers’ pioneered in the 3rd century.

It is this deeply felt connection to Scriptural prophecy and the Holy Family that perhaps explains the survival of the Coptic Church through nineteen centuries of history—most of it under Muslim rule. Today, the Coptic Church remains a small but vibrant minority in a country that is 90 percent Muslim.

The Coptic Church—along with the Ethiopian Orthodox—are part of the Oriental Orthodox communion that separated from the rest of Christendom after the Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD. The council had held that Christ had two natures, such that he was fully man and fully God. The dissenters also insisted he was both man and God, but they believed those two natures were fused into one in the person of Christ.

When I sat in on the Divine Liturgy at the Hanging Church, I found a congregation willing to embrace other Christians with a degree of hospitality and openness that initially bordered on the scandalous. After the end of an elaborate, hours-long service, I withdrew inconspicuously to the back of the church to watch everyone else file out.

It didn’t work. Before long, a father and son approached me. Neither of them spoke any English, as far as I can remember. Instead, the son extended his arm to me. In his hand, he was holding a piece of bread. When I didn’t take it, he pulled back, then thrust it out again.

As a Catholic, I was quite taken aback by the encounter. Given that the Divine Liturgy had just ended, I concluded that this had to be Eucharistic bread. The idea of a child—anyone—sauntering out of church with the Eucharist in hand was, to understate it, quite a surprise.

Later during my trip, I found out that there are, in fact, two kinds of bread dispensed at the Coptic liturgy. The first kind does indeed become the Body of Jesus. But there is a second bread, called the loma baraka in Arabic, or, ‘The Bread of the Blessing,’ which was not Eucharistic, according to Marian Magdy, another college-age woman I met at the Hanging Church. This second bread, she said, was meant to be shared with the ‘people’—presumably including guests and strangers such as myself.

In retrospect, the boy’s offer of bread was a touching act of Christian charity—an extension of fellowship that left a lasting impression.

Perhaps, after all these centuries, the Coptic Church still has something to teach us.

 

This article was originally published in Parable, the diocesan magazine of Manchester, New Hampshire.

Author

  • Stephen Beale

    Stephen Beale is a freelance writer based in Providence, Rhode Island. He is a former news editor at GoLocalProv.com and was a correspondent for the New Hampshire Union Leader, where he covered the 2008 presidential primary. He has appeared on Fox News, C-SPAN and the Today Show and his writing has been published in the Washington Times, Providence Journal, the National Catholic Register and on MSNBC.com and ABCNews.com. A native of Topsfield, Massachusetts, he graduated from Brown University in 2004 with a degree in classics and history.

tagged as: Church Coptic Church

Join the Conversation

in our Telegram Chat

Or find us on

Editor's picks

Item added to cart.
0 items - $0.00

Orthodox. Faithful. Free.

Signup to receive new Crisis articles daily

Email subscribe stack
Share to...