Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
5 Facts about Coptic Christians
5 Facts about Coptic Christians
Apr 26, 2025 12:36 AM

This Saturday is the inaugural Global Coptic Day, a day memorates the Holy Family’s flight to Egypt and that celebrates “the Coptic Orthodox Church’s rich heritage, including its indelible history of martyrdom and persecution, theological education and monasticism.” Here are five facts you should know about this ancient Christian tradition.

1.The word Copt is derived from the Greek word for Egyptian. After the Muslim conquest of Egypt, it became restricted to those Egyptians adhering to Christianity. The term is typically used in reference to members of the Coptic Orthodox Church, though it is sometimes used to refer to any Christian groups in Egypt.

2. Approximately 12 percent of the Egyptian population—roughly 11 million people—identify as Christian. Egypt’s Copts are considered the munity of Christians in the Middle East, which makes them a frequent target of Islamic terrorist groups. Outside of the region, there are about one million members of the Coptic Orthodox Church, mostly in Australia, Europe, and North America. About300,000 Copts live in the U.S., with the largest concentrations in New York, New Jersey, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Houston, and Los Angeles.

3. According to tradition, the Coptic Orthodox Church was established circa AD 49 in Alexandria by St. Mark the Evangelist (the author of the Gospel of Mark), during the reign of the Roman emperor Claudius. In his fourth century bookEcclesiastical History, Eusebius writes, “And they say that this Mark was the first that was sent to Egypt, and that he proclaimed the Gospel which he had written, and first established churches in Alexandria.” (Ecclesiastical History2.16)

4. The first ecumenical council, the First Council of Nicaea (325), was convened in part as a result of a theological dispute over the nature of Christ that was begun by Arius, an Alexandrian presbyter. And in the fourth ecumenical council, Council of Chalcedon (451), the Copts separated from the other churches—a split almost 600 years before the East/West Schism of AD 1054.

5. Since their split with other Christian churches in the fourth century, the Coptic Orthodox Church has frequently been under persecution. When the Persians invaded Egypt in the sixth century, theydestroyed most of the churches and monasteries. The Persians were later replaced by Arabs, who made Islam the dominant religion in Egypt. As historianRobert Morgan says, “Until the present day in the twenty-first century, the Christian Copts of Egypt are still suffering great injustice and undeclared persecution under the Muslim yoke inside Egypt.”

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Reagan, Whittaker Chambers, and the Threat to Freedom
Over at the Liberty Law Blog, there is an excellent post titled “Ronald Reagan, Whittaker Chambers, and the Dialogue of Liberty” by Alan Snyder. Snyder delves into the influence Chambers had on Reagan and how their worldviews differed as well. Many conservatives and scholars felt Chambers’ prediction that the West was on the losing side of history in the battle against Marxism collapsed after the fall of the Iron Curtain and the Soviet Union. For many, the ideas of Chambers...
Italy’s Tax Man Takes Aim at the Vatican
Kishore Jayabalan, the Acton Institute’s Rome office director, was interviewed by the Zenit news agency in an article titled, “Is Taxing the Church a Real Solution for Italy?” In the article, Jayabalan discusses the history of the Italian state and its imposition of property taxes on the Roman Catholic Church’s land holdings, residences and non-profit businesses. Sometimes in the past, particularly under Napoleonic rule and before the Lateran Pacts, the institution of property tax was often a subject of state...
Let’s Change Hearts and Minds (and Laws, Too)
Few clichés are so widespread within the evangelical subculture, says Matthew Lee Anderson, as the notion that our witness must be one of “changing hearts and minds.” In careful hands, the idea is at best ambiguous. At worst it reinforces the sort of interior-oriented individualism that allows for and perpetuates a blissful naivete about how institutions and structures shape our dispositions and thoughts. In less than careful hands, the phrase drives a wedge between law and culture by attempting to...
How to Love Liberty More Than a Libertarian Economist
I have a deep and abiding love for liberty—which is why I find myself so often in disagreement with libertarians. Libertarians love liberty too, of course, but they tend to love liberty a bit differently. I love liberty in an earthy, elemental way. I love liberty because I need it—like I need air and food—for human flourishing. In contrast, the libertarians I’ve encountered tend to love liberty primarily as an abstraction. Indeed, the most ideologically consistent libertarians I know seem...
Constitutional Cases and the Four Cardinal Virtues
Should virtue be a consideration in judicial decisionmaking? Indiana Law Professor R. George Wright makes an intriguing argument for why the four cardinal virtues could be useful in interpreting constitutional cases: Judges typically decide constitutional cases by referring to one or more legal precedents, rules, tests, principles, doctrines, or policies. This Article mends supplementing this standard approach with fully legitimate and appropriate attention to what many cultures have long recognized as the four basic cardinal virtues of practical wisdom or...
How to Steal a Bike in New York City
Edmund Burke didn’t really say it, but it still rings true: All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. In a test of this maxim, filmmaker Casey Neistat tries to steal his own bike in several locations around New York City and finds that most people do nothing about it—even when it’s done right in front of a police station. I recently spent a couple of days conducting a bike theft experiment, which...
Is Work a Curse?
Is work a curse, a result of mankind’s fall from grace? Not according to the Book of Genesis. As Hugh Whelchel, Executive Director of the Institute for Faith, Work & Economics, explains, what Adam was called to do in the garden is what we are still called to do in our work today: Humanity was created by God to cultivate and keep God’s creation, which included developing it and protecting it. You see, we were created to be stewards of...
Integral Human Development
The Journal of Markets & Morality is planning a theme issue for the Spring of 2013: “Integral Human Development,” i.e. the synthesis of human freedom and responsibility necessary for the material and spiritual enrichment of human life. According to Pope Benedict XVI, Integral human development presupposes the responsible freedom of the individual and of peoples: no structure can guarantee this development over and above human responsibility. (Caritas in Veritate 17) There is a delicate balance between the material and the...
Obamacare’s Religious Rubes
The White House has a plan to mobilize prayer vigils in front of the Supreme Court in defense of Obamacare. It was reported that the administration met with leaders at non-profit organizations and religious officials who support the new health care law. The court takes up the constitutional test of the health care mandate in a couple of weeks. The mandate has now been challenged in 26 states. Cue the same stale big government religious prophets who confuse statism and...
Lord Acton and the Power of the Historian
Looking through my back stacks of periodicals the other day I ran across a review in Books & Culture by David Bebbington, “Macaulay in the Dock,” of a recent biography of Thomas Babington Macaulay. The essay takes its point of departure in Lord Acton’s characterization of Macaulay as “one of the greatest of all writers and masters, although I think him utterly base, contemptible and odious.” As Bebbington writes, “Acton, a towering intellectual of the later 19th century, was at...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved