Why I Love Copts (Even Though Copts Don't Necessarily Like Me)

There is absolutely no reason why I should take such an interest in the Coptic tradition. The Copts hate Jews and I am Jewish. I remember one time I was standing in a bar looking very dapper and I came across two very attractive women getting drinks. I asked them where they were from and they said 'Egypt' and when they told me their names (which I completely forget now) I knew they were Copts and they acknowledged that fact.

At the time I thought - 'I got this made/I'm getting laid' - so I proceeded to show off my knowledge of their tradition. Strangely my obsession with their religion and repeated invoking of the name 'Pope Shenouda III' DID NOT lead to a wild threesome. So I tried a different approach. When they asked why I knew so much about their tradition I said I was Jewish.

I got this 'Oh ...' and the amusing game of cat and mouse ended abruptly and they moved on to somewhere else.

Now many people will question my associating my experiences picking up ladies with scholarship and to some extent these objections have to be acknowledged as legitimate. However as I am writing a blog rather than an academic paper it is imperative that I keep the topics light and amusing.

The point however is that my love for the Copts goes beyond my inabilities to score a Coptic woman (from what I hear from my Coptic male friends I am not missing anything). The reason for my interest in their tradition is that it helped rescue me from being just another idiot with an idiotic theory about the origins of Christianity.

You see my 'Jewishness' isn't limited to a prejudice in favor of my inherited tradition. I did not marry a Jewish woman. I did not force my son to adopt Judaism as his religion. To me the Jewish legacy is to emphasize tradition (like Topol sings in Fiddler on the Roof).

The truth can't be found be inventing things out of thin air. There has to be a surviving tradition somewhere which will validate any radical new theory about Christianity.

That is why I was so happy to stumble upon the Copts. I was always interested in the Marcionites but dissatisfied with the manner in which most scholars proceeded to define what Marcionitism was.

It is only the Church Fathers whoever tell us about this sect. My friend Rory Boid demonstrated that the term likely comes from an Aramaic term meaning 'those of Mark.' Yet long before this I started noticing a pattern which suggested that the Marcionites were one and the same with the original Alexandrian tradition which refused to accept the new Catholic canon foisted on it by Imperial interests during the Commodian period.

I needn't develop the arguments here in this brief post but just look at what Irenaeus says about the Marcionite 'heresy' and its belief in a two part godhead with powers of 'mercy' and 'justice.' Yes this is a Jewish conception but Irenaeus' description also suggests a connection with Alexandrian Judaism in particular (as does Tertullian's discussion of the Marcionite interest in the Logos).

Of course the ultimate confirmation for my theory came in the most unlikely of sources. I couldn't get over the implausibility of most scholarly assumptions regarding Origen's status as a eunuch. This couldn't have been as a result of a 'personal decision' on his part.

No one cuts off his manhood based on a 'whim' or a newly developed scriptural interpretation.

As many of the female readers of my blog might guess men take their manhood very seriously. No one would develop an argument for self-castration unless it was already there as an established tradition.

The Marcionites demanded the ritual castration of their priesthood. And then I started thinking about the continuation of this practice throughout the third century. Do we really know whether Dionysius kept his virility intact? Of course not. The only reason Origen's status as a eunuch likely came out in the public eye was because of what his Imperial persecutors likely saw when they mutilated the rest of his body through tortures.

The point is that the castration ritual of the Marcionites was very distinct. There couldn't be two Markan traditions coming up with this 'discovery' independent of one another. It had to have been established as the original interpetation of the tradition (at the end of the Jewish War?) associated with Mark and then perpetuated for generations.

All of which likely explains why Coptic women are so hard to get. But that's another story ...