SSCN Voumes 1-10, 1994-2004

St. Shenouda Coptic Newsletter

relations and, above all, the positive ingredients of creating a strong Christian Coptic home. Conclusion: The family is the first educational institution in the life of the Copts. The church and the home have run side by side in the preservation of faith and culture of the Copts. The interaction between the parents and the children brings together the old and the new; tradition and I am indebted to Maged S.A. Mikhail for taking the trouble to read my modest essay on the Copts and for writing a review in a well-known and respected Coptic newsletter. I read the review this morning in print and in electronic format. Readers will find that Maged finds eleven points of contention in the book. On three important factual questions (the misspelt ‘Waqf’, Wine in the Eucharist and the practice of open or closed coffins) I am most grateful to Maged for the corrections of my errors. It will be of interest to him that I seem to have been deliberately misled for years on the question of unfermented wine. I have only attended eight Coptic funerals, six in Egypt and two in London. Most of these were of priests or bishops and my memory has clearly played me false. The last Coptic funeral I attended was that of Abouna Antonious Farag in London, at which I preached, and at this service the coffin was, as Maged says, open throughout the liturgy. That was some years ago. If my essay goes into paper cover I will correct these errors. On the questions raised concerning Abouna Tadros, the translation of the Liturgy and the definition of a Copt I shall need to stand by my moderate affirmations in the book. Many readers will know that I have written extensively on these matters in the past, including a much larger review of the output of Abouna Tadros, whom I admire as a traditionalist expositor. In context, the remarks about Modern Theology are important, but are

modernity are uniquely placed together in a constructive unit. From the tension between the past and the present, new means are created for the preservation and continuity of the religious tradition of the Copts abroad. Family experiences: spiritual, intellectual, emotional and physical are essential as a source of the development of the Christian Coptic identity.

Among the Copts - Book Review Response [Adversa] (by Fr. John Watson)

certainly not part of a full treatment of Malaty’s larger scheme. I have no serious problems with the comments of Maged Mikhail. Before my reading of his review today, it was presented to me as hostile. It is not. Perhaps it is mildly patronising to a non-Copt entering the minefield. Perhaps not. It is possible to offer two tangential observations on my work. A decade ago I was asked to lecture to some Hungarian Uniates (Eastern Orthodox in communion with Rome) on the subject of “Saint Antony the Great and his monastery at the Red Sea today”. At the end of my talk I was furiously attacked for saying that Abba Antony was a Copt. I was told that Copts came into existence in AD 451. It is a point of view I do not share. They were ready to lynch me when I said that some scholars had suggested that the source text of the Vita Antonii had been a Coptic one. I hope that my definition of Copt includes all the people mentioned by Maged, and many more but I remain convinced of the kind of conversion I envisage if, for example, I became a Copt myself. I was first in Baghdad in 1957. In several countries I have heard entire recitations of the Qur’an by an hafiz in Ramadan. Strictly speaking the Qur’an cannot be translated, as is well known. To hear it delivered in Arabic is to understand its inner life. I have no doubt at all that the same applies to the Liturgy in Coptic and Arabic. I cannot write again

St. Shenouda Coptic Newsletter

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