SSCN Voumes 1-10, 1994-2004

St. Shenouda Coptic Newsletter

preserved primarily in the liturgy and in the monasteries which led to a very narrow distribution and creation of Coptic writings. Saint Shenoute who had written in an earlier period and had included literary activity and a literary style, as contrasted with other monastic works which were enumerations of rules and instructions, came to be considered by such scholars as Alois Grillmeier and Hany Takla as arguably the pre-eminent Coptic author. 4 From the fifth to the seventh century authors frequently made reference to Saint Shenoute, his life and his works. His Canons described the monastic rule of the White Monastery for as long as the monastery survived and his sermons found in his Discourses were quoted and became part of the lectionary and the liturgy of the Coptic Church. Saint Shenoute had an almost prophetic standing in Coptic Christianity. Yet outside of Egypt there did not appear to be any lasting historical impact. In the opinion of Stephen Emmel: He does not appear in the Greco-Egyptian sources that Western scholarship relies on for information about Egyptian history in the early Byzantine periods. This may be due to the fact that none of the writers of the famous monastic tours of Egypt had penetrated to the Thebaid. 5 The Finding of the Manuscripts Many students and scholars here in the West are familiar with the discovery of the Nag Hammadi manuscripts but not so many are familiar with the finding of the manuscripts in the Library of the White Manuscripts. From the fifth to the sixteenth century Saint Shenoute's memory was confined to the Coptic Church and he is first mentioned in the West in a list compiled by Michael Wansleben given to him by Coptic monks in 1663. At the end of this century he and Saint Besa are mentioned in the Diptychs in a Vatican Library manuscript on the Liturgy of St. Basil. From this time on there was a slow recognition of the existence of these works among scholars.

Dr. Emmel points out in his work that a publisher in 1783 omitted the name of Saint Shenoute at the request of the Sacred Congregation for the Correction of Oriental Texts, since to their knowledge there had been no mention of him prior to the Council of Chalcedon. To their way of thinking Saint Shenoute was guilty of being a Eutychian on the basis of their lack of knowledge of his existence. Fortunately the 1699 manuscript still existed and gave us one of the first mentions of Saint Shenoute. 6 Up to this point there was no evidence of any collection of manuscripts surviving that were attributable to Saint Shenoute. However in 1743 on a trip up the Nile by Sir Charles Percy the following record remains, as quoted by Dr. Emmel in his study: We got Intelligence of a famous antient (sic) convent, at about Three Leagues Distance from Achmim, situate (sic) to the south-west of it, at the Foot of the Libyan Mountains and this…..we went to visit. This Convent, which is very antient (sic) and celebrated is called the White Convent; and we yet find in it many Manuscripts, wrote (sic) on Parchment in the old Coptic Character .7 We have here evidence of the existence of a library and although the manuscripts were taken by visitors and collectors and spread around Europe, it became clear that they were from a common source, that there were abundant collections written in Sahidic Coptic which were and I quote Dr. Emmel "older, literarily richer, and more varied and in the language in which Saint Shenoute had written".

St. Shenouda Coptic Newsletter Thanks to Gaston Maspero, Director of Egyptian Antiquities Service in Paris these manuscripts were traced to the White Monastery and the room where the library was located. Emmel quotes Maspero's description when he first saw it in 1892:

The incomplete books, the detached pages of bibles, of Gospels of collections of homilies unused in the convent, were scattered pell-mell under the sun in a cell situated behind the choir, in an escape tower not

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