Effective Spirits: Coptic Martyrs and Martyrology

This dissertation discusses Coptic martyrs: their history, legacy, and ongoing veneration, to illustrate martyrs and martyr narratives (commonly called martyrology) as the most important focus for the Copts, their religious heritage, and perhaps even their civilization. This focus on martyrs and martyrology is not emphasized to the same degree for any other Christian group or culture. The living narrative of Coptic martyrology underpins the Coptic Orthodox Church’s self-definition as a martyrs’ church, and helps explain why the Copts celebrate and honor their status as a persecuted minority even today. To understand Coptic culture, one must understand the Coptic martyrs. We need more comprehensive study of Coptic martyrs, not only to update existing research with the most recent scholarship, but to encourage further scholarship into this most crucial aspect of Coptic civilization. As a broad, comprehensive study rather than the narrow focus of a specialist, this dissertation reviews and collates scholarship from many disciplines to create a contemporary picture of Coptic martyrs and martyrology both within the Coptic culture and inside Coptic Studies scholarship, in the hope of encouraging more scholarly attention for this important topic. Two areas of particular focus are 1) the treatment of martyrs in Coptic art within a historical context; and 2) a new proposal for consistent and meaningful terminology for discussing the entire chronology of Coptic martyrology. Because of this dissertation’s necessarily comprehensive nature, seven interdisciplinary chapters address different parts of wider questions to meet my hypothesis: the reason Coptic martyrs and martyrology are so much more integral to Coptic identity than they are to other Christian peoples, is because the Copts already came from an indigenous heritage that venerated and interacted with the ancestral dead on an ongoing, living basis. Coptic martyrs in some ways replaced earlier, pharaonic “saints” as intercessors with the divine, and became the repository of Coptic heritage, insulating and reinforcing it against first Roman, then Byzantine, Arab, Ottoman, and even Western colonization and change. The continuing reality of Coptic persecution, with its cycle where martyrs are continuously created, has only served to reinforce this indigenous belief, and to bind living Copts ever closer with their departed brethren. Watered with the blood of new martyrs, the seed of the Copts continues to flourish.