Bible

The Sahidic Coptic Bible is one of the earliest Egyptian-language Bible traditions and an important witness to ancient Greek textual forms. Rendered in the Sahidic dialect of Coptic, the final stage of the Egyptian language written in an alphabet derived largely from Greek, it served the Christian communities of the Nile valley, including its monastic centres, in their own tongue. It covers both the Old and New Testaments, though the text survives unevenly, preserved in manuscripts of varying completeness. It was made from Greek, drawing on the Septuagint for the Old Testament and the Greek New Testament, and its approach is generally close to the Greek; it is classed as a fresh translation rather than a revision of an earlier version. A distinctive feature is that different books may reflect different translators and different stages of translation. Textual scholars consult it among the early versions cited in the study of the Greek text.