“Out of Egypt Have I Called My Son:” A Bibliographic Essay on Egyptian Christianity from its Origins to the Arab Conquest

Abstract

The earliest chronological report linking Jesus to Egypt is the infancy narrative in the Gospel of Matthew (2: 13–18). The author writes that Joseph and Mary fled to Egypt in order to save Jesus from Herod’s edict to kill all the male children in Jerusalem (“the Massacre of the Innocents,’ memorialized by Peter Paul Rubens, among others). In Coptic tradition, the Holy Family (Mary, Joseph, and Jesus) traveled across the Sinai Peninsula and made their way to the Roman fortress of Babylon (Old Cairo). Joseph used the gold, frankincense and myrrh presented to the baby Jesus by the three wise men from the “East” (Matthew 2: 1–12) to hire a boat to take his family to Upper Egypt. Coptic literature claims that the Holy Family spent precisely 185 days in Egypt (Kamil 2002). It is doubtful that this pericope can be linked to the establishment of a Christian community in Egypt. However, the next reference to Egypt in the New Testament is found in Acts 2: 9–11, which tells of Egyptian visitors to Jerusalem during Pentecost, which may point to the origin of a Christian community west of Sinai.