We may pass over the banishment of John Chrysostom, Bishop of Constantinople, as having less to do with the history of Egypt, though, as in the cases of Arius and Nestorius, the chief mover of the attack upon him was a bishop of Alexandria, who accused him of heresy, because he did not come up to the Egyptian standard of orthodoxy. But among the bishops who were deposed with Chrysostom was Palladius of Galatia, who was sent a prisoner to Syênê. As soon as he was released from his bonds, instead of being cast down by his misfortunes, he proposed to take advantage of the place of his banishment, and he set forward on his travels through Ethiopia for India, in search of the wisdom of the Brahmins. He arrived in safety at Adule, the port on the Red Sea in latitude 15°, now known as Zula, where he made acquaintance with Moses, the bishop of that city, and persuaded him to join him in his distant and difficult voyage.
From Adule the two set sail in one of the vessels employed in the Indian trade; but they were unable to accomplish their purpose, and Palladius returned to Egypt worn out with heat and fatigue, having scarcely touched the shores of India. On his return through Thebes he met with a traveller who had lately returned from the same journey, and who consoled him under his disappointment by recounting his own failure in the same undertaking. His new friend had himself been a merchant in the Indian trade, but had given up business because he was not successful in it; and, having taken a priest as his companion, had set out on the same voyage in search of Eastern wisdom. They had sailed to Adule on the Abyssinian shore, and then travelled to Auxum, the capital of that country. From that coast they set sail for the Indian ocean, and reached a coast which they thought was Taprobane or Ceylon. But there they were taken prisoners, and, after spending six years in slavery, and learning but little of the philosophy that they were in search of, were glad to take the first opportunity of escaping and returning to Egypt. Palladius had travelled in Egypt before he was sent there into banishment, and he had spent many years in examining the monasteries of the Thebaid and their rules, and he has left a history of the lives of many of those holy men and woman, addressed to his friend Lausus.
When Nestorius was deposed from the bishopric of Constantinople for refusing to use the words “Mother of God” as the title of Jesus’ mother, and for falling short in other points of what was then thought orthodoxy, he was banished to Hibe in the Great Oasis. While he was living there, the Great Oasis was overrun by the Blemmyes, the Roman garrison was defeated, and those that resisted were put to the sword. The Blemmyes pillaged the place and then withdrew; and, being themselves at war with the Mazices, another tribe of Arabs, they kindly sent their prisoners to the Thebaid, lest they should fall into the hands of the latter. Nestorius then went to Panopolis to show himself to the governor, lest he should be accused of running away from his place of banishment, and soon afterwards he died of the sufferings brought on by these forced and painful journeys through the desert.
About the same time Egypt was visited by Cassianus, a monk of Gaul, in order to study the monastic institutions of the Thebaid. In his work on that subject he has described at length the way of life and the severe rules of the Egyptian monks, and has recommended them to the imitation of his countrymen. But the natives of Italy and the West do not seem to have been contented with copying the Theban monks at a distance. Such was the fame of the Egyptian monasteries that many zealots from Italy flocked there, to place themselves under the severe discipline of those holy men. As these Latin monks did not understand either Koptic or Greek, they found some difficulty in regulating their lives with the wished-for exactness; and the rules of Pachomius, of Theodorus, and of Oresiesis, the most celebrated of the founders, were actually sent to Jerome at Rome, to be by him translated into Latin for the use of these settlers in the Thebaid. These Latin monks made St. Peter a popular saint in some parts of Egypt; and in the temple of Asseboua, in Nubia, when the Christians plastered over the figure of one of the old gods, they painted in its place the Apostle Peter holding the key in his hand.
They did not alter the rest of the sculpture; so that Ramses II. is there now seen presenting his offering to the Christian saint. The mixed group gives us proof of the nation’s decline in art rather than of its improvement in religion.
Among the monks of Egypt there were also some men of learning and industry, who in their cells in the desert had made at least three translations of the New Testament into the three dialects of the Koptic language; namely, the Sahidic of Upper Egypt, the Bashmuric of the Bashmour province of the eastern half of the Delta, and the Koptic proper of Memphis and the western half of the Delta. To these were afterwards added the Acts of the council of Nicæa, the lives of the saints and martyrs, the writings of many of the Christian fathers, the rituals of the Koptic church, and various treatises on religion.
Other monks were as busy in making copies of the Greek manuscripts of the Old and New Testament; and, as each copy must have needed the painful labour of months, and often years, their industry and zeal must have been great. Most of these manuscripts were on papyrus, or on a manufactured papyrus which might be called paper, and have long since been lost; but the three most ancient copies on parchment which are the pride of the Vatican, the Paris library, and the British Museum, are the work of the Alexandrian penmen.
Copies of the Bible were also made in Alexandria for sale in western Europe; and all our oldest manuscripts show their origin by the Egyptian form of spelling in some of the words. The Beza manuscript at Cambridge, and the Clermont manuscript at Paris, which have Greek on one side of the page and Latin on the other, were written in Alexandria. The Latin is that more ancient version which was in use before the time of Jerome, and which he corrected, to form what is now called the Latin Vulgate. This old version was made by changing each Greek word into its corresponding Latin word, with very little regard to the different characters of the two languages. It was no doubt made by an Alexandrian Greek, who had a very slight knowledge of Latin.