No of course not, I just noticed differences in the version I found on NewAdvent and the version the other poster quoted, sorry I don’t recall his name. So I suspected that there might’ve been changes made to the version he cited because of the date that was on it because I thought it might be a version date. All I can do is search for information online I can’t attest to its authenticity, authorship, or date of origin if that information isn’t included in the website. So I apologize if it is an inaccurate version because none of this information was provided.
Edit: ok it was you who originally posted that version. I thought so but just didn’t want to go back and look while I was writing this post.
I don't know what a "version date" would mean in an Orthodox context. No doubt our friend The Liturgist (whose username for some reason breaks my brain's/computer's ability to use the @ function, so hopefully he'll see this even without being properly summoned
) could set us all straight on the particulars, as his knowledge of the history and development of liturgies is second to none among CF posters, but it is my understanding that the liturgies that are currently in use among the Copts and the Greeks alike in Egypt do not significantly differ in their antiquity, such that their present day forms have largely been established since the 18th century or so. It is their historical interactions and roots that we must look into to see what can be said regarding who is preserving what, hence my quoting of the Coptic Encyclopedia's article on the Cyrillian version of Mark to make the point that even if the manuscript tradition for the Bohairic version does not predate the 12th century (which makes sense if you know anything about the history of Coptic as a language, since it was not until c. the 9th century that Bohairic began to officially supplant the earlier and much more widespread Sahidic dialect in the Church -- Sahidic having been the native dialect of great Church luminaries such as St. Shenouda the Archimandrite and others), it is nevertheless observed by scholars of the Egyptian liturgy who know these details much better than any of us that when it comes to agreeing with the very earliest fragments of the Egyptian liturgy itself (~ the presumed original text that both Greek Mark and Coptic/Cyrillian Mark descend from), St. Cyril's liturgy sticks closer to the available manuscript evidence than the Greek recension of Mark does.
Things like this are precisely why we cannot say "The liturgy was originally served at Alexandria in Greek, therefore...", like some Greek/Chalcedonian chauvinists sometimes do (thankfully not so many here at CF that I have observed lately!), or "this manuscript is older than that one, therefore...", as though it is simply a matter of comparing dates and noticing that, yes, this one is obviously older than that one. Not only can radiocarbon dating of actual pieces of papyrus lead to false conclusions about the supposed antiquity of what is written on them (recall or look up the controversy surrounding the so-called "Gospel of Jesus' Wife" from a few years ago; it turned out to be a completely modern forgery), but manuscripts written at any point across the history of particular liturgies can and do show the evolution of the liturgy in such a way that the presumed 'original' can often only be reconstructed to whatever degree it can by looking back at common elements, rather than treating each change as evidence that "this one evolved away from that one" or what have you. That's simply not how obviously-related texts coming out of similar geographic and cultural environments are treated by serious researchers into this stuff, presumably because when the point is not to 'prove' the authenticity, originality, or correctness of a tradition, but rather to just describe what we're seeing by looking at the texts themselves, no one change or series of changes can be taken to be conclusive proof of any type of corruption or willful change.
To put it in simple terms that are hopefully understandable by people who do not actually celebrate the liturgies in question, we do not look at Coptic Mark and ascribe any sort of value judgment to the fact that it is longer than Greek Mark, or that it has this or that feature or passage or prayer that Greek Mark does not have. Greek Mark, by the same token, has features and prayers and such that Coptic Mark does not have, so why would it be that Greek Mark is given priority over Coptic Mark/Cyril when looking at the two? Again, because the liturgy was originally served in Greek at Alexandria? That doesn't work, because the anti-Chalcedonian Copts in Alexandria proper continued to purposely worship in Greek for centuries after the schism, just as they had before it. Having a Greek education was a normal marker of a certain social status at the time, and reached far beyond Alexandria and whatever the Greeks and Copts were doing there (e.g., the aforementioned St. Shenouda, the father of theology in the Coptic language, also received a classical Greek education, and he hailed from the opposite side of the country from Alexandria, from a place called Shenalolet/Shandaweil, within what was then the district of
Akhmim). Coptic historian Maged S.A. Mikhail makes the point in his book
From Byzantine to Islamic Egypt, that Greek remained a perfectly fine vehicle for the expression of anti-Chalcedonian theology for centuries after the schism, such that it is literally not possible to use the existence of such-and-such thing (liturgy, treatise, etc.) in Greek as evidence of anything in itself. Heck, even outside of Egypt, the beloved and holy 'Crown of the Syrians' (as he is called by them and us), St. Severus of Antioch, originally wrote in Greek. He is associated with Syriac Christianity in particular because the vast majority of his letters, homilies, and prayers were preserved in that language both before and after his departure, as the Chalcedonians did their best to scrub him from the history of Greek-speaking Christianity entirely (it would seem fairly successfully, if we compare the available Greek manuscripts containing his work to those in Syriac).
In summary, the elevation of Greek versions of
whatever above what the peasants were doing only makes sense if you are Greek supremacist, which it makes no sense to be in the context of Egypt in particular -- other places, sure, but not Egypt. This is because we have records of exactly when and under what circumstances the Greeks first settled in Egypt in the centuries before Christ, and a great deal of what they subsequently built was built atop naturally earlier Egyptian settlements (Alexandria itself being built on the site of the preexisting Egyptian settlement of Rhakotis, which as I understand it remained as a kind of "Egyptian district" within that most Greek of cities), art forms, and yes, eventually liturgies (the ancient pre-Christian Egyptians being famously incredibly religious, and having their own means of expressing this religiosity, which were carried over into the Christian era for the worship of the true God -- Ⲫ̀ⲓⲱⲧ, ⲛⲉⲙ Ⲡ̀ϣⲏⲣⲓ, ⲛⲉⲙ ⲡⲓⲡ̀ⲛⲉⲩⲙⲁ ⲉ̅ⲑ̅ⲩ̅). This led to a great deal of interchange among the two groups, such that even to this day (after 1,600+ years in schism) there are things that the Copts and the Greeks share that are unknown to Chalcedonians elsewhere. (I don't have any specifics on this, but I remember reading about it from EO people on their forum some time ago, so I presume that they would know.) The Copts were inevitably Hellenized much more than the Greeks were ever Egyptianized (though a look at the Ptolemaic dynasty, for example, shows obvious efforts at inculturation on their part), but the point is that in this sort of environment, it makes much more sense to posit that they developed alongside one another as distinct but interrelated Christian communities, just as they continued to do after the schism in Egypt and beyond.
