Letters of Pesynthius of Coptos

No ancient title; Coptic pastoral letters and administrative documents of the bishop of Coptos · Pesynthius (Pisentius), bishop of Coptos · 599–632 (episcopate, per Dekker 2018) · letter

Coptic · domain: documentary · researched 2026-11-13

Why this is in the register

HOLLIS 'Pesynthius' returns 5 records: G. Gabra, Untersuchungen zu den Texten über Pesyntheus, Bischof von Koptos (1984, German), R. Dekker, Episcopal Networks and Authority in Late Antique Egypt (2018, English monograph that analyses but does not translate the corpus), Amélineau 1887 (French) and Till 1934 (German) (https://hollis.harvard.edu/discovery/search?query=any,contains,Pesynthius&tab=Everything&search_scope=MyInst_and_CI&vid=01HVD_INST:HVD2&offset=0 HOLLIS 'Pesynthius letters English' returns 0 (https://hollis.harvard.edu/discovery/search?query=any,contains,Pesynthius%20letters%20English&tab=Everything&search_scope=MyInst_and_CI&vid=01HVD_INST:HVD2&offset=0 OpenLibrary 'pesynthius' returns 0. No English translation was found, but the letters are edited piecemeal across German-language studies and I could not exclude article-level renderings, so the status is recorded as unknown rather than none. Coptic Scriptorium holds no text of these letters.

Pesynthius was a monk of the Theban desert who became bishop of Coptos; his Coptic correspondence, preserved in several collections and partly overlapping the Abraham dossier, is the densest documentary witness to the Egyptian church of the early 7th century and the basis of his later Coptic and Arabic hagiography.

Existing translations recorded

None recorded in English. Non-English versions, where they exist, are named in the evidence above.

Electronic text

No open electronic text was verified for this work. The Greek/Coptic/Geʿez may exist only in a print or subscription edition (Migne, CSCO, TLG, CMCL).

Scanned witnesses

Scan search: restricted scan — 1 candidate(s). One restricted witness. The Coptic texts are dispersed across German-language studies: Amelineau 1887 (French) and Till 1934 (German) are cited in the dossier but neither was located on IA (creator:(Amelineau) restricted to 1885-1890 returns only his Gnosticism, Contes et romans, Actes des martyrs and Historia Lausiaca work; title:(pesynthe) returns 0), and no digitised copy of either was verified elsewhere. Crum, Coptic Ostraca (1902) was checked and rejected as an edition: its 51 'Pesynthius' mentions are editorial/prosopographical discussion of the Theban dossier in the introduction, not texts of the letters. No English translation exists to pair with a scan, so the pipeline value of a Pesynthius scan is a German/Coptic edition, not a translation source.

Harvard Hollis

Hollis query: Pesynthius bishop of Coptos — 2 record(s); match basis author_only.

Sources checked

• HOLLIS search — Pesynthius letters English
• HOLLIS search — Pesynthius
• https://openlibrary.org/search.json?q=pesynthius

Cite: Tergwame, “Letters of Pesynthius of Coptos” (coptic gap dossier), 2026. https://naxiai.com/christian/gaps/coptic-pesynthius-letters