Theological Issues in the Liturgy of Apostle Mark of the Coptic Church

Abstract

The Liturgy of St. Mark the Apostle had spread in the Ancient Church period throughout the territory of modern Egypt and Ethiopia. Traditionally, it is attributed to Apostle Mark. It was distributed first in the Greek-speaking environment, and then in the Coptic one. In the original version, the Liturgy was performed until the 7th–11th centuries. The sixth century was marked by the fact that Greek-speaking Christian missionaries had succeeded in creating Church in Nubia, where later many different preserved passages and manuscripts of the liturgy of St. Mark were found. The article is aimed to analyze the content of the texts of the Liturgy of Apostle Mark of the Coptic Orthodox Church: to identify the main theological themes that are presented in the content of hymns, prayers and hymns; and to formulate the main problems within the framework of modern theology. The discovery of manuscripts of the Liturgy of St. Mark in the 20th century and its translation from the Strasbourg manuscripts into Russian in 2003 increased attention of the scientific community to this topic. All this is catalyzed by the heightened interest to the liturgical revival in the Russian Orthodox Church in recent times. This article also attempts a textual analysis of the entire sequence of the Liturgy of Apostle Mark, with the identification of characteristic features and illustrated by an example from the divine service. The author also uses a comparative analysis of the Russian, Arabic and Coptic translations, which reveals the terminological features of a particular tradition, as well as contributes to the further development of theological dialogue between Churches.

Keywords

• coptic orthodox church
• liturgy of st. mark
• theology
• liturgics
• creation
• christian anthropology