Between Defense and Devotion: Buṭrus al-Sadamantī's Kitāb al-Taṣḥīḥ in Its 13th Century Copto-Islamic Milieu

This dissertation deepens the understanding of the 13th century “Golden Age” in Copto-Arabic literature by focusing on the largely overlooked thinker Buṭrus al-Sadamantī and his Kitāb al-Taṣḥīḥ fī ‘alām al-Sayyid al-Mashīh, The Book of Correction on the Pains of Christ the Lord (hereafter Kitāb al-Taṣḥīḥ), a lengthy commentary on the events of Christ’s passion as found across the four gospels.  This text has received minimal scholarly attention, with only an unpublished PhD dissertation on its beginning and an analysis and French translation of one of its three introductions. This dissertation offers the first critical edition of the Arabic text based on extantmanuscripts from the Vatican Library, Syria, and Egypt. It then demonstrates that al-Sadamantī derived large portions of Kitāb al-Taṣḥīḥ from an earlier work by Ibn al-Tayyib, an 11th century author from a different Christian confession, while simultaneously making Christological claims specific to his own Coptic community. This dissertation examines how al-Sadamantī critically receives and expands on his source material, arguing that the text draws upon resources across doctrinal boundaries to respond to increasingly sophisticated polemical reinterpretation of Christian scripture. It explores how, spurred by developments in Islamic polemics, al-Sadamantītransformed traditional exegesis of scriptural pericopes particularly vulnerable to Muslim polemical reinterpretation, rendering them fertile sites for theological reflection and devotion for the author’s community. Through establishing the text of Kitāb al-Taṣḥih, analyzing its incorporation of an earlier exegetical text, and exploring its defense of a pericope of the New Testament particularly vulnerable to polemical reinterpretation, this project offers a systematic exploration of the text to unfold al-Sadamantī’s intervention in 13th century Coptic theology.