Coptic literature of the period AD 337-425 was essentially a functional literature. It was composed for a definite purpose. This purpose was invariably religious in nature. Texts were written for use in liturgy and ritual, public worship and private devotion, or for instruction and edification. Another notable feature of Coptic literature during the period under consideration is that most of it was originally composed in other languages, chiefly Greek, and translated into Coptic subsequently. For purposes of discussion, this chapter is divided into six categories: magical texts, the Bible and Apocrypha, patristic and homiletic works, monastic texts and martyrologies, the Nag Hammadi library and related tractates, and Manichean writings. Virtually the earliest written evidence for the transmission of the Bible to the native population of Egypt is a Greek-Coptic glossary to Hosea and Amos. Patristic literature in Coptic, at least for the period AD 337-425, consisted chiefly if not entirely of works translated from Greek.

This chapter explores the Biblical Scripts: Early Hebrew, Square Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Syriac, Coptic and Ethiopic. The Early Hebrew and the Phoenician alphabets were two branches from the Canaanite stem, which was a continuation of the North- Semitic. The Samaria ostraca, of the ninth or eighth century BC are the earliest documents written in Early Hebrew current or running hand. The Greek alphabet occupies in many ways a unique place in the history of writing. The numerous Greek inscriptions are of paramount importance for history; they form the subject of Greek epigraphy. The city of Antioch of Syria was one of the most important centres of early Christianity and it was there that 'the disciples were for the first time called Christians'. Coptic literature consists for the most part of translations from Greek, and includes versions of the Bible, apocrypha of the Old Testament and of the New Testament, the Martyrdoms and the Lives of the Saints, and so on.