Textual analysis reveals Coptic origins for the Syriac Martyrdom of Luke the Evangelist, indicating that Eastern Christian apocrypha circulated without Greek intermediaries.
This essay presents the first complete analysis of the Syriac and Coptic versions of the Martyrdom of Luke the Evangelist. There is no Greek or Latin version of this narrative, and it appears to have originated in the Christian East. In this essay, we argue in fact that the Coptic version is the original and that all subsequent versions, including the Syriac, are based on the Coptic original. We present here an introduction to the Syriac and Coptic manuscripts followed by a comparative edition of both versions, translated into English for the first time.
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Lollar et al. (2026) studied this question.
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