A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

A mob who regarded him as a traitor to Dioscorus pursued him into the baptistery of a city church, butchered him and six of his clergy, and paraded the bleeding corpses round the city: all in the name of the mia physis of Jesus Christ.3 The emperor’s authority in Egypt never fully recovered from this appalling incident: increasingly a majority in the Egyptian Church as well as other strongholds of Miaphysitism denounced Chalcedonian Christians as ‘Dyophysites’ and sneered at them as ‘the emperor’s people’ – Melchites.4 The word ‘Melchite’ has had a complicated later history, and now various Churches of Orthodox tradition in communion with the pope in Rome are happy to use it to label themselves, but it thus started life as a term of abuse as poisonous as ‘collaborator’ in the aftermath of Nazi occupation in the Europe of the 1940s. From now on Egyptian Christianity increasingly worshipped God in the native language of Egypt, Coptic.