Il conflitto che non c'era. Ebrei e cristiani nella tradizione letteraria copta del V-VIII secolo

The hagiographic and homiletic Coptic literary production (5th-8th centuries) narrates several episodes of supposed frictions between the Christian and the Jewish communities. Analysing the structure and the context of these texts, however, it is clear that behind the polemics against the Jewish community there was a wider necessity to defend the Christian orthodoxy, which had been threatened at first by various heresiological controversies, later by the presence in Egypt of a Chalcedonian ecclesiastic hierarchy - parallel and opposed to that of the Coptic (anti-Chalcedonian) Church -, and lastly by the arrival of the new invaders, the Arabs.