Abstract
My seminar paper is an attempt to identify the literary production of lay Christians writing in Coptic. Among the literary pieces in Coptic, there are certainly some composed and/or written by laypeople; however, a positive evaluation of such authorship is usually impossible. The monastic or clerical link is equally hard to prove directly. Nevertheless, it often functions as a default interpretation.
The paper's title is appended with a question mark since I propose not hard evidence but a cumulative argument that I test as a reasonable hypothesis.
I am convinced that the texts of ritual power ('magical texts') give us a unique chance to catch laypeople's writing. In my argument, I refer to three different source corpora: the text of ritual power themselves (internal evidence), church canons concerning magic, and narrative texts portraying magicians (external evidence).
The presentation can be found here.
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