Abraham

Abraham of Farshut, known also as Abraham of Pbow, was a sixth-century Egyptian monk, abbot, and saint of the Coptic Orthodox Church. He was born in Farshut, a town of the Thebaid on the west bank of the Nile in Upper Egypt, in the region of present-day Qena Governorate. The Coptic hagiographical texts that preserve his memory present his family as Christian and state that he was instructed in the Scriptures before he left secular life for the monastery. He entered Pbow (also called Pabau or Phbow), the principal house of the Pachomian monastic federation founded in the fourth century by Pachomius the Great, near the Nile east of Farshut in the vicinity of modern Faw Qibli. Formed in the cenobitic rule of Pachomius, Abraham remained at Pbow and in time was chosen archimandrite, becoming head of what remained of the Pachomian congregation in Upper Egypt.

In the sixth century the Pachomian monasteries, like the great majority of Egyptian monks, adhered to the anti-Chalcedonian Christology associated with Cyril of Alexandria and with the see of Alexandria as it was then held by the Coptic hierarchy. The Council of Chalcedon in 451 had split the imperial church, and Byzantine emperors repeatedly attempted to restore ecclesiastical unity by requiring acceptance of Chalcedon and of the Tome of Leo. Under Justinian I this policy was pursued with particular energy. Coptic sources relate that Abraham, as archimandrite of Pbow, was required to subscribe to the Chalcedonian definition and refused. Empress Theodora, who favored the non-Chalcedonian party, is described in the tradition as having afforded him a measure of protection during her lifetime. After her death in 548, imperial pressure increased. Abraham was deprived of the abbacy of Pbow and a Chalcedonian abbot was put in his place. He is therefore remembered as the last Coptic Orthodox superior of the historic Pachomian motherhouse, whose remaining community passed, at least officially, under Chalcedonian control.

Following his removal from Pbow, Abraham withdrew to the district of his birth. There he founded a monastery at Farshut, which the tradition associates with a dedication to the Virgin Mary, and he is also linked with the establishment or revival of other monastic settlements in the same region of Upper Egypt. The principal Coptic texts concerning him—a panegyric and related narratives, studied and edited in the modern period especially by James E. Goehring—portray him as a steadfast opponent of imperial religious policy and as a wonder-working abbot in the classic Egyptian monastic mold. They belong to the larger body of sixth- and later Coptic literature that interpreted the struggle over Chalcedon as a defense of Egyptian orthodoxy and of monastic independence from Constantinople.

No contemporary chronicle records the year of Abraham’s birth or death. He lived and died in the sixth century; his confrontation with the court of Justinian and his subsequent foundation at Farshut fall in the middle decades of that century, after 548 and within or shortly after Justinian’s reign (527–565). He died at the monastery he had established at Farshut. His veneration remained a fact of Coptic liturgical and monastic memory rather than of a formal process of canonization of the later Western type. He was never bishop of Rome nor Coptic pope of Alexandria, nor did he hold a patriarchal see; his dignity was that of archimandrite. Modern historians value the dossier on Abraham of Farshut as evidence for the final chapter of Pachomian institutional history and for the making of a separate Coptic Orthodox identity under Byzantine rule, while treating the miracle stories and court scenes of the panegyric with the caution due to hagiography composed after the events it describes.