An antiArian church-history of Alexandria

Alessandro Bossi promised in 2011 an edition of a Ge'ez/Latin synopsis. He and Alberto Camplani published this in 2016.

I am coming into this a bit "cold". I only just found out Camplani's avertissiment. I gather at the time this was going to be Bossi's baby but that Camplani provided so much help that Bossi - graciously! - provided cowriter credit. It seems a real tangle to me, so - well done to both o' youse... as Italian-Americans might say.

The synopsis, they say, extends to the end of the fourth century AD which in local terms would be about the start of the second c. anno Diocletiani (~384). That's Theodosius I, nailing down the Nicene Creed in Constantinople. So the "Miaphysitism" shouldn't much be in play, yet. It seems the (false) saint Cyril sent a copy to Rome where it got Latinised. It also circulated in its native Greek and in west-Syriac, and straight from Greek to the Ethiopians got it. Rarely - the latter got it without the medium of Arabic, nor it seems even of any Coptic.

Camplani also brings Timothy Aelurus, who wrote about the 400s AD more than about the 300s. But Caplani argues this later guy drew much imagery from our 300s AD history. There's also a [Sahid-]Coptic history up to Aelurus, itself translated from Greek (after that Greek had already sailed up to Ethiopia) and now fragmentary. That last is what's in the (in)famous Chronicle of the Patriarchs.

Is the history (thus reconstrued) any... good? - it seems not. It gave rise to the conflation of Arius the disciple of Melitius the Lycopolitan - who plagued the Nile - and Arius the haeresiarch. Thence, to Sozumen; and to many, many histories to come including, sigh, Gonick's cartoons.

This history is, however, the best game in town for events after Peter I's death, or "martyrdom" if you're a Copt. This goes on from Nicaea to the forgotten Council of Serdica, which Constans of Rome convened in AD 343 to bridge the East. This Council is today agreed as a failure. This history, closer to events, deems Serdica as a valiant defence of the Orthodox against such Eunomians as, well, that other emperor, Constantius II. Also of interest: no monks. Monks assuredly existed but had no clout in Alexandria as of The First Century Of Diocletian's Martyrs. They'll show up in that later Coptic history.