The literature of Coptic Christianity was almost wholly religious. Little else had an interest for the devoted adherents of the new faith. The romances which had delighted their forefathers were replaced by legends of the saints and martyrs, and Christian hymns succeeded to the poems of the past. We owe to this passion for theology the preservation of productions of the Jewish and Christian Churches which would otherwise have been lost. The Book of Enoch, quoted though it is by St. Jude, would have perished irrevocably had it not been for Coptic Christianity. The Church of Abyssinia, a daughter of that of Egypt, has preserved it in an Ethiopic translation, and portions of the Greek original from which the translation was made have been found in a tomb at Ekhmîm, which was excavated in 1886. It has long been known that the text used by the Abyssinian translator must have differed considerably from that of which extracts have been preserved for us in the Epistle of St. Jude and the writings of the Byzantine historians Kedrenos and George the Syncellus; the newly-discovered fragments now enable us to see what this text actually was like. If the original book was written in Aramaic it would seem that at least two authorised Greek versions of it existed, one of which was used in Europe and Syria, the other in Egypt. Which was the older and more faithful we have yet to learn. The excavations at Ekhmîm have brought to light fragments of two other works, both belonging to the early days of Christianity and long since lost. One of these is supposed by its first editor, M. Bouriant, to be the Apocalypse of St. Peter; it opens with an account of the Transfiguration, which is followed by a vision of heaven and hell. The book appears to have been composed or interpolated by a Gnostic, as there is a reference in it to “the Æon” in which Moses and Elias dwelt in glory. The other work is of more importance. It is the Gospel known to the early Church as that of St. Peter, and the portion which is preserved contains the narrative of the Passion and Resurrection of Christ. Throughout the narrative the responsibility for the death of our Lord is transferred from Pilate to the Jews; when the guard who watched the tomb under the centurion Petronius ran to tell Pilate of the resurrection they had witnessed, “grieving greatly and saying: Truly he was the son of God”: he answered: “I am clean of the blood of the son of God: I too thought he was so.” Docetic tendencies, however, are observable in the Gospel: at all events the cry of Christ on the cross is rendered, “My power, (my) power, thou hast forsaken me!”