This Group is for discussions involving the Sahidica Project in particular; and the ancient writings in the Coptic dialects of Egypt in general.

The Sahidica Project is my effort to recover the Egyptian New Testament; namely, the Sahidic Coptic text and the Greek texts upon which it was based. Aland calls it this textual family the Egyptian Text. Metzger calls it the Alexandrian Text.

The seeds of Sahidica were sown when I began learning the Coptic dialects in March of 1986 (at which time I had already been studying Greek for just over a decade).

The project leapt forward in July of 2000 when I got permission from David Woodley Packard of the Packard Humanities Institute to use the Sahidic Coptic data from the Institute�s PHI CD 5.3 as the basis of a new collation of a standardized edition. At the time, I was CEO and Chairman of the Board for a small research company. At that time I began collecting materials in earnest.

The project flowered soon after when, because of the stock crash at the beginning of 2001, I was virtually unemployed for a year and a half. Said unemployment left me free to focus on almost exclusively on Sahidica.

Sahidica is freely available online. Though I have granted more than one publisher non-exclusive rights, Sahidica online will remain free for everyone interested.

No spam, profanity or insulting language. This is not a forum for discussing Gnostic writings. No doctrinal arguments, please (NB 2Tim.2:14).

The photo is a late-fourth century Middle Egyptian codex of Matthew.

J. Warren Wells

Keywords: Coptic, Sahidic, Bohairic, Greek, Koine.