This volume presents a first publication of the entire collection of literary Coptic manuscripts in the A. S. Pushkin State Fine Arts Museum in Moscow. This collection of Coptic mss. is the most important in Russia, leaving far behind those of the National Library and the Hermitage in St. Petersburg.The mss. were brought together between 1870 and 1907 by the distinguished Russian Egyptologist Vladimir Golenischev. The collection, comprising 61 items, derives in part from the famous White Monastery's Library near Achmim. It represents all the genres characteristic of Coptic literature: Vitae, martyrdoms, legends, encomia, homilies, didactic works, treatises, discourses, polemic works, poetical pieces, pseudepigrapha, as well as the Coptic versions of the Bible (fragments). Some of the mss. are of exceptional importance, such as a fourth-century fragment of Luke's Gospel and a cosmogonical theological treatise dealing with the symbolism of baptism.
