The 21

 'The 21': The story of the Coptic Christian martyrs

'I found that seeing real martyrs is much more important than what any pope or bishop or theologian may quote or say in everyday media,' he says. 'It was a return for me to the real important thing.'

Reflecting on the young girl who said she was ready to die for her faith, he suggests Coptic Christians may have a different concept of 'truth'. 'In the Western world we have had a particular problem in the last 200 years with the word "truth". It's something embarrassing. We are sceptical, we doubt and we think there are so many kinds of truth, and what is for one person the truth is for the next a lie, or meaningless, or that every age has its own truth. But Jesus said, He is the truth. The words of Jesus are big rocks on the way of our thinking. You cannot diminish them.'

The Coptic Church – with its 1,400-year history unruptured by Reformations and schisms – has preserved this notion of truth unsullied. Even its liturgy is mainly musical and visual: it has no place for the argumentative and intellectual sermon that characterises Western devotion. Consequently, says Mosebach, Coptic Christianity is a spiritual time capsule, which has preserved for the Western church an image of the early church. The martyrdoms under the Emperor Diocletian and the martyrdoms on that beach in Libya are not different in kind: Copts know how to die, because they remember. As Mosebach says in his book: 'In their isolation, the Copts of Upper Egypt experience the events of the early church as if they had only happened yesterday, and this helps them preserve the simple core of the Christian message.'

+ + +

On 21 February 2015 a week after their death the Pope of the Coptic Orthodox Church, Pope Tawadros II of Alexandria canonized the 21 Coptic Martyrs as Saints, their feast day would be celebrated on 15 February of the Gregorian calendar. The commemoration falls on the feast of the Presentation of Jesus at the Temple which is 8th Amshir of the Coptic calendar.

christiantoday.com/article/the-21-the-story-of-the-coptic-christian-martyrs/131772.htm

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_kidnapping_and_beheading_of_Copts_in_Libya