Christslave: A Gospel of Lie Story

By Fady Riad

Life and times of Wahid Abdul Massih, the taciturn figure that haunted the city of Alexandria in the late twentieth century and left its marks on the few who knew it. Those who like the style and prose of this book would benefit greatly from reading Riad's major work, The Gospel of Lie.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fady Riad
• Release date: Jun 11, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370709649

Book preview

Christslave

A Gospel of Lie Story

by

Fady Riad

Copyright 2017 Fady Riad

All Rights Reserved

Smashwords Edition

Christslave

An old, dust-covered copy of The Critique of Coptic Reason (Beirut, 1978), a colossal undertaking whose rarity, acuteness and bizarreness failed to attract scholarly attention or spark the interest of antique dealers, is perhaps the sole surviving testimony to the tragic life of Wahid Abdul Masseih.

The work is in many ways unconventional. It was written by a man who lived in a country where literature was praised in public while shunned in private; it dealt with a subject that was otherwise unexplored by any ingenious mind; and it had a peculiar, labyrinthine structure that blended paragraphs of quasi-scholarly value with autobiographical diary-like entries that screamed with subjectivist pain.

In the first chapter Abdul Masseih utilized the shock approach to alert the reader that there are more things in scripture and history than those preached by the abounas [Coptic priests]. The chapter starts with a quote from St. Augustine that might be shocking to Copts. If you expel prostitution from society, you will unsettle everything on account of lusts. The whole chapter is made up of unrelated quotes and facts that Wahid thought would surprise and hook the interest of the Coptic layman. He started by pointing out how the account of creation differed between the first and second chapters of Genesis and elaborated on this point to introduce the reader to the documentary hypothesis (1). He dabbled throughout the chapter with occult themes in the Bible that he claimed were carefully avoided by the priests, like the Urim and Thummim, or Ashmodai’s dislike of fish liver odor as documented in the Book of Tobit (2). He then quoted prominent church fathers regarding the identity of the children of God and the Nephilim in the sixth chapter of Genesis before going on to discuss Origen’s belief in the salvation of the Devil and eventually embarking on Pope Dionysius’ embarrassing comments on the Book of Revelation (3).

One of Abdul Masseih’s most daring endeavors, perhaps, was his refutation of the 1968 apparitions of our Blessed Virgin at Al-Zeitoun. He illustrated how easily the whole affair could have been forged and went on to express his contempt at how low the extraordinarily popular Pope Kyrillos the Sixth had gone in order to extract the papacy from the cradle of filth where the corruption of Yousab the Second had left it (4). "Resorting to the cliché of miracle-working is the filthiest expression of