In Memoriam: Bentley Layton (1941–2025)

Bentley Layton, a founding member and former president of the International Association for Coptic Studies, died Wednesday, 26 March 2025, at his home in New Haven, Connecticut, from complications of Parkinson’s disease. He was 83.

Layton received his B.A. summa cum laude from Harvard University in 1963 and the Ph.D. in the Study of Religion from Harvard in 1971. He became a visiting professor in early Christian literature at the École biblique et archéologique française in Jerusalem, and in 1976 he joined the Department of Religious Studies at Yale University and later the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, eventually becoming Goff Professor of Religious Studies.

Layton’s contributions to Coptic studies and the history of ancient Christianity were immense and enduring. He was a primary participant in the UNESCO project to publish the Nag Hammadi Codices, serving as the editor-in-chief for Codex II (1988). He edited and/or translated numerous Nag Hammadi texts and related works, culminating in his authoritative collection in English, The Gnostic Scriptures (1987, revised edition 2021). Layton had studied Coptic with H. J. Polotsky (1905–1991) and developed Polotsky’s structuralist approach in the landmark A Coptic Grammar with Chrestomathy and Glossary: Sahidic Dialect (2000, third edition 2011). He taught Coptic to numerous students at Yale and even more elsewhere through a widely used teaching grammar (2007) and a chrestomathy of grammatically analyzed Coptic Gnostic texts for students (2004). His Catalogue of Coptic Literary Manuscripts in the British Library Acquired since the Year 1906 (1987) provided first editions of many fragments and pioneered a method of manuscript description that has served as a model for others. In recent years Layton devoted himself to Coptic monasticism, especially Shenoute and the White Monastery Federation. His intensive study of Shenoute’s Canons resulted in The Canons of Our Fathers: Monastic Rules of Shenoute (2014). His nearly complete critical edition of volumes 4 and 5 of the Canons will be published by colleagues, and with the architectural historian Michael Hamilton Burgoyne (1944–2021), a dear friend, he devoted many years to documenting the remains of the White Monastery church.

Layton was also an inspiring teacher of the highest standards. His doctoral students teach at prestigious institutions in North America and Europe and include two former presidents of the IACS. He was a dedicated mentor to the graduate students who served as his teaching assistants. Undergraduate Yale students, nearly all of whom did not become scholars of Coptic or religion, remember him especially for his popular lecture course, “The History of Ancient Christianity: From Jesus to Augustine,” and his seminars on monasticism and Gnosticism.

The IACS was Layton’s primary intellectual home among professional societies, and he hoped that it would flourish for years to come.

Bentley Layton was a loyal parishioner at Christ Church New Haven. A Solemn Requiem Mass and burial will be held there at 11 a.m. Saturday, April 26, followed by a reception. His ashes will be buried alongside his parents’ ashes in the Christ Church garden.