According to tradition, the Christians of Egypt, the Copts (a name derived from the Greek name for Egypt), received their faith from the evangelist Mark and were the first to develop Christian monasticism. Since the Islamic conquest in the 7th century CE, Coptic Christians have been a culturally significant minority in Egypt.

Coptic was one of the first languages into which the New Testament was translated, at least partially, in the 2nd century CE.

The influence of Coptic Christianity spread to Ethiopia, where Christianity continued to dominate despite the significant Muslim population. In 1959, the Patriarch of Egypt declared the Church of Ethiopia autocephalous, and it became independent of the Egyptian church that it had been part of since the 4th century CE. 

The Coptic Christians from Egypt and Ethiopia are Monophysites, a term referring to a position on how to understand the figure of Christ defended in the debates of the first councils to bring together all branches of Christianity. For Monophysites, Christ has a single nature (physis, in Greek), such that the human nature of Jesus was absorbed by the divine. 

The Coptic churches of Egypt and Ethiopia, the Jacobite church of Syria, and the Armenian church rejected the conciliar formula of the dual human and divine nature of Christ and so, during the reign of Justinian (527-565 CE), they split off. Armenia had been the first nation to adopt Christianity as an official religion.