The 'Golden Age of Patristic Literature', the fourth and fifth centuries provides a mass of material which carries weighty literary and theological significance. Christian rhetoricians began to produce a new literature which had classical styles and genres but Christian content. The Constantinian revolution had reinforced the tendencies for Christians to come from the educated literary elites and to adapt classical modes of writing to Christian ends. History, for Eusebius, had become a kind of apologetic, an alternative method of proof that Christianity was true. Little of the Christian literature of the fourth and fifth centuries escapes influence from the classical traditions of antiquity, yet little of it can be analysed neatly according to the classical genres. The descriptions 'apologetic' and 'dogmatic' both appear as subsequent classifications, and raise questions about genre, and the point of generic analysis.

Coptic literature of the period AD 337-425 was essentially a functional literature. It was composed for a definite purpose. This purpose was invariably religious in nature. Texts were written for use in liturgy and ritual, public worship and private devotion, or for instruction and edification. Another notable feature of Coptic literature during the period under consideration is that most of it was originally composed in other languages, chiefly Greek, and translated into Coptic subsequently. For purposes of discussion, this chapter is divided into six categories: magical texts, the Bible and Apocrypha, patristic and homiletic works, monastic texts and martyrologies, the Nag Hammadi library and related tractates, and Manichean writings. Virtually the earliest written evidence for the transmission of the Bible to the native population of Egypt is a Greek-Coptic glossary to Hosea and Amos. Patristic literature in Coptic, at least for the period AD 337-425, consisted chiefly if not entirely of works translated from Greek.