Ivan Miroshnikov

Pro Futura Scientia Fellow, SCAS.
Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Egyptological Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow.
Docent in Early Christian and Coptic Studies, University of Helsinki

Ivan Miroshnikov was born in 1986 in Moscow, USSR. In 2008, he received his Specialist Diploma
(equivalent to an MA) in Religious Studies from the Department of Religious Studies at the Faculty of
Philosophy, Moscow State University. As a student, he became interested in the Gospel of Thomas,
an early Christian text whose only complete copy survives in Coptic (i.e., the last developmental stage
of the Egyptian language), which would later become the topic of his candidate’s (Moscow State Uni-
versity, 2012) and doctoral dissertations (University of Helsinki, 2016). Miroshnikov’s doctoral disser-
tation, entitled “The Gospel of Thomas and Plato: A Study of the Impact of Platonism on the ‘Fifth
Gospel,’” was recently published in the series Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies (Leiden: Brill,
2018).

During the recent years, Miroshnikov’s research interests have shifted from early Christian studies to
Coptic philology. He is currently working on publishing various hitherto unedited manuscripts in Coptic,
both documentary and literary. He is especially enchanted with Coptic dialectology, an area of research
focusing on the dialects of Coptic, which in many respects remain unexplored. In 2019, for instance, his
publication of the first edition of fragments of the Epistle to the Hebrews – written in the early Bohairic
dialect of Coptic he discovered at the National Library of Russia in Saint Petersburg – became only the
fifth manuscript written in this dialect to be published. Miroshnikov’s fascination with Coptic dialects lies
at the heart of his Pro Futura project, entitled The Neglected Dialects: A Study of the Manuscripts and
Literature in Fayyūmic and Bohairic Coptic.


This information is accurate as of the academic year 2023-24.