BULUS AL-BUSHI (Paul of Bush), an Arab regarded as one of the
most significant personalities in the Coptic hierarchy during the
Middle Ages. There is no precise information about his birth date or
his secular life as a young man before he took the monastic vow. It
is possible that he was born between 1170 and 1175. This conjecture
is based on the fact that Pope JOHN VI mentioned him as a possible
successor in 1216, and it is known that no patriarch of the Coptic
church could be nominated before the age of forty.  Though he was a
native of the city of Bush north of Bani Suef in Middle Egypt, where
the central office for the monasteries of Saint Antony and Saint Paul
(DAYR ANBA ANTUNIYUS and DAYR ANBA BULA) in the
Eastern Desert was located, it is certain that he did not enroll in
either of these monastic institutions. He probably joined the
monastery of Anba Samu’il of Qalamun in the Fayyum province,
which was within easy reach of Bush and where he resided with his as much money as possible by applying the shartuniyyah (simony—
see CHEIROTONIA) to enable him to pay his own promised bribe
to the Muslim administration... Bulus was the permanent candidate who was trusted for hisintegrity, though it is doubtful whether he preferred this task to his
intellectual productivity in the seclusion of his monastic life.
In fact Bulus al-Bushi is remembered more for his writings than
for his position of vigilance in the patriarchate of Cyril III.  Of his
surviving written works, ten codices have been known to exist,
mainly in manuscript in numerous repositories, and only a few have
been published.