[3]: 20 As priest, Mark Ibn Kunbar preached against the common practice of taking censers into personal homes for the confession of sins.
[5] Mark Ibn Kunbar objected strongly to this form of private confession, insisting that a priest must be present for the absolution of sins.
The Muslim rulers commanded Pope Mark to give him a fair trial, but the Church refused to do so under the authority of the Sultan.
[8]: 607 In 1179, Michael, the metropolitan of Damietta, wrote an official condemnation of Mark Ibn Kunbar for the Coptic Church.
[4] Although Patriarch Michael eventually supported Mark Ibn Kunbar's position of confession to a priest, he excommunicated him for his Chalcedonianism.
On hearing of his relapse to the Monophysite Coptics, Sophronius rebuked him and sent him to the Melkite monastery in Dayr Al-Qusayr, near modern-day El Quseyya, in the Asyut Governorate of Egypt.
Mark employed allegorical interpretation methods and typological exegesis in his commentaries, and he often noted how the Pentateuch showed the Trinity, Jesus Christ, church institutions, and ascetic monastic life.
[3][12] The conflict that Mark Ibn Kunbar raised is now seen as the first time auricular confession was an important topic in Coptic history.
[7]: 65 Although Mark Ibn Kunbar was firmly rejected and his followers dispersed, his discussion on the necessity of confession to a priest carried on to the next century in the writings of Pope Cyril III of Alexandria, who published Mark Ibn Kunbar's Book of the Master and Disciple.
[2]: 99 John Mason Neale, a nineteenth-century scholar, has compared Mark Ibn Kunbar with the seventeenth-century English clergyman William Chillingworth because of the controversies and defiance of the church of both men.