For the most part he is talking about native Egyptians. By the time that Christianity rose to become the predominant religion of the Empire (early 300s CE) Egypt had been a part of the Roman Empire for 350 years, and had been ruled by Greek-speaking ex-Macedonian Emigrants for 250 years before that. The vast majority of Egyptian people were now culturally and archaeologically indistinct from the rest of the inhabitants of the Roman Empire--they were culturally 'Roman.' By this, we don't mean that they looked like, dressed like, ate like, and spoke like the Romans of the time periods we most readily THINK OF when we talk about 'Ancient Rome' (the late Republican and Augustan eras); we really mean 'Roman' in the sense of that identity which had grown and evolved during the preceding four or five centuries of Roman imperial domination over the Mediterranean into a pan-Mediterranean cultural homogeneity which (by at least the early second century CE) stretched from Britain to Egypt.

This transformation had taken place over a very lengthy period, first beginning from around the time of Alexander the Great, after he conquered all of the Near East. His conquests, and the Graeco-Macedonian dynasts who would rule over the fragmented remnants of his Empire for the next 250 years, unleashed a wave of cultural Hellenism which swept the Mediterranean. This Hellenistic influence was of course highly concentrated in the Near East, where Ptolemies, Antigonids, and Seleucids ruled over their respective portions of Alexander's conquests, but it reached into the West, as well, via the influence of economically powerful and culturally influential Greek colonies from Cyrene to Massalía to Syracuse to Taranto (all of Southern Italy, in effect, the region so called 'Magna Graecia')--even in Spain! In the East, due to the cultural elitism of the Graeco-Macedonians who ruled there, these Hellenizing influences were largely confined to the urban areas during the period of Macedonian dominance (which is why native Egyptian culture persisted as its own separate thing all the way through Ptolemaic rule), but Greek influences radically transformed the old Roman way of life during the mid-late Republican period, and by the time Rome's later empire expanded to include every corner of the Mediterranean, its culture was fully that which we now commonly refer to as 'Graeco-Roman.' But while Rome had been influenced by Greece, 'Greek' culture (Hellenism) was also substantially transformed by contact with Rome, and from the early-Imperial period onwards we increasingly find old 'Greek' metropolises (outside of Greece itself, where cultural snobbery would linger for a few centuries) such as Ephesus and Antioch and Alexandria and Syracuse and Massilia (the Roman name) becoming visibly and architecturally Romanized, with the introduction of forums and basilicas and circuses and other hallmarks of Romanization. And while Latin language never really caught on in the Eastern cities the way Greek had done, that doesn't mean that cultural Romanization didn't occur there or was only skin-deep; there was simply no need for the majority of the locals to LEARN Latin--the Romans who arrived in the East could mostly speak Greek already, and Greek had already replaced the local languages as the primary language of commerce, law, and exchange, so there was no need for everyone to suddenly learn Latin so that they could communicate, as there was in the West.)

Now, to an extent, this early urban 'Romanization' was just different parts of the existing Hellenistic world becoming more like one another, but one of the key differences between Roman Imperial domination of the Mediterranean and the Hellenistic and Persian regimes which had preceded it was that while the Persians had let their subject peoples effectively live by their pre-existing cultural mores without any substantial interference (as long as they submitted to the King of Kings and paid tax and did what the local satrap demanded of them on behalf of the King), and the Graeco-Macedonians had ruled like foreign conquerors, shut up inside their palaces in a very few coastal cities and interacting with the rural hinterlands of their realm and the common people who lived there only to the extent necessary to extract goods and resources from them, Imperial Rome was much more a civilization 'of the people,' in the sense that the old Republican ideology that THE PEOPLE were the source of political legitimacy was still philosophically in vogue (even if the existence of unelected Emperors had meant the death of representative government in practice, in ethos it was still very much the expectation that the Emperor worked for the people and derived his legitimacy from their support and that he had to protect and take care of the people, and at the local level elections for local city officials continued to proceed for centuries to come), and the wellbeing of the populace, popular participation in government and economic activity and in religion, were cultural norms the Romans brought with them when they took control of the lands surrounding the Mediterranean. To a great extent, these cultural exports reflected the fact that during the time of the early Empire, the Roman army was a citizen-soldiery force recruited from the poorest, and provided a vehicle for both naturalization (becoming a citizen if you weren't one already) and for class-mobility (if you were.) To this day, the empire-wide Romanization that followed the arrival of the legions in places as far apart as Britain and Egypt still stuns modern scholars (we're still trying to understand it), but for the most part it seems that the common people of the various Roman provinces--by and large--embraced cultural Romanization once it was on offer. When 'becoming more Roman' meant you could move up in society, become better off, live more comfortably, be more involved in the running of your local town or city or neighborhood, even in the running of the Empire (for most people to a lesser degree, for a few select people to a greater), and that you could enjoy all the tangible physical benefits of Roman civilization (such as arenas and circuses and aqueducts and relatively cheap international commerce and drainage systems and ESPECIALLY Roman bathhouses, which were a smashingly BIG HIT across the Empire that we really don't talk about enough)--within a generation or two most people seemed to be on board with that. The places where Romanization encountered sustained pushback were either in lands which had formerly been free of any external domination (most of Northern Europe) before the legions had arrived, or where the cultural/religious traditions were in direct and irreconcilable conflict with those of 'Roman' civilization (such as Judea.)

Egypt was neither. After seven centuries of external domination, of being shut out from political and military participation in THEIR OWN LAND, the arrival of the Romans may well have been welcomed (to some extent) by the native inhabitants. There were some early native rebellions against Roman control during Augustus' lifetime, but once these were put down, all subsequent political unrest deriving from Egypt was of a very 'Roman' nature. Roman subjects or citizens who lived life the way Romans did objecting to some move by the central Imperial administration that they thought violated the Imperial contact with Roman citizens to rule in the best interests of the Roman people. And, again, by 'Roman,' I don't mean 'Roman' in the sense of 'Roman' in Scipio Africanus' day or Cicero's day or even Augustus' day--I mean 'Roman' in the sense of how Roman identity grew and evolved once people from all across the Mediterranean world began interact with 'cultural Romanness' in both a giving and a taking sort of sense. I mean the pan-Imperial 'Romanness' which was still highly Roman and Etruscan and Greek but also with a dash of Syrian influences and North African influences and Semitic influences and Germanic influences and even Persian influences which evolved out of the interaction of all these different parts of the Empire growing more like one another over the first 350 years of Roman rule, the way that an Empire which was at times ruled by North Africans and at times by Syrians and at times by Spaniards and at times by Illyrians couldn't help but to grow more homogeneous and cosmopolitan as the years went by.

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