Ethiopian Witness Introduction

The Ethiopian Witness

An orientation to the canon and tradition of the Ethiopian Church

The Ethiopian Church preserved, in the Geez tongue, a body of Scripture wider than that of any other tradition, and kept whole certain ancient books that elsewhere survive only in fragments or were lost entirely. It is to Ethiopia that we owe the complete text of Enoch and of Jubilees, treasured and copied for centuries when the rest of the world had forgotten them.

Beyond these, the Ethiopian tradition holds books found in no other canon: the three books of Meqabyan (distinct from the Maccabees of the Greek Bible), the Ethiopic forms of certain church orders, and other writings of instruction and covenant.

How the Ethiopian witnesses are filed in this project

Enoch and Jubilees are not repeated here, because they are filed earlier under the apocalyptic and the patriarchal witnesses, where they have their strongest home. Under the Ethiopian Witness are gathered those books that are distinctively Ethiopian: the three Meqabyan, the Ethiopic Didascalia and Sinodos, the Book of the Covenant, Qalementos, and the related canon-comparison and fragmentary indexes.

The Ethiopian canon is set out in a comparison table, so that the reader may see at a glance how its reckoning of Scripture differs from the others.