Scriptorium Press is a new publisher, and offers a growing series of English translations of hagiographical texts. Most of these are from the Greek. All of them seem intended for use by the educated general reader with an interest in the lives of the saints.
An interesting volume is their Saints of Ethiopia (140 pages, C$16). ISBN 9798300901172. This is an anthology of texts which throw light upon the origins of the Ethiopian church. This is a welcome attempt to make this little-known area of orthodox life more accessible.
Not everything in it is newly translated. The editors do not seem to know Ge`ez, and so they have done their best with whatever they could translate.
The volume contains translations of the following texts, which are translated from the following sources.
On the Captivity of Frumentius (from Rufinus, Church History, book 1, c. 9; PL 21: 478-480)
The Life of Saint Moses the Ethiopian (from Palladius, The Lausiac History, c. 22; PG34:1063-70)
The Sayings of Abba Moses (from the Sayings of the Desert Fathers/Apophthegmata Patrum – Alphabetical Collection; PG 65:281-9)
The Life of Saint Pantaleon the Recluse (CSCO 26, Scriptores Aethiopici 17, 39-56)
The Martyrdom of Saint Arethas (in 9 chapters; BHG 166-166b; Anecdota Graeca 5 , Paris (1883), p.1-62.)
The Life of Saint Jared the Melodist (CSCO 26, 3-21).
The Cannibal of Kemer.
The first of these tells the story of how Christianity came to Ethiopia, and is therefore an excellent introduction to the rest. The next two, about Moses the Black, relate to life in Egypt, but are probably an inevitable inclusion.
The remaining texts will be less familiar. The Life of Saint Pantaleon is a 15th century Ge`ez text, for which a reader must otherwise consult the modern Latin translation of Rossini.
The Martyrdom of Saint Arethas and his companions – the martyrs of Najran, ca. 523 AD – is a Greek text. It records the war of the Christian Ethiopians against the Jewish Himiyarite king responsible. It makes use of earlier texts extant in Syriac, and makes a very welcome addition to the literature for this period.
The Life of Saint Jared (or Yared) the Melodist is a Ge`ez text of unknown date – the saint is 6th century -, but considerable length. It is a very useful thing to have. The editors have perforce abbreviated it, and they have included E. Wallis Budge’s translation of the corresponding portion of the Ethiopian Synaxarion. This interesting figure seems to have begun the musical tradition of the Ethiopian church, and created a system of musical notation.
The Cannibal of Kemer is an extract from the Book of the Miracles of Our Lady Mary. This is an Ethiopian translation of an 11th century Coptic text. The version given here is that of Budge, somewhat modernised, rather than a new translation.
The translation style is perfectly good and clear. It is sometimes a little stiff – “Jared sojourned in Aksum” is perhaps not a phrase found in current use – but probably from following the text particularly closely. Anybody who has had to work with dictionaries will know that the need for an exact equivalent often has this effect, where an older English had a word, but modern English does not. It’s probably right to stick with the older word.
For some of the texts, the footnotes are extensive, and very useful to the general reader. Few of us will be familiar with any of the context, after all. These are admirably done, identifying unfamiliar people and places, and referring to other texts. For others the notes are fewer – the Life of Pantaleon is much more annotated than the Life ofJared, for instance. But I do not think this will trouble the reader.
Something that is missing in the book is running titles. This is consistent with the style of the series, but in an anthology, it makes it harder to find particular texts. I suspect that copies of the book will get corners folded down, or sprout postits, at the start of each text.
The 23 page introduction assumes no knowledge of the origins of the Ethiopian church, and therefore stands as a useful primer for newcomers. The statements made are all carefully referenced, and so, in a short space, it gives a vast amount of useful information.
As in other volumes, the short bibliography is at the back. At the front there are two nice and very necessary maps of the region, and of the location of important Ethiopian monasteries.
All in all this volume is a success. It gives us texts in English that we did not have before. It collects useful material. May it sell well and bring knowledge of Ethiopia to many.
In my last post I mentioned how the Life of St Garima in Ethiopian was printed by Rossini, but without a translation. In fact it has never been translated into any modern language, to my knowledge. I don’t know any Ethiopian, and I doubt that I ever will.
But we live in an age of wonders, when it comes to unfamiliar languages.
So… is it possible to work with Ethiopian language editions, even if you know no Ethiopian? What about Google Translate? Ethiopian is in this heavy unfamiliar script. Is there OCR for this? If you can scan Rossini’s edition, can you pop it into Google Translate and get the English?
There are two sorts of Ethiopian out there, I know. There is Ge`ez, or classical Ethiopian; and there is Amharic, the modern dialect. Rossini printed his text from a 19th century manuscript. So it seems likely that this is in Amharic.
A quick Google confirmed; Google Translate knows Amharic! A bit of googling found me an Amharic news website online, here. I’m using Chrome, so all I had to do was right-click anywhere and select “Translate to English” and the whole website was rendered into some sort of English. And… it worked!! Yay me! It’s obviously not 100%, but it’s way better than 0%!
So what about OCR? I was sad to see that Abbyy Finereader apparently doesn’t support Amharic. That’s a blow. It was developed originally to handle Cyrillic, so it certainly has the capability. But it’s not offered. Drat.
A bit of googling brought me to a dubious-looking website here, claiming to offer a selection of tools which could do Amharic OCR. The prose felt a bit machine-generated, so I worried that it was bunk, or worse, a malicious site. But the first option was… Google Drive.
I never knew this, but seems that, if you upload a PDF containing an image of text, and then open it in Drive as a Google Docs document, it OCR’s the content.
Well, I thought, let’s give it a try. So I extracted the first page of Rossini’s edition, using Adobe Acrobat Pro 9 – no flashy latest-edition stuff going on here! Here’s a pic:
Then I uploaded it, and opened as a Google document. And … it just treated the Amharic as an image. Dang! But I noticed that it did indeed OCR the Italian at the top of the page!
This is supposed to work. So I thought maybe I should work over the image a bit. I imported the one-page PDF into Abbyy Finereader 15, and chopped off the Italian at the top, and the critical apparatus at the bottom. I then used the image editor in Finereader to “whiten the background”. This can be flaky, but this time it worked fine, and I got a pure white background. And I got this:
(I’ve just seen the marginal notes, which I need to chop off as well, so I’ll have to go round the loop again)
I exported the image as a PNG, and I used Acrobat again to create a PDF from the image. Then I uploaded the new PDF to Google Drive, and opened it as a Google Docs document. And… it worked! Sort of…
That’s… rather astonishing. No idea what all that is, but it looks sort of right. Let’s bear in mind that Rossini printed his edition in 1897. This is not a modern typeface. So this is rather good.
Next step was to paste it into Google Translate. It set it to auto-detect the language, and pasted in the first bit. And… it worked. In fact it gave a really useful transcription into Roman letters as well, which makes it a LOT easier to manipulate the text.
OK, I’m cheating slightly. The first time I uploaded, the translation ended at “Spirit”. But this is a Google Translate bug – it sometimes omits the remainder of a sentence. If you split the text with a line feed, you often get the rest. And that’s what I did. I worked out by experiment where I needed to be, and then I got the above.
I don’t quite believe the translation of the second sentence either. I suspect I need to play with this a bit to work out what each word is.
I notice all those colons between every word. It might help if I actually looked up the script online!
But I think you’ll agree that this is quite marvellous – I, who know absolutely nothing about the language, am getting something useful out!
Here’s an interesting one, which I came across today. There is an early set of gospels in Ethiopia, at the Abuna Garima monastery in Ethiopia’s Tigrai Highlands. An article in the Independent 6 July 2010 by Jerome Taylor tells us:
The monks have their own legend about how the gospels came into their possession. They believe they were written by Abba Garima, a Byzantine royal who arrived in what was then the kingdom of Axum in 494 and went on to found the monastery. According to the monks, Abba Garima finished his exquisite work in a single day because God stopped the sun from setting while he worked.
This claim is repeated in many places, often based on Wikipedia’s wording, which references the Independent article:
According to tradition, Abba Garima wrote and illustrated the complete Gospels in a single day: God stopped the sun from setting until the Saint completed his work.
“Tradition” is a weasel word. We have no traditions, not in the modern age, handed down from father to son orally. What we have are books. So whenever we see “tradition” mentioned, we need to ask what the literary source is.
Fortunately information is not far to seek. In Judith McKenzie and Francis Watson, The Garima Gospels: Early Illuminated Gospel Books from Ethiopia, Oxford (2016), (preview here), we find the following statement, p. ix, n.25:
23 There is a tradition that while Abba Garima was copying the Gospels, God stopped the sun so that he might complete the task in a single day (Heldman 1993: 129). This incident is not included in Carlo Conti Rossini’s edition of the text, where it is reported instead that, while he began the task, angels completed the work for him in four hours (Conti Rossini 1897: 161-62). There is, however, an illustrated manuscript at the monastery showing in a single miniature Abba Garima copying the Gospel below both a full and a setting sun, under the inscription “As Abba Garima wrote the Gospel in the land of Atäret” (fig 20 here). Atäret is one of the places said to have been granted to the monastery by Gabra Masqäl (A. Bausi, “Ǝnda Abba Garima,“ EAE 2: 284:. I am grateful to Denis Nosnitsin and Nafisa Valieva for their assistance in the identification of this story.
– M. Heldman, “The Heritage of Late Antiquity,” in: R. Grierson (ed), African Zion: The Sacred Art of Ethiopia, (1993), pp. 117-32, esp. 129-30.
– C. Conti Rossini, “L’omilia di Yohannes, vescovo d’Aksum in onore di Garimâ,” in: Actes du Onzième Congrès des Orientalistes. Paris – 1897. Quatrième section. Hébreu – Phénicien – Aramée – Éthiopien – Assyrien, Paris (1898), pp. 139–177.
The Garima Gospels: Early Illuminated Gospel Books from Ethiopia, p.18, fig.20.
I was only able to access the preview, but this extraordinarily interesting book must be the source for what appears online. But let’s look deeper into the references.
The Heldman reference is as follows:
According to tradition, the monastery from which this manuscript [=Abba Garima Gospels I] takes its name was founded by Isaac, also known as Abba Garima, one of the Nine Saints who came to Ethiopia from the Roman Empire in the late fifth century. Monks of Abba Garima’s monastery reported to Donald Davies that Abba Garima himself had copied this manuscript, and that he had completed the task in a single day. God stopped the sun’s course one afternoon so that Abba Garima could finish copying his Gospels before night fell.[1]
Conversation between the author and Donald Davies, 1986.
So the story is circulating in just this form in Ethiopia currently.
The Rossini “section 4” is at Gallica here. The article turns out to be the publication of a text in Ethiopic, the Gadla Abba Garima, called by Rossini the “Homily of Yohannes, bishop of Axum, in honour of Garima.” He printed it from a manuscript in the French National Library (A = Paris BNF et. 132, 19th c.) and one in Berlin (= B, with an impenetrable shelfmark, 16th c.). The oldest MS is 15th century. “Yohannes” is of course John, and a bishop of that name did arrive in Ethiopia from Egypt around 1439.[1]
Unfortunately the homily is given without translation (!). The best the editor could do was to give a summary of what it says. Basically Abba Garima was a Byzantine prince named Isaac, who came to Ethiopia and took the name of Garima, and is one of the Nine Saints who appear in Ethiopian literature in the 14-15th century and are unknown before then.[2]
I’ve run Rossini’s summary over into English. Rossini states:
Here is a brief summary of the narration contained in the homily:
And then we get this:
After years of historic marriage, Masfyânos, king of Rome, and Sefengyà, his pious wife, have a son, Yeshâq, «whose name means “pearl”»; while the patriarch is baptizing him, a great supernatural light foretells his future glories (v. 14-36.) — At the age of twelve the child is sent to school, where he progresses rapidly: still growing up, his parents would like to give him a wife, but a celestial vision distracts them (v. 36-48).— With the death of Masfyânos, reluctant Yeshâq is placed on the throne. After seven years of peaceful reign, he secretly flees to Ethiopia, called there by a letter from the saint Pantalêwon of Somâ`t: the angel Gabriel transports him there in four days, while the messengers of Pantalêwon take ten months to return and four days. There Yeshâq received the monastic habit from Pantalêwon, and he remained with his teacher for a year (v. 48-108) — Then, having heard of his departure, Liqânos of Constantinople, Yem`atâ of Qosyât, Schmâ of Antioch, Gubâ of Cilicia, Afsê of Asia, Malâ` of Romyâ, and `Os of Caesarea also went to Ethiopia, and with great abstinence, and in great holiness, live in the same house with Pantalêwon and Yeshâq (v. 108-122). — While they are like this, a governor of Aksum announces to them how the country is dominated by a huge snake, Arwè, venerated as a God, and to which, in addition to infinite animals, a girl is given daily: assured of the fact thanks by sending of Yeshâq and `Os, who was very frightened at the sight of the monster, the nine saints with great prayers obtain from God the death of the serpent (v. 123-284). — Then Ethiopia is filled with tumults and disorders; until God, seeing the righteousness of the faith of that land, and hearing the prayers of the saints, invoking a king of David’s lineage, places Kâlêb on the throne. (v. 285-288). — After thirteen years, and many prodigies performed by them, a poor monk, Melkyânos, joins them, whose humility they despise; whereupon, to punish them, God takes away from them a mysterious face, which used to come down to illuminate their meals. Having obtained the pardon of this, the saints divided, and Yeshâq retired to Madarâ (v. 288-309). — There he performs great miracles: he frees a possessed person, heals a woman who has been suffering for thirty years from an uninterrupted flow of blood, etc., etc.
At the same time he is made head of the priests of Madarâ (v. 310-345). — One day, he sows a grain of wheat: in a short time this germinates, grows, produces a very rich harvest, which the saint distributes to the poor (v. 346-355). — Another day, having ceased writing in order to pray, the angels, who always served him, copy for him the gospel and his interpretation of it (v. 356-360). — Heals a girl invaded by an evil spirit (v. 360-442). — Visited by two monks, he feeds them, but puts away his portion, whereupon, a little later, invited, he celebrates the Eucharistic sacrifice, for which, his companions not knowing that he was still fasting, he is accused to Pantalêwon. The latter calls him to an interview, and, having met, he invites him, in order to be able to take him back in secret, to have his companions leave: «not only men, but let the trees of the wood and the stones move away from us!» exclaims Yeshâq: the trees and the stones obey, so, recognizing his innocence, Pantalêwon shouts: «Garamkani, you have amazed me!» and from this Yeshâq takes the name of Garimâ (v. 443-491). — Returning to the convent, one day Garimâ stops the sun to be able to fulfill his prayers (v. 492-496). — The donkey that used to serve him and bring him the gospel and food having died, he mourns him bitterly (v. 497-507). — After writing under a tree and having spat on a large stone, he makes a healthy spring gush forth (v. 507-511). — Having come across a village that does not observe Sunday rest, he scolds them, is badly beaten, and launches terrible curses against it (v. 512-527)» — King Gabra Masqal, hearing the saint’s wonders, visits him in Modani or Bèta Masqal, receives his blessing, has a church erected there in honour of the saint, and to this and to the convent of Garimâ he donates the land of Tâfâ, `Adwâ, Mesâh(?), Sebe`ito(?), and Maya Lehekuet (v. 528-556). — One time the saint sows a grape: immediately it germinates, and he draws the juice for the mass. Gathered around him many men, he gives rules and precepts for the community (v. 557-665). — Having descended into the heart of the mountain, he causes a wonderfully healthy spring to gush from it (v. 566-569). — When his pen falls while he is writing, it becomes a plant (v. 569-571). — Informed of all this, the king gives him the land of Atarêt and seven other cities (v. 571-575). — The saint, while going with Yem’âtâ, stops a large boulder, which Satan rolls against him to kill him, meets one last time with Pantalêwon, by whom he is comforted for the beatings given to him by the violators of Sunday rest (v. 576-592). — And finally, warned by God of his imminent end, he obtains from Him great promises for those who venerate him, bids farewell to his brothers and disappears on the 17th of the month of Sene (v. 593-640). — One of his disciples then has a vision of future painful events in the locality sanctified by Garimâ, where a wicked people will settle (v. 641-645).[3]
It is a pity that we do not have a translation of pp.161-2, because the summary does NOT give us the story as Judith McKenzie summarises it. I expect that Dr. McKenzie is correct. But note how this 15th century text has two episodes that each have part of the story, rather than just one? This suggests that the narrative we have today was assembled somewhere since this text was written. Hagiography is often revised over time.
I was unable to discover whether any of the Lives of the Nine Saints have been translated into any western language. If not, this is rather a shame. The Life of Garima is 23 pages; surely not beyond the powers of any native English speaker who knows Ethiopian? Is there anybody out there?
[1]Or so I gather from a rather marvellous article: Stuart Munro-Hay, “Saintly Shadows”, in: Walter Raunig, Steffen Wenig (edd.), Afrikas Horn, Series: Meroitica 22, Otto Harrassowitz Verlag, (2005) 137-168; p. 162 (preview here).↩
Ecco un breve compendio della narrazione, contenuta nell’ omilia :
Dopo anni di storile matrimonio, Masfyânos, re di Roma, e Sefengyà, piissima sua moglie, hanno un figlio , Yeshâq, «il cui nome significa margarita»; mentre il patriarca lo battezza, una grande luce soprannanaturale ne preannuncia le future glorie (v. 14-36.) — A dodici anni il fanciotto è mandalo a scuola, ove rapidamente progredisce: cresciuto ancora, i suoi genitori vorrebbero dargli moglie, ma una visione celeste ne li distoglie (v. 36-48).— Morto Masfyânos, Yeshâq riluttante è posto sul trono. Dopo selle anni di pacifico regno, fugge di nascosto in Etiopia, chiamatovi da una lettera del santo Pantalêwon di Somâ`t: l’angelo Gabriele ve lo trasporta in quattro giorni, mentre i messi di Pantalêwon impiegano nel ritorno dieci mesi e quattro giorni. Colà Yeshâq receve da Pantalêwon l’abito monacale, e col suo maestro rimane un anno (v. 48-108) — Allora, avuta notìzia della sua andata, passano in Etiopia anche Liqânos di Costantinopoli, Yem`atâ di Qosyât, Schmâ di Antiochia, Gubâ della Cilicia, Afsê dell’ Asia, Malâ` di Romyâ, `Os di Cesarea, e con grandi astinenze, e in grande santità vivono in una sola casa con Pantalêwon e Yeshâq (v. 108-122). — Mentre così stanno, un governatore di Aksum annuncia loro come il paese sia dominato da un immane serpente, Arwè, venerato come un Dio, e in pasto al quale, oltre a infiniti animali, si dà giornalmente una fanciulla: sinceratisi del fatto mercè l’invio di Yeshâq e di `Os, il quale ultimo assai si spaventa alla vista dei mostro, i nove santi con grandi preghiere ottengono da Dio la morie del serpente (v. 123-284). — L’Etiopia allora si empie di tumulti e di disordini; sino a che Dio, vedendo la rettitudine della fede di quella terra, ed esaudendo le preci dei santi, invocanti un re della stirpe di Davide, pone sul trono Kâlêb. (v. 285-288). — Dopo tredici anni, e compiuti da loro numerosi prodigi, un povero monaco, Melkyânos, si unisce ad essi, i quali ne vilipendono l’umiltà; onde, per punirli, Dio lor toglie una face misteriosa, che soleva scendere a illuminarne i pasti. Ottenuto di ciò il perdono, i santi dividonsi, e Yeshâq ritirasi in Madarâ (v. 288-309). — Ivi egli compie grandi miracoli: libera un ossesso, guarisce una donna, da trenta anni sofferente per ininterrotto flusso di sangue, ecc., ecc.
Intanto, è fatto capo dei sacerdoti di Madarâ (v. 310-345). — Un giorno, egli semina un acino di grano: in breve ora questo germina, cresce, produce una ricchissima messe, che tutta il santo distribuisce ai poveri (v. 346-355). — Un altro giorno, avendo cessato di scrivere per pregare, gli angeli, che sempre lo servivano, gli copiano l’evangelo e la sua interpretazione (v. 356-360). — Sana una fanciulla invasa dallo spirito maligno (v. 360-442). — Visitato da due monaci, egli dà loro da mangiare, ma ripone la sua parte, onde, poco di poi, invitato, celebra il sacrifizio eucaristico, di che, ignorandosi dai suoi compagni com’ egli si conservasse digiuno, è accusato presso Pantalêwon. Questi lo chiama a colloquio, e, incontratolo, lo invita, per poterlo riprendere in segreto, a far allontanare i suoi compagni: «non gli uomini soltanto, ma gli alberi del bosco e le pietre si scostino da noi!» esclama Yeshâq: gli alberi e le pietre obbediscono, onde, riconosciuta l’innocenza, Pantalêwon grida: «Garamkani, mi hai stupito!» e da ciò Yeshâq trae il nome di Garimâ (v. 443-491). — Tornato al convento, un dì Garimâ ferma il sole per poter compiere le sue preghiere (v. 492-496). — Essendo morto l’asino che soleva servirlo e portargli l’evangelo ed il cibo, lo piange amaramente (v. 497- 507). — Stando a scrivere sotto un albero e avendo sputato su un gran sasso, ne fa sgorgare una fonte salutare (v. 507-511). — Imbattutosi in un villaggio che non osserva il riposo domenicale, lo redarguisce, è in malo modo percosso, e contro di esso lancia terribili maledizioni (v. 512- 527)» — Il re Gabra Masqal, intesi i prodigi del santo, lo visita in Modani o Bèta Masqal, ne riceve la benedizione, fa in onore del santo colà erigere una chiesa, e a questa ed al convento di Garimâ dona la terra di Tâfâ, ‘Adwâ, Mesâh(?), Sebe`ito(?), Maya Lehekuet (v. 528-556). — Una volta il santo semina un acino d’uva: subito questo germina, ed egli ne trae il succo per la messa. Adunatisi intorno a lui molti uomini, egli dà regole e precetti per la comunità (v. 557-665). — Sceso nel cuor del monte, fa da esso zampillare una fonte mirabilmente salutare (v. 566- 569). — Cadutagli la penna mentre sta scrivendo, essa diviene una pianta (v. 569-571). — Informato di tutto ciò, il re gli dona la terra d’Atarêt ed altre sette città (v. 571-575). — Il santo, mentre va con Yem’âtâ, ferma un grande macigno, che Satana, per ucciderlo, gli rotolava contro, incontrasi un’ultima volta con Pantalêwon, dal quale e confortato per le percosse dategli dai violatori del riposo domenicale (v. 576-592). — Ed infine, avvertito da Dio della prossima sua fine, e ottenute da Lui grandi promesse per quelli che lo venereranno, saluta i suoi fratelli e scompare al 17 del mese di sanê (v. 593-640). — Un suo discepolo ha, poscia, una visione circa futuri dolorosi eventi della località santificata da Garimâ, ove si stabilirâ un popolo malvagio (v. 641-645).↩
Here are a couple of things that I noticed recently, and might be useful to others.
Following an enquiry, I find that there is a translation of Theophylact on Matthew online here. This is certainly better than the $70 needed to obtain the 1992 translation of the same work, at Amazon.com here.
Next, the physical remains of ancient Rome are always interesting. Piranesi printed a drawing of the rear of the Pantheon, with what he claims are the remains of the Baths of Agrippa, completed before 12 BC and therefore one of the original public baths of thermae:
I was able to find online some photos of the same area, here.
Much of the baths still stood in the 17th century, despite use as a quarry for building materials. It would be interesting to track down the older sketches that apparently exist.
Finally I saw something about the Ethiopian canon of the bible. It is a common atheist jeer online is that the Ethiopian canon of the bible is larger than the normal, insinuating – the argument is rarely made explicit – that this proves that the bible does not exist, or is not by God, or something of the kind. I’ve never worried about the odd additions to the Ethiopian canon, since Ethiopia was not converted to Christianity until the canon was pretty much set, and the isolation of that community, the little that we know about it, and its unusual circumstances could result in any amount of oddity. One Ethiopian emperor used to eat pages of the bible when he was feeling ill, for instance. This is not a very educated world.
But I spent a little time looking into this. The Wikipedia article contains very poor sources. The only one of any value seemed to be by G.-A. Mikre-Sellassie,[1] This says on p.119:
It is rather difficult to determine what exactly the official Canon of Scriptures of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church is. As R.W Cowley has rightly observed, one of the problems in this study is that in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church “the concept of canonicity is regarded more loosely than it is among most other churches”.[46] Apparently, the two terms, protocanonical and deuterocanonical, employed among many churches nowadays, are not known within the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.
46. R.W. Cowley, “The Biblical Canon of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church Today” in Ostikirchliche Studien, 23 (1974), 318-323. In this short article the author has attempted a careful study of the Canon of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.
This is not encouraging. In fact the article did not give any kind of history of how the canon came to be – a common problem. In general one gained the idea that in Ethiopian history the church was rather more important than the scriptures were, and the apocrypha might have a near-canonical status, or not, as times demanded. Perhaps our own view on canon is shaped by the Reformers here, and is more precise than might have been the case either than in antiquity or the middle ages? If so, the Ethiopians are merely continuing a late-antique vagueness, albeit shaped by their own unusual world.
One of the key sources is apparently E. Ullendorf, Ethiopia and the Bible: the Schweich Lectures 1967, OUP (1968). This I could not access, but a Google Books preview gave me p.31 f., which gives an account about the translation of the Old and New Testaments into Ge`ez:
I don’t think that we need to rely on this very much. Ullendorf also discusses the equally traditional idea that the bible in Ethiopian was translated by Arabic; and it seems to be a fact that many Ethiopian versions of ancient texts derive from an Arabic translation. However I quickly drowned in the number of books and articles that I would have to read to know more!
