Ethiopic

Abstract

The first wave of Jewish and Christian pseudepigrapha reached Eritrea and Ethiopia in the wake of the Christianization of the Aksumite kingdom, in the middle of the fourth century of our era. Their Ethiopian acculturation was a part of the process of translating the ensemble of the Scriptures, including “apocryphal” texts, from Greek originals into Gǝʿǝz, or Classical Ethiopic. As a result, the pseudepigrapha were copied for centuries in the same manuscripts as other biblical texts. After a long period of relative isolation, the re-establishing of regular relations with Egyptian Christianity, in the thirteenth century, led to a complete re-examination and revision of Ethiopian Scriptures and other religious texts. The pseudepigrapha were scrutinized, discussed, edited, eventually newly translated from the Arabic or, in a few cases, abandoned. The theological debates about the status of some of these texts played a major role in their active preservation in Ethiopian culture.