Exploring the Ethiopic Book of the Cock, An Apocryphal Passion Gospel from Late Antiquity

Abstract

The Mashafa dorho, or Book of the Cock, is an apocryphal passion narrative that survives in an Ethiopic () version, which in turn has clearly been translated from an Arabic Vorlage. The anonymous author describes it as an oral teaching (the terms are dersān, “homily, discourse,” and temhert, “doctrine, instruction”) that he or she received from the apostles themselves. One of the author's main concerns is to relate “in detail” (4:18) “all that has happened” to Jesus (4:8). At the end of the narrative, the author acknowledges his or her debt to John the Evangelist, who was—“in tension with, yet finally in harmony with Peter”—one of the foremost eyewitnesses to the events of the passion. Although a fragment of the Book of the Cock has long been known to Western scholars, and the entire work enjoys to this day a privileged place in the liturgy of the Ethiopian church, the antiquity of the traditions that it preserves has not been recognized; hence the claim to have “newly discovered” an apocryphal text, the origins of which lie in the fifth or sixth century C.E.