Ezana's Conversion Reconsidered

Abstract

The past decade has been a momentous one for the study of African Christianity. The opposing figures of the missionary-hero and the missionary-imperialist have begun to vanish from the scholarly literature. The metropolitan-ecclesiastical and schools of mission history have, to a significant degree, given way to a number of more subtle and sophisticated lines of inquiry.' Among these new approaches the most exciting has probably been that of African religious history. emphasizing the political, economic, and social factors in the spread of Christianity, nationalist historians largely neglected the religious dimension... 2 In recent years, however, a number of scholars have attempted to examine the mission-African interaction at the level of symbol, ritual, myth, and theology.3 In this article it is my intention to examine the conversion to Christianity of the fourth century Ethiopian ruler Ezana. An extensive literature exists concerning this king who left behind inscriptions containing polytheistic, monotheistic, and Christian formulae. However, to date scholars have focused their attention almost exclusively upon the political implications of these religious changes. As will be shown below, this approach has done a grave disservice to the sources and has left several questions of major importance unanswered. An analysis of Ezana's conversion which emphasizes the religious dimension of this act enables us to resolve several of the hitherto troubling features of the turning point of Ethiopian history.4 While various legends seek to trace the introduction of Christianity to Ethiopia to the Apostolic period, scholars are virtually unanimous in viewing the arrival of the Syrian brothers Frumentius and Aedesius in the early fourth century as the crucial event in the religious history of the Aksumite kingdom. The story of their activities, which appears with minor variations in both Ethiopic and