Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Beliefs

1. What "Tewahedo" Means

Tewahedo is a Ge'ez word meaning "made one" or "unified", and the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church carries it in its own name because the doctrine it names is the hinge of its identity. The word describes the union of divinity and humanity in Christ: one incarnate nature of the Word of God, formed from two natures, without mixture, without confusion, without alteration and without separation. A church that puts its Christology into its legal title is telling you what it thinks the argument was about.

Ethiopian teachers state the doctrine positively. Christ is perfect God and perfect man. His humanity is complete, with a human body and a rational human soul, and it is neither absorbed by the divinity nor diluted into it. His divinity is complete and unchanged by the union. What the Church denies is any account in which the two remain side by side as two subjects after the incarnation, because for Ethiopian theology that would leave two Christs and no real salvation. The union happened in the womb of the Virgin, it is permanent, and it is the reason the Ethiopian Church calls Mary Waladita Amlak, the Bearer of God, the Ge'ez rendering of Theotokos defined at Ephesus in 431.

The Word "Monophysite" Is a Mislabel

Ethiopian Orthodox Christians reject the label monophysite and they are right to. Monophysitism in its condemned form is the teaching of Eutyches, who held that Christ's humanity was swallowed up by his divinity like a drop of honey in the sea. The Ethiopian Church anathematises Eutyches by name. Its formula follows Saint Cyril of Alexandria's phrase about the one incarnate nature of the Word, which Cyril used while insisting on the completeness of Christ's manhood. The accurate term is miaphysite, from the Greek mia, one, describing a single united nature that retains everything of both.

The Ethiopian Church equally rejects Nestorius, whose teaching it understands as dividing Christ into two persons. Both rejections matter, because a reader who assumes the Ethiopian Church leans towards Eutyches has already misread it. Our guide to the Oriental Orthodox Churches and the Chalcedon question works through the Christological argument, the 451 council and the modern common declarations in full detail. This page takes that history as settled background and turns to what Ethiopian Christians believe, read and do.

2. How Christianity Reached Ethiopia

Christianity became the religion of the Aksumite kingdom in the fourth century, when King Ezana was converted and Frumentius, a young man from Tyre who was shipwrecked on the Red Sea coast and raised at the Aksumite court, was consecrated as the first bishop by Athanasius of Alexandria. Ethiopians call Frumentius Abba Selama, the Father of Peace, and the consecration by Athanasius is the origin of the long tie between the Ethiopian Church and the Coptic Patriarchate of Alexandria. Ezana's coins, which shift from a disc and crescent to a cross, are physical evidence of the change.

The Ethiopian Church Reads Its Origins Further Back

The Church itself dates its beginning earlier, to the conversion recorded in Acts 8:26-40, where Philip meets a court official of Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, reading Isaiah in his chariot and baptises him on the road. Ancient writers used "Ethiopia" for a broad region south of Egypt, so historians dispute whether the eunuch belonged to Aksum or to the Nubian kingdom of Meroë. For Ethiopian tradition the passage is foundational, and it explains why Ethiopian Christians so often describe their faith as apostolic in origin rather than missionary in origin.

The Nine Saints and the Ge'ez Bible

In the late fifth and early sixth centuries a group remembered as the Nine Saints arrived in Aksum from the Roman world, including Abba Aregawi, who founded the cliff-top monastery of Debre Damo, and Abba Pantaleon. Ethiopian tradition credits them with founding monasteries, spreading the faith into the countryside and advancing the translation of Scripture into Ge'ez. That translation matters enormously for this page, because the Bible the Ethiopian Church still uses descends from it, and it was made from Greek at a moment when the Greek biblical collections circulating in Egypt were broader than the list Rome would later define.

Ethiopian Christianity then developed with unusual continuity. It survived the spread of Islam across North Africa, the collapse of Aksum, the Zagwe and Solomonic dynasties, the devastating sixteenth-century war with the forces of Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi, and the twentieth-century Italian occupation. The eleven rock-hewn churches of Lalibela, cut down into the rock in the Zagwe period and inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 1978, are among the most celebrated monuments of that continuity. For the broader picture of the continent, see our guide to Christianity in Africa.

3. The Canon of 81 Books

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church holds a biblical canon of 81 books, wider than the Catholic 73, wider than the Protestant 66 and wider than the lists received in the Eastern Orthodox Churches. The number is recorded in the Fetha Nagast, the Law of the Kings, a legal code translated into Ge'ez from Arabic in the fifteenth century and used for centuries as the Church's own reference, and it is repeated in Ethiopian canon lists and church teaching to this day. Ask an Ethiopian priest how many books are in the Bible and the answer is 81.

The Number Is Fixed and the List Is Not

Here is the point most summaries miss. The total of 81 is stable in Ethiopian usage, while the contents behind it vary between lists, because different enumerations group and divide the same material in different ways. Two arrangements are commonly met:

• 46 Old Testament and 35 New Testament. The Old Testament is counted in larger blocks, and the New Testament runs to 35 by adding eight church-order and canonical works to the familiar 27.
• 54 Old Testament and 27 New Testament. The Old Testament is divided more finely, and the New Testament is the standard 27 books held by every Church.

Both arrangements reach 81, and neither is a rogue local opinion. Ethiopian scholarship itself distinguishes a "narrower" canon, the books read as Scripture in the ordinary sense, from a "broader" canon that takes in further ancient works of church order and discipline. A visitor who wants a single definitive Ethiopian table of contents is asking a question the tradition has not answered in that form, and honest writing on the subject says so.

Books, Chapters and the Ge'ez Text

The Ge'ez Old Testament was translated from Greek, so its base text is the Septuagint tradition rather than the later Hebrew Masoretic text. Later revisions brought in readings from Arabic and Syriac versions. The Church's own study tradition, the andemta, is a body of Amharic commentary transmitted in the church schools alongside the Ge'ez text, and it functions rather as the patristic commentary tradition does in the West: the text is read inside a received interpretation rather than handed to each reader raw. That instinct, that Scripture belongs inside the Church that received it, is one the Catholic reader should recognise immediately. Our guide to Scripture and Tradition works the same principle from the Catholic side.

4. The Books Rome Does Not Have

The Ethiopian Old Testament carries the deuterocanonical books Protestant Bibles dropped, Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach and Baruch with the Letter of Jeremiah, along with the Greek additions to Daniel and Esther, and then several works that no Western Church receives. The additional writings are ancient Jewish and early Christian texts preserved in Ge'ez, in several cases preserved there alone. One item runs the other way, and it is set out under Meqabyan below: the Greek books of Maccabees that Rome receives are not a settled part of the historic Ge'ez collection.

1 Enoch (Henok)

1 Enoch is an apocalyptic work attributed to the patriarch Enoch of Genesis 5, containing the Book of the Watchers, the Book of Parables, an astronomical book, a dream-vision section and an epistle. The complete text survives only in Ge'ez. Greek portions are known, and Aramaic fragments of it were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran, which proves the work was circulating in Judea well before Christ. Its account of the fallen angels who corrupted humanity shaped a great deal of later angelology, including ideas that reached the West and appear in our guide to angels and the angelic hierarchy.

Jubilees (Kufale)

Jubilees retells Genesis and the first part of Exodus as a revelation given to Moses on Sinai, organised into periods of forty-nine years, with a strong emphasis on a 364-day solar calendar and on the antiquity of the law. Hebrew fragments of Jubilees were also found at Qumran. In Ethiopian usage the book supports the Church's calendrical and observance traditions.

1, 2 and 3 Meqabyan

The three books of Meqabyan are the items on the list that English writing misreports most often. They are usually rendered "1, 2 and 3 Maccabees", which leaves the reader assuming they are the Greek books of the Maccabees found in Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Bibles. They are different works with different content. The Greek 1 and 2 Maccabees narrate the Hasmonean resistance to Antiochus IV and the events that followed; the Ethiopian Meqabyan books are separate Ge'ez compositions, partly narrative and partly homiletic, concerned with martyrdom, resurrection and fidelity under a persecuting king.

The confusion has a second consequence, and it is the one place this page has to be careful. Because Meqabyan occupies the slot an English reader expects the Greek Maccabees to fill, the Greek books are not a secure part of the historic Ge'ez collection at all. Some modern Ethiopian printed Bibles carry translations of them alongside Meqabyan; the older manuscript tradition generally does not. Anyone comparing the Catholic 73 with the Ethiopian 81 needs to hold the two sets of books apart, or the comparison collapses.

Ezra Sutuel and 4 Baruch

Ezra Sutuel is the apocalypse known in the Latin tradition as 4 Ezra and in some English Bibles as 2 Esdras, a work of visions on suffering and divine justice after the fall of Jerusalem. Rome never received it; it was printed in an appendix to the Clementine Vulgate precisely to mark that it stood outside the canon while remaining in circulation. 4 Baruch, also called the Rest of the Words of Baruch or the Paralipomena of Jeremiah, is a short narrative attached to the Jeremiah material. Ethiopian lists also carry Josippon, a medieval Hebrew retelling of Jewish history, in the broader canon.

The Broader New Testament

The Ethiopian New Testament contains the same 27 books every Christian Church receives. The Gospels, Acts, the Pauline letters, the Catholic epistles and Revelation are all there, in the same order of authority. The broader canon adds eight further works of church order and discipline:

• The Sinodos, in four parts, a collection of canons and church order material.
• The Book of the Covenant (Mashafa Kidan), in two parts, containing liturgical and disciplinary material and a discourse of the risen Christ to his disciples.
• Ethiopic Clement (Qalementos), a work of instruction transmitted under the name of Clement of Rome, distinct from the Letter of Clement to the Corinthians.
• The Ethiopic Didascalia, a church order related to the Syriac Didascalia Apostolorum.

These four titles counted as eight books are the difference between a New Testament of 27 and one of 35. They function in Ethiopian practice much as canon law and liturgical books function in the Latin Church, which is part of why the two enumerations of 81 can differ without anyone changing what is actually read at the altar.

5. How the Three Canons Compare

Three Christian canons in wide use today can be laid side by side: the Protestant 66, the Catholic 73 and the Ethiopian 81. The table below shows where each stands on the disputed material. It compares positions, and it does not settle them; the argument follows in the next section.

The Catholic column follows the Council of Trent, Session IV, Decree on the Canonical Scriptures, 8 April 1546, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church 120, which prints the full list of 73. The Ethiopian column follows Ethiopian canon lists as transmitted in the Fetha Nagast and in the Church's own teaching materials; because Ethiopian enumerations differ in how they divide books, this table names contents rather than reconstructing a single official sequence.

6. Why the Canons Differ

The three canons differ because three different communities closed the list at three different moments by three different procedures. None of them assembled the books from scratch. Each inherited a fluid collection of Jewish and early Christian writings and then drew a line, and the line landed in a different place each time.

What Rome Did

The Catholic list of 73 books emerged from the usage of the churches and was ratified by councils. The African councils of Hippo in 393 and Carthage in 397 listed the books that could be read as divine Scripture, and their list is the Catholic one. Pope Eugene IV repeated it in the bull Cantate Domino in 1442, a document addressed to the Copts and Ethiopians during the Council of Florence, which is a striking detail on this page: the first time the Roman canon was formally put to Ethiopian Christians was in a decree of union that did not hold. The Council of Trent then defined the list under anathema in Session IV, on 8 April 1546, in response to the Reformers' removal of the seven deuterocanonical books. The Catechism of the Catholic Church 120 prints it out.

What the Reformers Did

The Reformers moved the seven deuterocanonical books out of the Old Testament, following Jerome's preference for the books extant in Hebrew and arguing that the Jewish community of their own day did not receive them. Luther's Bible printed them between the Testaments as good and useful to read without being equal to Scripture, and later English Protestant editions dropped them from the printed Bible entirely. The full Catholic answer to that move is set out in our guide to the deuterocanonical books, and this page will not repeat it.

What Ethiopia Did

Ethiopia never performed the act of subtraction, and it never held a defining council of the kind Trent was. Its canon is the collection that arrived with the Ge'ez translation and stayed, expressed later in the Fetha Nagast and in the lists the church schools transmit. Isolation played a real part. Ethiopian Christianity was cut off from Mediterranean church politics for long stretches after the seventh century, and works that fell out of Greek and Latin use were still being copied in Ge'ez in monastic scriptoria. The Ethiopian canon is best understood as a preservation. These books were already there in Ge'ez, and they simply never left.

The Catholic Judgment, Stated Plainly

Catholic teaching holds that the canon is settled by the Church's discernment under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, expressed in the usage of the churches and defined by the Church's authority when the question is disputed. On that principle the Catholic answer to the Ethiopian 81 is the same in form as the answer to the Protestant 66: antiquity, edification and even inspiration-sounding language in a book do not by themselves put it in the canon, and the Church that received the books is the body competent to say which they are. Rome judges that 1 Enoch, Jubilees, the Meqabyan books and 4 Ezra are ancient and worth reading, and that they were not received as canonical Scripture by the Church at large.

Two things follow, and both should be said. First, the Catholic Church has never declared the Ethiopian Church heretical for its canon; the churches are separated over the Christological language of Chalcedon and the question of communion with the See of Peter, and the canon question sits inside that separation rather than causing it. Second, the Ethiopian case damages the Protestant argument rather than the Catholic one. If the canon is supposed to be self-evident from the text, three apostolic communities reading in good faith would not have arrived at 66, 73 and 81. Something has to decide, and the something is the Church.

7. Enoch, Jude, and What a Quotation Proves

The Letter of Jude quotes Enoch by name, and that quotation is the single most cited argument for the Ethiopian canon. Jude 14-15 says that Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied that the Lord comes with his holy myriads to execute judgment on all. The wording matches 1 Enoch 1:9 closely enough that the dependence is not seriously disputed. A New Testament author knew 1 Enoch and used it as a prophecy.

How Ethiopian Teachers Read It

Ethiopian Orthodox teaching treats the quotation as an apostolic endorsement. Jude calls the passage prophecy, attributes it to a named patriarch, and uses it to make a doctrinal point about judgment. On that reading, the Church that kept Enoch kept what an apostle read, and the churches that lost it lost part of the deposit. The argument is coherent and it deserves to be stated in its strongest form before anyone answers it.

The Catholic Response

Catholic teaching answers that citation and canonicity are separate questions. Saint Paul quotes the Greek poet Aratus at Athens, telling the Areopagus that certain of their own poets have said we are God's offspring (Acts 17:28), and he quotes a Cretan writer on the character of Cretans in Titus 1:12. Nobody proposes canonising Aratus. An inspired author may use a true sentence from a source that is otherwise not Scripture, and the truth of the sentence carries no verdict on the book it came from.

The early Church argued this out. Tertullian defended the standing of Enoch. Saint Jerome and Saint Augustine did not receive it; Augustine discusses Enoch in The City of God, book 15, acknowledging that Enoch wrote something divine while judging that the works circulating under his name could not be trusted as Scripture because their transmission could not be vouched for. The Latin and Greek churches settled where Augustine and Jerome stood, and the councils that fixed the canon left Enoch outside it. The Ethiopian Church, working from a different manuscript inheritance in a different language, settled the other way.

For a Catholic the practical conclusion is calm. 1 Enoch is a genuinely ancient Jewish text, it illuminates the world of thought that Jude and other New Testament writers moved in, and reading it is legitimate and often useful. It is not Scripture in the Catholic Church, and nothing in Catholic doctrine depends on excluding it or on including it.

8. The Ge'ez Liturgy and the Chant of Yared

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church worships in Ge'ez, an ancient Semitic language of the Aksumite kingdom that no longer has native speakers and remains the liturgical tongue, with Amharic and other languages used for preaching and instruction. The Eucharistic liturgy is called the Qeddase, the Sanctification. The Church possesses fourteen anaphoras, the great Eucharistic prayers, attributed to figures including the Apostles, Saint Mary, Saint Athanasius, Saint Basil, Saint Cyril, Saint John Chrysostom and Saint Dioscorus, and the celebrant chooses among them according to the day.

Zema, the Chant of Saint Yared

Ethiopian sacred music is a system in its own right, credited to Saint Yared, a deacon of Aksum remembered in the sixth century. Tradition says he received the chant in a vision and organised it into three modes, ge'ez, ezl and araray, used for ordinary days, for solemn and penitential occasions and for feasts. Ethiopian notation, the melekket, is a set of characters written above the text to cue melodic formulas the singer already knows. The notation as it survives is documented from the sixteenth century, while the chant it records was carried orally for far longer, and it is still learned by years of apprenticeship in the church schools.

Aquaquam and the Instruments

On major feasts the clergy and the debtera, the trained lay cantors and scholars who carry much of the Church's learning, perform aquaquam, a solemn measured movement to the chant. They hold the maqwamiya, a prayer staff, shake the tsenatsel, a metal sistrum of the type used in ancient Egypt, and beat the kebero, a large double-headed drum. Worshippers stand for long hours, men and women on separate sides, shoes removed at the door in the manner of Exodus 3:5.

The Shape of a Church Building

An Ethiopian church is often round or octagonal and is built in three concentric zones. The outer ring, the qene mahlet, is where the chanters stand. The middle ring, the qeddest, is where the faithful receive Communion. The innermost chamber, the maqdas, is the holy of holies, entered only by clergy, and it houses the tabot. The plan deliberately reproduces the arrangement of the Temple in Jerusalem, which tells you a great deal about how this Church understands the relationship between the two covenants.

The Seven Sacraments

The Ethiopian Church holds seven sacraments, called mysteries: baptism, chrismation, the Eucharist, penance, unction of the sick, matrimony and holy orders. Infants are baptised, boys on the fortieth day after birth and girls on the eightieth, in a reckoning drawn from the purification periods of Leviticus 12, and chrismation and first Communion follow immediately, as in the other Eastern Churches. Married men may be ordained to the priesthood, and bishops are chosen from among monastics. Catholic readers will recognise the same sacramental economy set out in our guides to baptism and the Eucharist, celebrated in a different rite and a different language.

9. The Tabot and the Ark Claim at Aksum

Every Ethiopian Orthodox church holds a tabot, a consecrated tablet of wood or stone representing the tablets of the law and the Ark of the Covenant, kept in the innermost chamber and dedicated to the saint or mystery the church is named for. The tabot is what makes the building a church. Without it, the structure is masonry. Mass is celebrated on it, it is never seen uncovered by the laity, and on great feasts it is carried out wrapped in rich cloth on a priest's head in procession, which is the moment most visitors to Ethiopia photograph without knowing what they are looking at.

The Kebra Nagast and the Claim at Aksum

The Ethiopian national epic, the Kebra Nagast or Glory of Kings, compiled in Ge'ez in the fourteenth century from older material, tells how the Queen of Sheba visited Solomon, as recorded in 1 Kings 10, and bore him a son, Menelik. In the epic Menelik travels to Jerusalem as a young man and returns to Ethiopia with the Ark of the Covenant, and Ethiopia becomes the new Zion. The book is foundational for Ethiopian kingship, and the Solomonic dynasty claimed descent through Menelik.

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church teaches that the Ark itself rests today in the Chapel of the Tablet beside the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion in Aksum, guarded by a single appointed monk who alone may enter and who holds the office for life. No independent examination has ever been permitted. That is the fact of the matter, and it cuts both ways: the claim cannot be verified from outside, and it cannot be refuted from outside either.

How a Catholic Should Handle This

The Catholic Church has issued no judgment on the Aksum claim, and no Catholic is required to hold any position on it. Treating it as obvious fraud is discourteous and unwarranted; treating it as established fact overstates what anyone can know. The respectful and accurate formulation is that the Ethiopian Church teaches this, that it is central to Ethiopian religious identity, and that it stands outside the reach of verification.

What is beyond dispute is the theological work the tabot does in Ethiopian worship. The presence of God dwelt among Israel in the Ark; the presence of God dwells among the faithful in the Eucharist celebrated on the tabot. Ethiopian liturgy makes that continuity physical in every parish church in the country, and it is a striking way of saying what Catholic theology says when it calls Mary the Ark of the New Covenant and the tabernacle the dwelling of the Lord.

10. Fasting, the Calendar and the Great Feasts

Ethiopian Orthodox fasting is among the most demanding disciplines in the Christian world. On fast days the faithful abstain from all animal products, meat, dairy and eggs, and delay the first meal until a set hour, often the ninth hour of the day or later during the strictest seasons. The everyday effect is that Ethiopian cuisine has one of the great vegan traditions attached to it, built entirely out of the Church's calendar.

The Fasting Seasons

• Wednesdays and Fridays through most of the year, commemorating the betrayal and the crucifixion.
• Abiy Tsom or Hudade, the Great Fast of Lent, the longest and strictest season, taking in the fast of Heraclius and Holy Week.
• Tsome Hawaryat, the Fast of the Apostles, after Pentecost.
• Tsome Filseta, the Fast of the Assumption of Mary in August.
• Tsome Nebiyat, the Fast of the Prophets, before Christmas.
• Tsome Nenewe, the Fast of Nineveh, three days recalling Jonah's preaching.
• The eve of Epiphany and other appointed days.

Monastics and clergy keep more than the laity. Children, the sick, the elderly, pregnant and nursing women, and travellers are dispensed, in the same pastoral spirit that governs Catholic fasting law. Compared with the current Latin discipline of two days of fasting a year, the Ethiopian pattern is on a different scale altogether, and Ethiopian Christians in the diaspora keep it.

The Ethiopian Calendar

Ethiopia keeps its own calendar, and the Church's year runs on it. There are thirteen months: twelve of thirty days and a thirteenth, Pagume, of five days, or six in a leap year. The year begins on Meskerem 1, the feast of Enkutatash, which falls in September. The Ethiopian year number runs seven to eight years behind the Gregorian year, because Ethiopian reckoning uses a different calculation of the date of the Annunciation from the one adopted in the West. An Ethiopian church notice giving a year in the 2010s during a Gregorian 2020s week is using this calendar correctly.

Timkat and Meskel

Two feasts dominate the public year. Timkat celebrates the Baptism of Christ in the Jordan. The tabots are carried from the churches in procession to a body of water, kept overnight under vigil, and the water is blessed at dawn and sprinkled over the crowds in a renewal of baptism, after which the tabots return to their churches in a second procession. Meskel commemorates the finding of the True Cross by Saint Helena and is marked by the lighting of the demera, a great bonfire built as a cone of branches topped with flowers. UNESCO inscribed the Meskel commemoration on its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2013 and the Timkat celebration in 2019.

The Meskel and Timkat inscriptions are recorded by UNESCO on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Fasting practice above describes the Church's own published discipline; the exact hours and dispensations are set by pastors locally, so ask a parish rather than a guidebook.

11. The Old Testament Observances

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church keeps several practices drawn directly from the Old Testament that most Christian bodies dropped early. Male infants are circumcised, customarily on the eighth day, following Genesis 17 and Leviticus 12, alongside and distinct from baptism. Pork and other animals classed as unclean in Leviticus 11 are avoided. Shoes are removed before entering a church. The sanctuary is treated as a holy of holies. Many communities honour Saturday as well as Sunday, keeping the Sabbath of the Jews and the Sabbath of the Christians, with Sunday holding the higher place as the day of the Resurrection.

Why These Practices Are There

Three explanations circulate and they are not mutually exclusive. The Church's own account traces them to a Jewish presence in Ethiopia before Christianity arrived, connected in the tradition to the Solomonic narrative of the Kebra Nagast. Historians have argued for influence from the Jewish communities of southern Arabia and for the effect of translating and living with an Old Testament in a society with no competing Christian Roman legal culture to relativise it. Whatever the origin, the practices are ancient and thoroughly integrated into Ethiopian Christian life.

The Doctrinal Point Ethiopian Teachers Make

Ethiopian Orthodox theology does not hold that circumcision or the dietary rules are necessary for salvation. That would run straight into the Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15, where the apostles decided that Gentile converts need not be circumcised, and into Galatians, where Saint Paul confronts the question head on. Ethiopian teachers present these observances as inherited custom and cultural continuity with the covenant given to Abraham, retained voluntarily by a Christian people, with salvation resting on Christ. Stating the distinction that way is how Ethiopian theologians themselves state it, and any summary that presents Ethiopian Christianity as Judaising misrepresents it.

The Catholic Position

Catholic teaching holds that the ceremonial law of the Old Covenant is fulfilled and no longer binding, while the moral law endures, and that circumcision has no salvific effect for Christians. On that basis the Ethiopian practices, held as custom rather than as necessity, raise no doctrinal conflict, and the Latin Church has its own share of inherited observances that are custom rather than law. Where Catholic and Ethiopian teaching would diverge sharply is on any claim that the ceremonial law binds under pain of sin, and the Ethiopian Church does not make that claim.

Beta Israel, the Jewish community of Ethiopia, is a separate people with a separate history, and it should not be confused with Ethiopian Orthodox Christians who keep Old Testament observances. Our guide to Judaism and Catholic teaching covers the relationship between the Church and the Jewish people.

12. Mary, the Saints and Ethiopian Monasticism

Devotion to the Virgin Mary is exceptionally strong in Ethiopian Christianity and shapes the calendar, the liturgy and popular piety alike. Mary is honoured under the title Kidane Mehret, Our Lady of the Covenant of Mercy, referring to the tradition of a covenant of mercy granted to her by her Son on behalf of those who call on her. The Ethiopian year carries a full round of Marian commemorations, including her Nativity, the Assumption preceded by its own fast, and monthly memorials. The Ge'ez hymn cycle known as the Weddase Maryam, the Praise of Mary, is recited widely, and the collection of Marian miracle stories, the Ta'amre Maryam, has been copied, illuminated and read in Ethiopia for centuries.

How This Compares With Catholic Marian Doctrine

Ethiopian and Catholic teaching agree on the great substance: Mary is Theotokos, defined at Ephesus in 431 and confessed by both; she is ever-virgin; she intercedes; she is honoured above all the saints. The Ethiopian Church has not defined the Immaculate Conception or the Assumption as dogmas in the Western juridical sense, and it would not put the question that way, though it celebrates the Assumption with a fast and a feast and speaks of Mary's holiness in the highest terms. The difference lies in doctrinal method, and the devotion on both sides is of the same order. Our guide to Mary, Mother of God sets out the Catholic dogmas and their scriptural roots.

The Monastic Tradition

Ethiopian monasticism runs deep and old. Debre Damo, founded in the tradition by Abba Aregawi of the Nine Saints, sits on a flat-topped mountain reached only by a rope up a cliff face. Debre Libanos was founded by Saint Tekle Haymanot, a thirteenth-century monk venerated across Ethiopia, credited with reviving monastic life and with a role in the restoration of the Solomonic line. Saint Gebre Menfes Kidus is remembered as a desert ascetic who lived among wild animals. Monasteries preserved the Ge'ez manuscripts through centuries when nothing else would have, and the survival of 1 Enoch in a complete text is directly owed to that copying.

The Church also venerates the Ethiopian martyrs of the sixteenth-century wars and of the twentieth century, including those killed under the Italian occupation, when the monks and deacons of Debre Libanos were massacred in 1937 on the orders of the Italian viceroy Rodolfo Graziani, in reprisal after an attempt on his life in Addis Ababa. The killing is documented in the histories of the occupation and the monastery keeps its memory. Our guide to the saints and why Catholics honour them explains the theology of intercession that both Churches hold.

13. Governance, Autocephaly and a Hard Century

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church is governed by a Patriarch, formally the Patriarch and Catholicos of Ethiopia, with a Holy Synod of bishops. Autocephaly is recent in institutional terms. From the fourth century until the twentieth, the Ethiopian Church received its chief bishop, the abun, from the Coptic Patriarchate of Alexandria, and he was normally an Egyptian monk. Ethiopian pressure for an indigenous hierarchy grew through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The Steps to Self-Governance

Ethiopian monks were consecrated as bishops for the first time in 1929, a first breach in the old arrangement. After the Second World War the two Churches negotiated further, and Abune Basilios became the first Ethiopian-born archbishop of the Church in 1951. In 1959 Pope Cyril VI of Alexandria granted the Ethiopian Church autocephaly and elevated Abune Basilios as its first Patriarch, while a bond of honour with the Coptic See was retained. After Eritrea became independent in 1993, the Coptic Patriarchate granted autocephaly to the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church as well, and its first patriarch was enthroned in 1998. The Eritrean Church keeps the Ge'ez liturgy, calendar and fasting discipline substantially unchanged.

The Derg Years

The Ethiopian revolution of 1974 ended the monarchy and brought the Derg to power, and the Church lost the established position it had held for sixteen centuries. Church lands were nationalised, the Church was disestablished, and Patriarch Abune Theophilos was removed in 1976, imprisoned, and killed in detention. Clergy were harassed and church schools were curtailed. The Church survived the period substantially intact at parish level, which is a fact worth sitting with when reading about persecution in the twentieth century.

Division and Reconciliation

The fall of the Derg in 1991 produced a further crisis. Patriarch Abune Merkorios, elected under the previous government, left the country, a successor was elected in Addis Ababa, and a rival synod formed in exile in North America. Two synods claimed the Church for more than a quarter of a century. In 2018 the two sides reconciled, with both patriarchs recognised and the exile synod reunited with Addis Ababa. Ethiopian Orthodox communities abroad, in the United States, Europe, Israel and the Gulf, are large, and their parishes keep the Ge'ez liturgy and the fasting calendar. For the wider picture of Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox communities in North America, see our guide to Orthodox churches in America.

Ethiopia's 2007 national census recorded Ethiopian Orthodox Christians as the single largest religious group in the country, at 43.5 per cent of the population, ahead of Muslims at 33.9 per cent and Protestants at 18.6 per cent. Applied to a country of Ethiopia's population, that share puts the Ethiopian Church well ahead of the other five Oriental Orthodox Churches in numbers.

The census percentages are from the 2007 Population and Housing Census of Ethiopia, published by the Ethiopian Central Statistical Agency. No later national census has been completed, so current membership totals are estimates and this page gives none; the comparison with the other Oriental Orthodox Churches follows from that census share rather than from any single published ranking.

14. Rome and Ethiopia

The Catholic Church recognises the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church as possessing apostolic succession, a valid priesthood and a valid Eucharist, and the two Churches are not in full communion. The Second Vatican Council stated the recognition of the separated Eastern Churches in Unitatis Redintegratio 15, which affirms that these Churches possess true sacraments, above all the priesthood and the Eucharist, held through apostolic succession. The Catechism of the Catholic Church 838 describes the communion that exists with them as profound.

The History Rome Should Own

Contact between Rome and Ethiopia has a hard chapter and pretending otherwise helps nobody. Ethiopian delegates were present at the Council of Florence, and the bull Cantate Domino of 1442 was addressed to the Copts and Ethiopians, though no lasting union followed. In the early seventeenth century the Jesuit missionary Pedro Páez won the confidence of Emperor Susenyos, who declared Catholicism the state religion in 1622. The Latin patriarch Afonso Mendes, who arrived in 1626, then required rebaptism and reordination and imposed Latin usages on the Ethiopian rite. The country rose in revolt, Susenyos restored the old faith in 1632 and abdicated, and his son Fasilides expelled the Jesuits in 1633 and closed Ethiopia to Catholic missionaries for well over a century.

The lesson the Catholic Church itself drew from episodes of this kind is written into modern doctrine. Orientalium Ecclesiarum, the Council's decree on the Eastern Catholic Churches, insists that Eastern Churches in communion with Rome keep their own rites, disciplines and traditions intact, and that they should return to their ancestral usages where these have been eroded. The Joint International Commission with the Orthodox agreed at Balamand in 1993 that uniatism is not an acceptable method for seeking unity. Rome no longer treats Latinisation as a path to communion.

The Ethiopian Catholic Church

There is an Ethiopian Catholic Church, a sui iuris Eastern Catholic Church of the Ge'ez rite in full communion with Rome, whose metropolitan see at Addis Ababa was erected in 1961. It celebrates the Ge'ez liturgy and keeps the Ethiopian tradition. The Eritrean Catholic Church was established as a metropolitan Church in its own right in 2015. These bodies are distinct from the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, and confusing the two is a common error. Our guide to the Eastern Catholic Churches in communion with Rome explains what sui iuris status means and lists the Churches.

What This Means for a Catholic in Practice

The Catholic column follows Unitatis Redintegratio 14 to 18, canon 844 of the 1983 Code of Canon Law and the 1993 Directory for the Application of Principles and Norms on Ecumenism. The Ethiopian column describes general practice and binds no diocese, since the Church governs its own discipline. Ask the local parish rather than assuming.

15. What a Catholic Reader Should Take From This

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church is a test case for how seriously a Catholic takes his own doctrine of the Church. Here is a body with apostolic succession, valid sacraments, sixteen centuries of continuous worship, a martyrology written in real blood, and a canon of 81 books against our 73. Everything convenient about the usual canon argument breaks on it, and everything true about the Catholic doctrine of the Church holds.

Three Things Worth Carrying Away

• The canon needed the Church. Three apostolic communities reading the same inherited material arrived at 66, 73 and 81 books. No book of the Bible lists the books of the Bible. The list came from the discernment of the Church, which is exactly what Catholic teaching has always said, and the Ethiopian 81 proves the point from an unexpected direction.
• Antiquity is not the same as authority. 1 Enoch is genuinely ancient, genuinely quoted by Jude, and genuinely outside the Catholic canon. Being old and being useful and even being cited by an apostle do not add up to being Scripture. Something has to judge, and the something is the Church Christ founded.
• Separated does not mean lost. The Ethiopian Church has kept the Trinity, the incarnation, the Theotokos, seven sacraments, a real priesthood and a real Eucharist through persecutions the Western Church has never faced. Catholic teaching calls that a communion that is profound though incomplete, and prayer for its completion is a duty laid on every Catholic.

The Practical Advice

If you live near an Ethiopian Orthodox parish, go and stand through a Qeddase. Take your shoes off at the door, stand where you are directed, do not approach for Communion, and do not photograph the tabot. You will hear a Eucharistic prayer from the fourth-century world, sung to a chant system older than Western notation, in a language that stopped being spoken before the Norman Conquest. Then read the deuterocanonical books you already own and have probably never opened, and read 1 Enoch afterwards as a historical document, and notice how differently the two feel.

The urgency in all of this is ordinary Christian urgency. No one knows the day or the hour (Mark 13:32), the time given to any of us is not disclosed, and the disciplines that form a soul, fasting, Scripture, the sacraments and prayer, are asked of you now. The Ethiopian Church has kept a fast of that seriousness for sixteen hundred years. Most Catholics reading this keep two days a year. That comparison is worth doing something about this week.

16. Related Topics