I suppose I'm deeply suspicious of Messianicism or any kind of Hebrew roots movement in general.
Okay. Why do you think either of those things have anything to do with Ethiopian Christianity, though? That's where I am confused. Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Christians, like all Orthodox and Christians more generally, fully accept and worship Jesus Christ as the Messiah and Son of God. Their Hebraic roots, so far as I understand them, have more to do with lines of royal descent from the legendary first Emperor, Menelik I, who Ethiopian legend identifies as the offspring of Queen Makeda (of Sheba) and King Solomon of Israel than with any kind of fidelity to Judaism as a religion. Rather, all of the Orthodox Tewahedo claim that this same line was continued
through the Emperor and the acceptance of Christianity as the religion of the empire. The Jews in Ethiopia had their own kingdoms established by their own rulers in other parts of the empire, and the two (the Jewish kingdom and the Axumite/Abyssinian/Ethiopian kingdoms) were often at war. Witness for instance that the one Jewish interlude in post-330 rule of Ethiopia came by the Queen Gudit (Judith), a Jewish queen who, with the backing of local pagans, attempted to overthrow the Axumite kings c. 960 and established a dynasty which lasted until Mara Takla Haymanot ended it in 1137, founding the Zagwe dynasty. The Zagwe dynasty was itself ended with its defeat by Emperor Yekuno Amlak, who is said to have 'restored' the Solomonic dynasty. Why is he said to have done that? To quote
Wikipedia on the Zagwe dynasty:
"Emperor Mara Tekla Haymanot's marriage and off-spring thereof makes him the only Emperor without known ties to the Biblical King Solomon and Makeda, the Queen of Sheba."
The emperors both before and after this time were all Orthodox Christians, as every emperor since 330 had been, but the Zagwe were not considered to be part of the Solomonic line because of a lack of ties of their founder to Menelik I, even though he overthrew the actually Jewish leader (usurper) of his time! A look into Ethiopian history and the relation of the Solomonic Dynasty to its Jewish subjects the Beta Israel shows no love lost between the two. In 1329, Emperor Amda Syon (enthronement name: Gebre Mesqel "Slave of the Cross") campaigned in the Northwestern provinces in which the Beta Israel lived and were apparently converting people to Judaism, ordering his troops to fight people "like Jews" (ከመ:አይሁድ
kama ayhud).
I find it fascinating that Ethiopian Christians hold onto so many Jewish celebrations but also merge that with a Christian understanding which is rooted in Nicaea. The emphasis in the aforementioned groups is to induce in Christians a sense that the Sabbath law and Kosher laws are still binding on Christians to us today and that to violate them is a sin. That's a sort of understanding I can't get behind simply from my reading of the New Testament (Galatians) and the early Church. If individual Ethiopians are allowed to abstain from those practices and be regarded as full members of the Church then I would have little problem with this particular emphasis.
The Ethiopian Orthodox liturgy also contains a portion in the preparatory service in which it is proclaimed "Therefore let us not be circumcised like the Jews; we know that He Who had to fulfill the law and the prophets has already come." Yet they also practice circumcision (since at least the 9th century, as testified to in biography of HH Pope Yusab I in
The History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria). In that case, it very well may be a Jewish influence, but as the liturgy as quoted above shows, it is not considered religiously binding. I assume that a lot of what they do that looks Jewish to outsiders might be considered similarly: Things that are kept or hypothesized as having been kept from ancient Jewish custom are given Christian interpretations not out of fidelity to Judaism as a religion, but out of an understanding that the coming of Christ is the fulfillment of the law of Moses.
I can find no fault in this, as of course all of our fathers have taught the same, whether they belong to the Ethiopians or any other community (since Christ our Lord said it Himself in Matthew 5:17). It's just that not all communities claim Jewish roots as a part of their imperial history as the descendants of the Axumites do. (The Copts don't say they were ever practitioners of Judaism, for instance, and yet the Orthodox Tewahedo are rightly known as the daughters of the Egyptian Church.)
Thank for you indulging me on the matter of Ethiopian saints. The reason I ask is because I think knowledge of a Church's saints tells us of it's character and what the people who adhere to it today believe.
Agreed.
Is this book you referenced?
http://www.stmichaeleoc.org/The_Ethiopian_Synaxarium.pdf It's quite large. What is it exactly? Is it like the Eastern Orthodox Synaxion? A book about the lives of the saints?
I don't know the Eastern Orthodox Synaxion (Synaxerion?), so I can't comment on that, but yes, it is a book of the lives of the saints.
Also are there any books by Ancient Ethiopian writers you are familiar with that represent the Ethiopian Church or do they share the same Coptic fathers equally as spiritual influences?
Both. There are Ethiopian books of this type, but they are difficult to find in English translation. The British Library's Endangered Archives project has sought to digitize the collection of Roger Cowley (a researcher on Ethiopian Church history who collected this material for 15 years in the country before his death in 1988) of the "Andemta" Biblical commentaries (see
here), though I'm not sure if they're actually accessible to laypeople or if they're just available to researchers. You can read about the digitization project at this
link. Those date from about the 14th century onward, so they aren't exactly ancient, but they do provide evidence of Biblical commentary as it had developed in Ethiopia up to that point. I'm afraid I don't know enough about the intricacies of the Ethiopian tradition to be able to say more than that. It is my understanding that a lot of earlier Ethiopic Christian literature is dependent on Coptic and Syriac sources (e.g., the Roger Pearse blog post mentions the existence of commentary of Mor Philoxenos of Mabbug found in the Andemta commentaries, and I know of manuscripts of Ge'ez-Coptic dictionaries dating from long after Coptic itself ceased to be spoken anywhere or used to produce new writings; they must've been using those dictionaries for something), so it is possible that it was not until a bit later that the Ethiopians developed their own unique genre of Biblical and Patristic commentary. Or it could be that earlier sources just aren't known outside of East Africa, or haven't preserved or properly identified (NB: the earlier-referenced Garima Gospels were once thought by western scholars to date to no earlier than the 11th century), or some other possibility. I really don't know.
The
Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium collection has
an Ethiopian series which translates ancient writings relevant to that tradition into European languages, though I can't comment on it or its contents, since I don't own anything from that series. I own a few volumes of the Coptic and Syriac series, though, and those are professional critical translations, so I assume that the Ethiopian series follows suit.
