The Garima Gospels of Ethiopia

On a hilltop east of the town of Adwa, in the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia, stands the monastery of Abba Garima, named after one of the holy men who, according to Ethiopian tradition, came to the kingdom of Aksum from the Roman world in the late fifth century. For many centuries the monks kept there a small group of Gospel books written in Ge’ez, the classical language of Ethiopia, and painted with portraits of the evangelists, ornamental canon tables and the image of a domed building. Local tradition held that the saint himself had written them in a single day. Scholars who first saw them in the twentieth century generally thought them medieval. Radiocarbon tests on their parchment, arranged by the Ethiopian Heritage Fund, have since placed the two oldest of them in Late Antiquity, and the Garima Gospels are now counted among the oldest illuminated Gospel books known anywhere.¹ Their story joins the conversion of an African kingdom in the fourth century, the hagiography of the Nine Saints, the photographic surveys and descriptive catalogues of the twentieth century, the conservation work of the early twenty-first, and the war that broke out in Tigray in 2020.

Christianity in the Kingdom of Aksum

Frumentius and the Bishops of Alexandria

The Kingdom of Aksum was one of the great powers of the late antique world, controlling the highlands of what are now northern Ethiopia and Eritrea and the trade of the southern Red Sea. Its conversion to Christianity in the fourth century is described by the church historian Socrates Scholasticus, who drew on the earlier account of Rufinus. In his telling, a Tyrian philosopher named Meropius travelled to “India”, as the ancient writers loosely called the lands of the Red Sea and beyond, with two young kinsmen. On the voyage the ship put in at a harbour at a time when relations with the Romans had broken down; the travellers were killed, except for the two boys, Edesius and Frumentius, who were taken to the king. Edesius became his cup-bearer and Frumentius was entrusted with the royal records.²

When the king died, Socrates continues, the queen asked the two young men to help govern during the minority of her son. Frumentius sought out Christians among the Roman merchants who traded in the country, encouraged them to establish places of worship and built a house of prayer. When the young king came of age, the two foreigners asked leave to return home. Edesius went back to Tyre, while Frumentius travelled to Alexandria and reported to the bishop, Athanasius, who had only recently taken office. He asked Athanasius to send a bishop and clergy. Athanasius, judging that no one was more suitable, consecrated Frumentius himself, who returned, preached, built churches and, in the historian’s words, performed various miracles. Rufinus, Socrates adds, said that he had heard these facts from Edesius himself, who was afterwards ordained a priest at Tyre.³

The story is confirmed in its essentials by Athanasius. In his defence addressed to the emperor Constantius II, written during his third exile in the 350s, Athanasius complained that letters had been sent to the princes of “Auxumis” demanding that “Frumentius, Bishop of Auxumis” be brought away, so that the clergy and people there might be compelled to communicate with the party Athanasius opposed.⁴ The episode shows that by the middle of the fourth century the church of Aksum was known in the imperial capital, that its bishop owed his consecration to Alexandria, and that it was drawn into the theological quarrels of the Roman empire.

King Ezana and the Christian Kingdom

The king in whose reign Christianity became the faith of the Aksumite court is usually identified as Ezana, whose coins and inscriptions show a transition from the symbols of the older religion to the cross. The new religion spread first among the court and the towns, and only gradually into the countryside. The Ethiopian church remembers this second phase of evangelisation, in the later fifth and sixth centuries, through the stories of foreign holy men who settled in the kingdom, founded monasteries and translated sacred books. The Garima Gospels belong, in the monastery’s own understanding, to this second phase.

The Bible of the Ethiopian church was translated into Ge’ez from Greek, and the Gospels were among the first books to be rendered. The Ethiopic version of the Gospels was long known only from manuscripts written many centuries after the translation, because Ethiopian books of any kind older than the twelfth century had not been securely identified. The Ethiopian Heritage Fund notes that before the Garima Gospels were dated, the language of Aksum was attested by only a few inscriptions on coins and stelae, and that the two oldest Garima books each contain roughly four hundred pages of text.⁵ Their dating therefore transformed not only the history of Ethiopian art but also the documentary basis for the history of the Ge’ez language and of the Ethiopic Bible.

Abba Garima in Tradition

The Nine Saints

In Ethiopian tradition the founders of monastic life in the country were the Nine Saints, holy men believed to have come from different parts of the eastern Roman empire around 480. The Ethiopian scholar Mersha Alehegne, summarising the tradition, notes that they are believed to have left their homelands because of religious controversy: they were opponents of the Council of Chalcedon and were persecuted by its supporters. Tradition holds that they were well received by the emperor Ǝllä ʿAmida and by the inhabitants of Aksum, and the most important monastic genealogies of Ethiopia are traced to one or another of them.⁶

According to the hagiography summarised by Mersha Alehegne, Abba Garima, whose baptismal name was Yǝsḥaq, or Isaac, was the son of an emperor of “Rome” named Mäsfǝyanos and his wife Säfängǝya, who had been barren until she prayed to the Virgin Mary. He grew up learning the books of the church and was ordained deacon. When his father died, the people made him emperor, and he ruled justly for seven years. He was then summoned by Abba Pänṭälewon, another of the Nine Saints, who told him to leave his throne and seek the kingdom of Christ. Yǝsḥaq became a monk, went with Pänṭälewon to Ethiopia, and lived for twenty-three years at a place called Mädära, east of Adwa, working signs and wonders, before he was caught up in a shining cloud and disappeared.⁷ The monastery that bears his name is also known as Däbrä Mädära, the mount of Mädära.

A Gospel Written in a Day

The tradition most closely tied to the manuscripts is that Abba Garima wrote the first Ethiopic Gospel himself, and wrote it in a single day. Mersha Alehegne recorded the local form of the story in interviews with monks and others connected with the monastery in October 2013. According to these informants, the saint wrote the Gospel on 17 Gǝnbot, which corresponds to 25 May, on a hill on the south side of the monastery called Betä Mäsqäl Mädära, “the house of the Cross”. When he had finished, he threw away his pen, a short pen of bamboo, because it was too worn to use again; it grew into a tall bamboo tree in whose shade his disciples sheltered from the sun. A former member of the community told Mersha Alehegne that students who wished to learn traditional calligraphy used to be advised to travel to the monastery and cut their pens from its bamboo, in the belief that they would learn more quickly.⁸

Other stories gathered in the same interviews connect the landscape of the monastery with the writing of the book. A rocky place to the north of the hill, from which a white fluid flows in the dry season, is said to mark where the saint’s saliva fell as he worked, and the fluid is regarded as holy water effective against diseases of the eye. One narrative, which Mersha Alehegne thought of particular interest to palaeographers and codicologists, tells that while the saint stepped away from his table a monkey sent by Satan mixed the red and black inks and scrawled on an open leaf, and that the scrawl can still be seen in one of the books. Another story explains the name Mädära through a mocking exchange between the saint and Satan, who had come to him disguised as a monk.⁹ A further tradition, recorded in the same study, relates that on the day of the coronation of King Gäbrä Mäsqäl the saint sowed wheat at dawn and reaped it in the evening; a fast-ripening variety of teff in the region is still named after him.¹⁰

These narratives are not historical evidence for the making of the books, and Mersha Alehegne presented them as orature, the traditions passed down orally through generations, which nonetheless often have direct or indirect relations with the written hagiography. They explain the reverence in which the Gospels have been held. Claire Wilmot, who visited the monastery in 2024, reported that the monks believe the books were written by Abune Garima himself, and that for centuries they had kept them inside the monastery, under the protection of the saint and of the surrounding mountains.¹¹

The Manuscripts

Three Books in Two Bindings

There are in fact three Gospel manuscripts at Abba Garima, and their numbering has caused confusion. In the review of the principal modern study, the Ethiopianist Alessandro Bausi explains that at the time of their first documentation and until 2006 the three books, which he calls AG I, AG II and AG III, were bound in two volumes, each with two metal covers. One volume contained mainly AG I, the other mainly AG II and AG III, and leaves from each of the three had been transposed between them, together with fragments from other manuscripts. The French scholar Jacques Mercier calls AG I and AG III “Garima 1” and “Garima 2” respectively, and this is the usage of the Ethiopian Heritage Fund. AG II, the third and latest of the books, is not one of the two late antique manuscripts.¹²

The Ethiopian Heritage Fund describes the two oldest books as large Gospel codices with about four hundred pages of text each. It notes that the texts of the two are quite different from one another, which shows that the translation on which they rest had already been revised by the time they were copied; their early date therefore suggests that the Ethiopic translation of the Gospels may be older than commonly believed.¹³ Both have metal covers, and the Fund records the view that one of them is contemporary with the manuscript itself, which would make it one of the oldest bookbindings known.¹⁴

The Gospel Text and Its Prefaces

Like the great Greek Gospel books of Late Antiquity, the Garima manuscripts open with prefatory material. The most important is the system devised in the fourth century by Eusebius of Caesarea for finding parallel passages among the four Gospels, the Eusebian canons. Eusebius explained the system in a letter to a certain Carpianus, and set out the parallels in tables in which the numbered sections of each Gospel are listed side by side. In the Garima books the letter and the tables are present in Ge’ez, the tables framed in painted arcades.¹⁵ In a codicological study published in 2022, Sergey Kim rearranged the sequence of the disordered leaves in detailed tables, proposed a new foliation and described each manuscript. He found original quire numbers, together with original and later liturgical annotations in the margins, among them rubrics in a rare unvocalised consonantal script, and he discussed the two subsidiary texts originally included in the books, a “Discourse on the Harmony of the Gospels” and the Letter to Carpianus.¹⁶

The textual study in the monograph by Judith McKenzie and Francis Watson, published by Manar al-Athar in Oxford in 2016, gives particular attention to these features. Bausi describes Watson’s chapter on texts and images as by far the best analysis so far of the Ethiopic canon tables and of the chapter titles, the tituli or kephalaia, and notes that Watson shows how the constraints of the canon-table frames sat in tension with the text they had to hold. Appendices to the volume give translations of a prefatory text on the agreement of the four Gospels attributed to John Chrysostom and of the preface of Pseudo-Ammonius, and an edition of the Letter to Carpianus in Greek and Ge’ez with an English translation.¹⁷ Bausi himself published a new edition of the Ethiopic version of the letter, based on a selection of the most ancient manuscripts including the Garima books, which appeared too late to be taken into account by McKenzie and Watson.¹⁸

The manuscripts are therefore witnesses to the earliest recoverable form of the Ethiopic Gospels. The comparison between the two late antique books, whose texts differ, provides evidence for revision of the Ge’ez version within its first centuries. Because the translation was made from Greek, the Garima text also has a place in the wider history of the Gospel text, alongside the early versions in Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Gothic and Armenian. The Gothic version, made in the fourth century and preserved above all in the sixth-century Codex Argenteus, offers the closest parallel in date and in the circumstances of a translation made for a newly converted people.

Marginal Notes and Land Charters

The margins and blank spaces of the books were used, in later centuries, for documents. The Ethiopian scholar Getatchew Haile, of the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota, edited and translated these notes for the Oxford conference of 2013. He worked from copies made on three occasions: first by Donald Davies, then by Jacques Mercier, and most recently by his own institution. He warned that some letters and words might be lost for ever unless a technology could be found to recover them, and that some people and many places named in the notes would remain unidentified. He described the notes as what might be called land charters, and stated plainly that none of them is a colophon.¹⁹ This conclusion matters for the dating debate, because the books contain no scribe’s note recording when, where or by whom they were written.

Getatchew Haile also observed that some leaves of one Gospel manuscript had been inadvertently rebound with another. Bausi, in turn, drew attention to the consequences for the citation of the notes: Getatchew Haile’s attribution of particular notes to particular manuscripts followed the arrangement made in the 2006 restoration, whereas several of the leaves in question had originally belonged to other books. In one case, Bausi noted, the 2006 restoration had placed a leaf the wrong way round, so that its recto and verso should be reversed.²⁰ Kim’s study added the edition, translation and historical commentary of three previously unpublished donation notes of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.²¹

The Paintings

Evangelists, Canon Tables and a Building

The illuminations are the reason the Garima Gospels became famous outside Ethiopia. The Ethiopian Heritage Fund describes Garima 1 as containing a complete cycle of ten decorated pages, comparable to those in the Syriac Rabbula Gospels, which are dated by their colophon to 586. It describes the illustrations of Garima 2 as having affinities with Coptic painting, perhaps providing the only testimony of Coptic canon-table decoration, and notes that Garima 2 also contains some very fine portraits of the evangelists.²² The canon tables are set under arches and columns, with birds and other ornament in the spandrels, and among the full-page images is a domed or round building, often interpreted as an image of the Temple or of a sacred building at Jerusalem.

McKenzie and Watson argued that the four portraits of the evangelists all belong to AG III, that is, to Garima 2, and that a fifth portrait represents Eusebius of Caesarea, a subject otherwise known, as Bausi notes, only in one other Ethiopian book and its replica in the British Library.²³ Their central thesis, as Bausi summarises it, is that the early date of two of the three manuscripts is consistent with an apparently Alexandrian, that is Egyptian, connection in the motifs of the illuminations, but that an original contribution by Aksumite artists can also be shown. Examples include the depiction of Ethiopian birds in the canon tables, the subject of a separate note in the volume by Linda Macaulay, and certain architectural details.²⁴

Syria, Egypt and Aksum

The first scholar to document the paintings, the French scholar Jules Leroy, stressed their connections with Syrian and Byzantine art in the 1960s. McKenzie and Watson firmly rejected this in favour of an Egyptian connection.²⁵ The change reflects both the new dating and a broader re-examination of the art of Late Antique Egypt, but it also bears on the question of where the books were made. The Ethiopian Heritage Fund reported Jacques Mercier’s argument, presented at the 2013 conference, that a common grid of scored lines underlies both the paintings and the text; if the illustrations and the writing were laid out together, the paintings were not imported leaves but were made in the same workshop as the text, and a school of painting and a workshop for manuscripts must have existed in Aksum in Late Antiquity.²⁶

The Rabbula Gospels, written in Syriac in a monastery in Mesopotamia and now in Florence, had long been the earliest securely dated Gospel book with a full programme of illumination. Other illuminated biblical books of the sixth century, such as the purple Rossano Gospels and the Vienna Genesis, are undated and are placed in the sixth century on grounds of style. If the radiocarbon ranges for the Garima books are accepted, and if the paintings are contemporary with the parchment, Garima 2 is probably older than the Rabbula Gospels, and both Garima books belong to the same broad period as the other great illuminated books of the eastern Mediterranean. In the West, the comparable monuments, such as the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Codex Amiatinus, belong to the years around 700.

From Medieval to Late Antique

The History of Research

The rediscovery of the books by outside scholars was slow. According to Bausi, the Garima Gospels were vaguely hinted at in the 1950s by the British painter Beatrice Playne and first documented in the 1960s by Jules Leroy. Only with the photographs taken by Donald Davies in 1968 and the reliable and detailed description published by William F. Macomber in 1979 were the three manuscripts made available to scholars, who could then use them for the history of art, philology and palaeography.²⁷

Opinions on their date diverged widely. The art historian Marilyn Heldman suggested, at least for some sections, an early date in the sixth century, and Claude Lepage likewise assigned them to the sixth century or later. The philologists and palaeographers Siegbert Uhlig and Rochus Zuurmond, on the other hand, proposed a date around the twelfth or thirteenth century, while others proposed dates from the eighth century onwards.²⁸ The divergence was not surprising. No Ethiopian manuscript older than the twelfth century had been securely dated, the development of Ge’ez script before that period was poorly known, and the books contain no colophon. Art historians who compared the paintings with late antique works elsewhere were inclined to an early date; palaeographers who compared the script with dated Ethiopian books of the high Middle Ages inclined to a later one.

The Radiocarbon Evidence

The decisive evidence came from the parchment itself. Bausi records that the early dating of AG III, Mercier’s Garima 2, had been proposed in a contribution by Jacques Mercier in 2000, and that it was confirmed by a new analysis carried out in 2012 on both AG I, dated to 530–660, and AG III, dated to 330–650. The results were announced by Mercier at the conference “Ethiopia and the Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity: The Garima Gospels in Context”, sponsored by the Ethiopian Heritage Fund and held in Oxford on 2 and 3 November 2013.²⁹ The Ethiopian Heritage Fund, which organised the second set of tests, reports the results as AD 390–570 for Garima 2 and AD 550–660 for Garima 1; on another of its pages it gives the range for Garima 1 as beginning in 530.³⁰ The Fund states that the two sets of radiocarbon analysis securely assign the books to the late fifth to early seventh centuries, and that the dating applies both to their illustrations and to their text.³¹

The ranges are wide, as radiocarbon ranges for parchment usually are, and the published figures differ slightly between sources. They do not by themselves fix the date at which the books were written, since a skin may be prepared some years before it is used. What the results do exclude is the medieval date proposed by the palaeographers. Together with Mercier’s argument that the paintings and text were laid out together, they place the two older Garima Gospels in the Aksumite period and make them the earliest surviving Ethiopian manuscripts, and among the oldest illuminated Gospel books in existence.³²

The Oxford Conference and the Monograph

The Oxford conference of 2013 marked the entry of the Garima Gospels into the mainstream of late antique studies. Its proceedings were not published as a volume, although several papers appeared separately, including Getatchew Haile’s edition of the marginal notes and Mersha Alehegne’s study of the oral traditions in the journal Aethiopica.³³ The fullest study is the monograph by Judith McKenzie and Francis Watson, The Garima Gospels: Early Illuminated Gospel Books from Ethiopia, with a preface and photographs by Michael Gervers and contributions by Matthew R. Crawford, Linda R. Macaulay, Sarah S. Norodom, Andres T. Reyes and Miranda E. Williams.³⁴

Because the post-restoration photographs distributed by Mercier were still subject to restrictions, McKenzie and Watson used the photographs taken by Michael Gervers between 2000 and 2005, before the restoration, and followed Macomber’s numbering of the leaves while suggesting improvements to the reconstruction of their sequence. Bausi notes that an additional set of digital reproductions of the restored manuscripts had been acquired by the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library and made publicly available to some extent. The volume contains fifty-two full-page plates that reconstruct the sequence of illustrated pages in each manuscript, in order from the oldest to the latest: AG III in plates 1 to 26, AG I in plates 27 to 42 and AG II in plates 43 to 52, including the covers.³⁵ In Bausi’s judgement, the book, like the Oxford conference, had the historical merit of relocating Ethiopian studies in the world of Late Antiquity, where they rightly belong.³⁶

Conservation

The Work of the Ethiopian Heritage Fund

The Ethiopian Heritage Fund, a British charity, began its programme to conserve the two oldest manuscripts in October 2006. In that year the conservator Lester Capon and Mark Winstanley went to the monastery to carry out the first phase, which was mainly concerned with Garima 1. The binding was undone, the illustrated pages were conserved, the gilded binding was repaired and the book was rebound.³⁷ Bausi observes that this restoration finally separated the three manuscripts and established the presumably correct sequence of their leaves, although not without some evident errors.³⁸

Capon returned in 2012 with Julian Pendlebury. The main purpose of this visit was to ensure that the pages of Garima 2 were correctly ordered, since over the years pages had become loose or had been bound in the wrong place. Daniel Seife-Michael, the patriarch’s representative, read the Ge’ez text and identified each page and its correct position. Some pages were reversed and some misplaced, and there were also pages from Garima 1 in Garima 2. Once the order had been established, the binders opened the relevant sections and moved the pages to their correct places, in some cases creating vellum guards to strengthen the binding and protect the leaves. Vellum endpapers were added and the old boards were reattached.³⁹ The Fund noted that further work on Garima 1 remained to be done.⁴⁰

A Living Liturgical Object

The conservation of the Garima Gospels was carried out at the monastery and in the presence of the church authorities, not in a laboratory abroad. The books are not museum objects but sacred relics, venerated by local Christians and still used in the life of the monastery.⁴¹ The Ethiopian Heritage Fund describes them as books that the faithful continue to venerate, and the traditions recorded by Mersha Alehegne show how closely the books are bound to the identity of the monastery and of the surrounding farming communities, which regard Abba Garima as a protector of their fields and livestock.⁴² This status has shaped access to them. Photographs have been taken on only a few occasions, and the chief sets of images, those of Davies, Gervers, Mercier and the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library, are the basis of all modern study.⁴³

The Gospels in Wartime

Hidden in the Mountains

In November 2020 war broke out in Tigray between the Ethiopian federal government, supported by Eritrean forces, and the regional authorities. In 2021 The Globe and Mail reported that the fate of the monastery and its Gospels was unknown, since the region was cut off by fighting and telecommunications shutdowns and the area around the monastery was controlled by soldiers who had looted systematically. Michael Gervers told the newspaper that the war had inflicted more destruction on Ethiopia’s religious and cultural heritage than anything since the invasions of Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi in the sixteenth century, and that he and his colleagues were monitoring the antiquities market in case looters tried to sell the manuscripts. The ethnohistorian Wolbert Smidt pointed out that in past conflicts the monks had hidden the books, possibly in mountain caves, and that they might have succeeded in doing so again.⁴⁴

They had. The journalist Claire Wilmot, writing for New Lines Magazine after visits in January and October 2024, reported that in late November 2020, under cover of darkness, a monk named Father Gebretsadik carried the Gospels, in their cases of thick brown leather, out of the monastery and into hiding, for the first time in recorded history. Two weeks into the war, Eritrean forces reached the monastery, more than twenty-four miles south of their border, and looted or destroyed what they found; for the next two years Eritrean soldiers used it periodically as a base. In November 2022, days before the peace agreement, 113 civilians were killed by retreating Eritrean soldiers, according to the testimony of sixteen eyewitnesses and records kept by the monks.⁴⁵

An Uncertain Return

By October 2024 the monks had begun to visit the books in their hiding place. “We know now that the Gospels are safe,” Father Gebretsadik told Wilmot, but the location remained a closely guarded secret known to only a few monks. Other treasures of the monastery, including objects from the Aksumite period, had been hidden with them and had not been returned. The Gospels, Wilmot reported, would come back to the monastery only when the monks believed that peace would last, and at the time of her visits banditry was rising and there were rumours of renewed war.⁴⁶ The history of the books, which have survived invasions, rebindings and centuries of daily veneration, now includes a period of exile in the mountains around Adwa, the region where Ethiopian armies defeated Italy at the Battle of Adwa in 1896.

Why the Garima Gospels Matter

For the History of the Bible

For the history of the Bible, the Garima Gospels provide the earliest direct evidence for the Gospels in Ge’ez. They show that the Ethiopic version existed, and had already undergone revision, within the period of the kingdom of Aksum, and they preserve the Eusebian apparatus and prefatory texts that accompanied the Gospels in the Greek world.⁴⁷ They belong to the same world of late antique Gospel books as the great Greek codices, such as Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Alexandrinus, which also carry the Eusebian section numbers, and as the early versions made for other Christian peoples, from the Latin Vulgate to the Syriac Peshitta.

The Garima books also illustrate a theme that runs through the history of the biblical text: the gap between the date of a translation and the date of its oldest surviving copies. Before the radiocarbon results, the Ethiopic Gospels were known from manuscripts many centuries younger than the translation, and the earliest phases of the version could only be reconstructed. The two Garima books now place copies of the text within perhaps two centuries of the conversion of Aksum, and their differences provide material for reconstructing the history of the version itself.⁴⁸

For the History of Art and of Africa

For the history of art, the Garima Gospels are among the oldest illuminated Gospel books in existence and among the earliest surviving evidence of Christian painting in the Horn of Africa. Their evangelist portraits and canon tables connect Aksum with the artistic traditions of Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean, while the Ethiopian birds and architectural details in the canon tables, identified by McKenzie, Watson and Macaulay, show that the painters were not merely copying foreign models.⁴⁹ If Mercier’s argument about the shared ruling of text and image is accepted, a workshop capable of producing large illuminated books existed in Aksum in Late Antiquity.⁵⁰

Above all, the Garima Gospels have changed the place of Ethiopia in the history of early Christianity. The monastery’s books, kept for centuries as relics of its founder and dismissed by many twentieth-century scholars as medieval, are now among the principal monuments of the Aksumite past. Bausi’s verdict on the modern study of the books, that it relocated Ethiopian studies in the world of Late Antiquity, applies equally to the manuscripts themselves.⁵¹ Their survival has depended on the monks who kept them, on the scholars who photographed and described them, on the conservators who repaired them and, most recently, on the few who carried them into the mountains in 2020 and have kept their hiding place secret since.⁵²

Notes

1. Ethiopian Heritage Fund, “Garima Gospels: the Garima Gospels in context”. ↩
2. Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History 1.19, online text. ↩
3. Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History 1.19, online text. ↩
4. Athanasius, Apology to Constantius 29, online text. ↩
5. Ethiopian Heritage Fund, “Garima Gospels: the Garima Gospels in context”. ↩
6. Mersha Alehegne, “Orature on Literature”, 52–53. ↩
7. Mersha Alehegne, “Orature on Literature”, 52–53. ↩
8. Mersha Alehegne, “Orature on Literature”, 53–55. ↩
9. Mersha Alehegne, “Orature on Literature”, 53–55. ↩
10. Mersha Alehegne, “Orature on Literature”, 55–56. ↩
11. Wilmot, “In Search of Ethiopia’s Garima Gospels”. ↩
12. Bausi, review of McKenzie and Watson, 289. ↩
13. Ethiopian Heritage Fund, “Garima Gospels: the Garima Gospels in context”. ↩
14. Ethiopian Heritage Fund, “Garima Gospels: the Garima Gospels in context”. ↩
15. Kim, “New Studies of the Structure and the Texts of Abba Garima Ethiopian Gospels”, abstract. ↩
16. Kim, “New Studies of the Structure and the Texts of Abba Garima Ethiopian Gospels”, abstract. ↩
17. Bausi, review of McKenzie and Watson, 290–291. ↩
18. Bausi, review of McKenzie and Watson, 291–292. ↩
19. Getatchew Haile, “The Marginal Notes in the Abba Gärima Gospels”, introduction. ↩
20. Bausi, review of McKenzie and Watson, 289–290. ↩
21. Kim, “New Studies of the Structure and the Texts of Abba Garima Ethiopian Gospels”, abstract. ↩
22. Ethiopian Heritage Fund, “Garima Gospels: the Garima Gospels in context”. ↩
23. Bausi, review of McKenzie and Watson, 290–291. ↩
24. Bausi, review of McKenzie and Watson, 290–291. ↩
25. Bausi, review of McKenzie and Watson, 289. ↩
26. Ethiopian Heritage Fund, “Garima Gospels: the Garima Gospels in context”. ↩
27. Bausi, review of McKenzie and Watson, 289. ↩
28. Bausi, review of McKenzie and Watson, 289. ↩
29. Bausi, review of McKenzie and Watson, 289. ↩
30. Ethiopian Heritage Fund, “Project 3: the Abuna Garima Gospels”. ↩
31. Ethiopian Heritage Fund, “Garima Gospels: the Garima Gospels in context”. ↩
32. Ethiopian Heritage Fund, “Garima Gospels: the Garima Gospels in context”. ↩
33. Bausi, review of McKenzie and Watson, 289–290. ↩
34. Alessandro Bausi, review of Judith S. McKenzie and Francis Watson, The Garima Gospels: Early Illuminated Gospel Books from Ethiopia (Oxford: Manar al-Athar, 2016), Aethiopica 20 (2017), 289–292. ↩
35. Bausi, review of McKenzie and Watson, 289–290. ↩
36. Bausi, review of McKenzie and Watson, 291–292. ↩
37. Ethiopian Heritage Fund, “Garima Gospels: the Garima Gospels in context”. ↩
38. Bausi, review of McKenzie and Watson, 289. ↩
39. Ethiopian Heritage Fund, “Project 3: the Abuna Garima Gospels”. ↩
40. Ethiopian Heritage Fund, “Garima Gospels: the Garima Gospels in context”. ↩
41. Ethiopian Heritage Fund, “Garima Gospels: the Garima Gospels in context”. ↩
42. Mersha Alehegne, “Orature on Literature”, 55–56. ↩
43. Getatchew Haile, “The Marginal Notes in the Abba Gärima Gospels”, introduction. ↩
44. “Where are the Garima Gospels? In Ethiopia, scholars fear the worst for one of Christianity’s oldest manuscripts”, The Globe and Mail, 2021. ↩
45. Wilmot, “In Search of Ethiopia’s Garima Gospels”. ↩
46. Wilmot, “In Search of Ethiopia’s Garima Gospels”. ↩
47. Ethiopian Heritage Fund, “Garima Gospels: the Garima Gospels in context”. ↩
48. Ethiopian Heritage Fund, “Garima Gospels: the Garima Gospels in context”. ↩
49. Bausi, review of McKenzie and Watson, 290–291. ↩
50. Ethiopian Heritage Fund, “Garima Gospels: the Garima Gospels in context”. ↩
51. Bausi, review of McKenzie and Watson, 291–292. ↩
52. Wilmot, “In Search of Ethiopia’s Garima Gospels”. ↩