Christianity in Ethiopia: From the Ethiopian Eunuch to the Tewahedo Church

Ethiopia is one of the oldest Christian nations on earth. Its Church had bishops before most of Europe had heard the gospel, it keeps a liturgy in the ancient Ge'ez language, carved churches out of solid rock, and preserved books that survive complete nowhere else. Yet many Christians in the West know almost nothing about it, and many people still assume that Christianity reached Africa with European missionaries.

This article tells the story from the Ethiopian official in Acts 8 to the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church today. It separates what the ancient documents show from what later tradition remembers, describes the Ethiopian Church's faith as its own members would recognise it, and explains honestly where it stands with the Eastern Orthodox Church.

In brief

The Ethiopian Church traces its origins to the official baptized by Philip in Acts 8, though that "Ethiopian" came from the kingdom of Kush (Nubia), south of Egypt, not from the highlands of modern Ethiopia. The documented beginning of the Church in the kingdom of Aksum is the mission of Frumentius, a Christian from Tyre whom St Athanasius of Alexandria consecrated bishop in the fourth century. A letter of the emperor Constantius to the Aksumite rulers Aezanes and Sazanes confirms it, and King Ezana's coins replaced pagan symbols with the cross. Later tradition credits the "Nine Saints" with spreading monasticism, though their written lives are medieval. The rock churches of Lalibela are attributed to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, though some parts may be older. For most of its history the Church received its archbishop from the Coptic Church of Alexandria, until it gained autocephaly and its own patriarch in 1959. It belongs to the Oriental Orthodox family, which did not accept the Council of Chalcedon (451), and keeps a canon of 81 books including Enoch and Jubilees. Dialogue with the Eastern Orthodox has produced agreed statements on Christ, though full communion has not been restored.

Thesis: Ethiopian Christianity is an ancient, independent and deeply biblical African tradition, documented from the fourth century, which Eastern Orthodox Christians should honour as close kin, while holding that the Council of Chalcedon, which it does not accept, expresses the Orthodox faith, and that the division of 451 must be healed in that faith.

The Ethiopian in Acts 8

Luke tells how Philip met "a man of Ethiopia, a eunuch of great authority under Candace the queen of the Ethiopians, who had charge of all her treasury." He was reading Isaiah in his chariot. Philip "preached Jesus to him," and when they came to water the official said, "See, here is water. What hinders me from being baptized?" After the baptism "he went on his way rejoicing" (Acts 8:27-39, NKJV).¹

Ethiopian Christians see this as the first seed of their Church, and the Church's own description begins there.² In Greek, "Ethiopia" meant the lands south of Egypt. The translators' notes of the NET Bible explain that "Candace" was a royal title, and that "Ethiopia refers to the kingdom of Nubia in the northern Sudan, whose capital was Meroe," which is "not to be confused with Abyssinia, which was later called Ethiopia and converted to Christianity in the 4th century."³ So the official was probably a Nubian. That does not make the story irrelevant to Ethiopia: it shows that from the first generation the gospel was carried by an African believer, and that Psalm 68:31, "Ethiopia will quickly stretch out her hands to God" (NKJV), was read as being fulfilled.⁴ But the Church of Aksum has a documented beginning of its own, three centuries later.

Aksum, Frumentius and King Ezana

A great kingdom

In late antiquity the kingdom of Aksum, in what is now northern Ethiopia and Eritrea, was, in UNESCO's words, "the most powerful state between the Eastern Roman Empire and Persia." Its capital still has monumental stone stelae from the third and fourth centuries and stone inscriptions, some of them trilingual in Greek, Sabaean and Ge'ez, set up by King Ezana in the fourth century.⁵

The story of Frumentius

The Latin church historian Rufinus told how Christianity came to the court, and Socrates Scholasticus repeated the account in Greek in the fifth century. A philosopher from Tyre, Meropius, sailed south with two young relatives, Frumentius and Edesius. Their ship was seized at a harbour and everyone was killed except the two boys, who were taken to the king. Edesius became cup-bearer and Frumentius keeper of the royal records. When the king died, the queen asked them to help govern for her young son. Frumentius sought out Christian merchants and encouraged them to set up places of prayer. When the prince came of age, Frumentius went to Alexandria, told "Athanasius the bishop" what had happened, and asked for a bishop to be sent. Athanasius replied that no one was more suitable than Frumentius himself, consecrated him, and sent him back, where he "built several churches." Socrates adds that Rufinus "heard these facts from Edesius," who later became a priest at Tyre.⁶

Socrates, following Rufinus, calls the country "interior India," a loose geographical name. The Orthodox Church in America's life of St Frumentius, "Archbishop of Inda (Ethiopia, formerly Abyssinia)," identifies it with Abyssinia, and keeps his memory on November 30. Ethiopians call him Abba Salama, which the Church renders "Father of Peace," with the title "Revealer of Light."⁷

A contemporary witness

What makes the Frumentius story more than legend is a document from the time. St Athanasius preserved a letter of the emperor Constantius, then hostile to Athanasius, addressed to Aezanes and Sazanes, the "Princes of Auxumis" (Aksum). The emperor demands that "the Bishop Frumentius" be sent to Egypt to be examined by George, the bishop then holding Alexandria while Athanasius was deprived of his see, because Frumentius "was advanced to his present rank by Athanasius." He fears that otherwise the exiled Athanasius's influence might "pass over into Auxumis and corrupt your people."⁸ The letter shows that a bishop consecrated by Athanasius was at work in Aksum, that its ruler Aezanes is evidently the Ezana of the inscriptions and coins, and that the young Ethiopian Church was caught up in the struggle over the Nicene faith. {{very-strong: A Christian bishop, Frumentius, consecrated by Athanasius, was active in the kingdom of Aksum by the middle of the fourth century.}}

The cross on the coins

Aksum minted its own coins. Numismatist Mike Markowitz notes that King Ezana, who reigned about 330 to 356, was "the last pagan ruler" and that "Ezana's conversion to Christianity was reflected on the coins": early issues bear the pagan crescent and disc, later ones the cross, "possibly the first use of this symbol on coins anywhere."⁹ Under Ezana, Christianity became the established faith of the kingdom; how quickly it spread beyond the court is far less well documented.¹⁰

The Nine Saints and the growth of the Church

The Ethiopian Church remembers that, about 150 years after Frumentius, nine holy monks came "from the Middle East and Asia Minor," introduced monastic life, translated religious books into Ge'ez, and taught "the One-person, One-nature doctrine of St Cyril."¹¹ They are honoured by name, among them Abba Zemika'el Aregawi, Abba Gerima (Garima), Abba P'entelewon and Abba Yem'ata.¹⁰

Here the evidence needs care. A research project at the University of Hamburg summarises the work of Antonella Brita: the lives of the Nine Saints, "though speaking about Late Antiquity, are actually medieval productions," and "they do not seem to contain reliable historical information about Late Antiquity." They were written partly to give later monasteries an ancient foundation story.¹² That does not mean the saints never existed, only that the details of their lives cannot be checked.

Two illustrated Gospel books kept at the monastery of Abba Garima, long thought to be no older than the twelfth century, were radiocarbon-dated at Oxford to between 330 and 650. The French specialist Jacques Mercier suggests about 600. Tradition says Abba Garima brought them in 494.¹³ If the dating holds, they are among the oldest illustrated Christian books in the world.

A refuge for the first Muslims

Ethiopia also appears in early Islamic history. Sahih al-Bukhari includes a chapter on "the emigration to Ethiopia," in which a companion of Muhammad recalls how "our ship took us away to An-Najashi (the Negus) in Ethiopia," and another report says that when the Najashi died, Muhammad announced his death and led a funeral prayer for him.¹⁴ Some of the first Muslims thus found shelter in a Christian kingdom, and the episode is a reminder that Ethiopian Christianity and Islam have lived side by side, not always in peace, for fourteen centuries. See How Did Christianity Survive Under Islamic Rule?

Lalibela, the Ark and the Solomonic tradition

In the mountains of central Ethiopia stand eleven churches carved downward out of the living rock. UNESCO attributes them to King Lalibela, who set out "to construct in the 12th century a 'New Jerusalem', after Muslim conquests halted Christian pilgrimages to the holy Land"; its summary calls them "this 13th-century 'New Jerusalem'." A stream there is called the Jordan, and one church holds replicas of Christ's tomb.¹⁵ UNESCO describes Lalibela as still "a high place of Ethiopian Christianity" and a place of pilgrimage. The archaeologist David Phillipson has argued that some of the rock-cut structures are centuries older and were first cut for other purposes, with the complex taking its final form by the mid-thirteenth century.

Two further traditions shape Ethiopian identity. The Kebra Nagast ("Glory of the Kings"), committed to writing in the fourteenth century from older traditions, tells how Menelik (Menyelek), son of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, took the Ark of the Covenant to Ethiopia.¹⁶ The church of St Mary of Zion at Aksum is, as UNESCO puts it, "believed to hold the Ark of the Covenant." No outsider may enter the building where it is kept, so the claim cannot be examined, and scholars generally doubt it. Every Ethiopian church, however, is consecrated by a tabot, a tablet representing the tablets of the Law, which is carried in procession on feast days.¹⁷ These traditions are treasured; they are not historical evidence in the way Constantius's letter is.

Trials, Rome and independence

The Church's own history speaks of great suffering: the reign of Queen Yodit in the ninth century, the sixteenth-century invasion of "Mohammed the Left-Handed," and the struggle against Mussolini's invasion (1935 to 1940 in the Church's account), when "several bishops, many priests and thousands of faithful lost their lives" and more than 2,000 churches were destroyed.¹⁸

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Jesuit missionaries sought to bring Ethiopia into union with Rome. Emperor Susenyos embraced Roman Catholicism, and in 1626, with the Jesuit patriarch Afonso Mendes, publicly acknowledged the pope's primacy and made Catholicism the state religion, but he met fierce resistance and abdicated in 1632 in favour of his son Fasilides, who restored the Orthodox faith and the link with Alexandria and expelled the Jesuits.¹⁹ The Ethiopian Church remembers this as persecution "at the hands of the Jesuit Alphonzo Mendez and his followers"; an attempt to impose a faith by royal decree is something Christians of every tradition can regret.

For most of its history the Ethiopian Church received its archbishop (the abuna) from the Coptic Patriarch of Alexandria, always an Egyptian. An agreement in 1948 began the move to self-government; in 1951 Abune Basilyos became the first Ethiopian-born archbishop to head the Church, and in 1959 Coptic Pope Cyril VI enthroned him as the first Patriarch of Ethiopia.²⁰ (The Church's WCC entry dates autocephaly to 1950.) After the revolution of 1974 the Marxist Derg government seized church property, and in 1976 it arrested Patriarch Abune Tewoflos, who was secretly executed in 1979.²¹ After Eritrea's independence, the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church became a separate church with the Coptic Church's blessing and the Ethiopian Church's reluctant consent.²²

Faith and worship of the Tewahedo Church

"Tewahedo": made one

Tewahedo is a Ge'ez word meaning "being made one." It expresses the Church's confession that in Christ the divinity and humanity are united in one nature, following St Cyril of Alexandria's formula "one nature of the incarnate Logos."²³ The Church's WCC entry describes it as sharing "the same faith with the Coptic, Syrian and Armenian Orthodox Churches and the Syrian Orthodox Church of India," the family usually called Oriental Orthodox.²⁴ They do not follow Eutyches: the 1990 agreed statement records that the Oriental Orthodox "acknowledge the double consubstantiality of the Logos which Eutyches denied," that is, that Christ is of one essence with the Father in his divinity and with us in his humanity.²⁵

Scripture and liturgy

The Ethiopian Church has "81 canonical books and 14 anaphoras" (Eucharistic prayers), and its liturgy is in Ge'ez, with portions now in Amharic.²⁶ Its Old Testament includes the Septuagint books and also 1 Enoch, Jubilees and three books of Meqabyan (different from Maccabees); its wider New Testament adds church-order books such as the Sinodos.²⁷ The Book of Enoch, quoted in Jude, survives complete only in Ge'ez thanks to Ethiopian scribes; see What Is the Book of Enoch, and Why Does Jude Quote It?

Fasting and biblical customs

Ethiopian Christians keep seven fasting periods, beginning with "all Wednesdays and Fridays (except during the 50 days after Easter)," as the earliest Christians did in the Didache.²⁸ Many customs echo the Old Testament: worshippers remove their shoes in church (Exodus 3:5), the Sabbath is honoured alongside the Lord's Day, with more emphasis on Sunday because of the Resurrection, and food laws close to those of the Law are kept.²⁹ Outsiders have sometimes called this "Judaizing." Ethiopian Christians see it as faithfulness to the whole of Scripture, held within the confession of Christ.

Ethiopia and the Eastern Orthodox Church

The Eastern Orthodox and the Ethiopian Church were one Church until the aftermath of the Council of Chalcedon in 451. Eastern Orthodoxy receives Chalcedon's definition of Christ "in two natures" as the Fourth Ecumenical Council; the Oriental Orthodox Churches, including Ethiopia, rejected it as a betrayal of St Cyril. The Orthodox Church holds that Chalcedon faithfully confessed St Cyril's own faith and is the Fourth Ecumenical Council, binding on the whole Church. The history and theology are set out in our articles What Did the Council of Chalcedon Actually Define? and Eastern Orthodoxy vs. Oriental Orthodoxy, so only essentials are given here.

In the official dialogue between the two families, the Second Agreed Statement (Chambésy, 1990) said that "both families have always loyally maintained the same authentic Orthodox Christological faith, and the unbroken continuity of the apostolic tradition, though they have used Christological terms in different ways." The Eastern Orthodox agreed that the Oriental Orthodox may keep the formula "one nature of the incarnate Logos," which "the Orthodox also use," and both sides recommended that past anathemas be lifted, each Church deciding how.²⁵ These statements are the work of theologians; the Churches have not yet acted on them together, and questions about the later councils and about saints each side has condemned remain open. {{strong: The official Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox dialogue has declared a common faith in Christ in different terms, but full communion has not been restored.}}

The Eastern Orthodox Church already honours Ethiopia's first bishop, St Frumentius, as a saint consecrated by St Athanasius, and St Moses the Black, remembered as an Ethiopian, as one of the great desert fathers (see Who Was St Moses the Black?). These are shared roots.

The strongest objections

"The Ethiopian Church goes straight back to Acts 8."

Many Ethiopian Christians hold this, and the Church's own account begins there. The NET Bible's note shows that the official most likely came from Nubia. The stronger claim for Ethiopia's antiquity rests on the fourth-century evidence: Athanasius, Constantius's letter and Ezana's coins.

"The Ethiopians are Monophysite heretics."

This has been said by Chalcedonian writers for centuries. But the Ethiopian Church condemns Eutyches, confesses Christ as perfect God and perfect man, and follows St Cyril, whom the Eastern Orthodox also venerate. The 1990 statement, signed by Eastern Orthodox theologians, judged the two Christologies the same faith in different words. The Orthodox position is that this agreement must still be received by the Churches, and that Chalcedon and the later Ecumenical Councils, which the Oriental Orthodox have not received, remain the measure of the faith; but it is no longer honest simply to call the Ethiopians heretics who deny Christ's humanity.

"Ethiopian Christianity is half Jewish."

The Ethiopian Church's Old Testament customs are distinctive, and Eastern Orthodox Christians do not share all of them. But it confesses the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, baptism and the Eucharist. Its customs are a reading of Scripture, not a denial of the gospel, and the Didache shows that Jewish patterns of fasting and prayer shaped the earliest Church too.

"Christianity in Africa is a colonial import."

Ethiopia refutes this directly. Its Church was founded in the fourth century, under an African king, through a bishop consecrated in Africa by an African patriarch, and it resisted both European missionaries and a European invasion.

What we can say confidently

• Acts 8 describes the baptism of an official from "Ethiopia," most likely Nubia (Kush), not Aksum.
• Frumentius, consecrated by Athanasius, was bishop in Aksum by the mid-fourth century, as Constantius's letter to Aezanes and Sazanes shows.
• King Ezana's coins changed from pagan symbols to the cross, and Christianity became the established faith of Aksum in his reign.
• UNESCO attributes the Lalibela rock churches to King Lalibela in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
• The Ethiopian Church received its archbishops from Alexandria until it gained autocephaly and its own patriarch (1959).
• It is an Oriental Orthodox Church with a canon of 81 books.

What remains disputed

• The exact date of Ezana's conversion and of Frumentius's consecration.
• Who the Nine Saints were and when they came, since their lives are medieval.
• The date of the Garima Gospels within the radiocarbon range.
• Whether parts of the Lalibela complex are centuries older than King Lalibela.
• The Kebra Nagast's account of Menelik and the claim that the Ark is at Aksum.
• How and when the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox agreed statements will be received and anathemas lifted.

Conclusion

The Ethiopian Church kept the faith for sixteen centuries on the edge of the Christian world, often isolated, often under attack, and never dependent on European protection. It carved churches out of mountains, copied books the rest of Christendom lost, and kept the fasts the earliest Christians kept. For Eastern Orthodox Christians it is not a foreign religion but an ancient Church, separated from Orthodox communion since 451 over how to confess the one Christ, true God and true man; the Orthodox Church holds that Chalcedon's confession of Him in two natures is the true expression of that faith. The Psalm Ethiopians love describes the Church's posture still: "Ethiopia will quickly stretch out her hands to God." Orthodox Christians can pray that the hands stretched out in Aksum and in Constantinople will one day meet again at one altar, in the one Orthodox faith.

Notes

1. Acts 8:26-39 (NKJV).
2. World Council of Churches, "Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church," member church profile, https://www.oikoumene.org/member-churches/ethiopian-orthodox-tewahedo-church; OrthodoxWiki, "Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church," https://orthodoxwiki.org/Ethiopian_Orthodox_Tewahedo_Church.
3. NET Bible, translators' note on Acts 8:27, https://biblia.com/bible/gs-netbible/acts/8/26-29.
4. Psalm 68:31 (NKJV).
5. UNESCO World Heritage Centre, "Aksum," https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/15/.
6. Socrates Scholasticus, Church History 1.19, trans. A. C. Zenos, NPNF2 2, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/26011.htm; compare Sozomen, Church History 2.24, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/26022.htm. Socrates' source is Rufinus, Church History 10.9-10 (Latin; not quoted here).
7. Orthodox Church in America, "Saint Frumentius, Archbishop of Abyssinia, Ethiopia" (November 30), https://www.oca.org/saints/lives/2021/11/30/103451-saint-frumentius-archbishop-of-abyssinia-ethiopia; World Council of Churches profile ("Abba Salama Kassate Berhan (Father of Peace and Revealer of Light)").
8. Athanasius, Apology to Constantius 31, trans. M. Atkinson and Archibald Robertson, NPNF2 4, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/2813.htm.
9. Mike Markowitz, "The Coinage of Aksum," CoinWeek, 20 September 2021, https://coinweek.com/ancient-coins/the-coinage-of-aksum/.
10. OrthodoxWiki, "Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church."
11. World Council of Churches profile.
12. University of Hamburg, BeInf project, "Hagiography of the Nine Saints," https://www.aai.uni-hamburg.de/beinf/02-case/04-hagiography.html.
13. "Garima Gospels found to be oldest surviving Christian illustrated manuscripts," Medievalists.net, July 2010, https://www.medievalists.net/2010/07/garima-gospels-found-to-be-oldest-surviving-christian-illustrated-manuscripts/.
14. Sahih al-Bukhari 3876 and 1245 (see also 3877), sunnah.com, https://sunnah.com/bukhari:3876, https://sunnah.com/bukhari:1245.
15. UNESCO World Heritage Centre, "Rock-Hewn Churches, Lalibela," https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/18/; David Keys, "Medieval Houses of God, or Ancient Fortresses?" Archaeology 57, no. 6 (November/December 2004), reporting David Phillipson, https://archive.archaeology.org/0411/newsbriefs/ethiopia.html.
16. E. A. Wallis Budge, trans., The Queen of Sheba and Her Only Son Menyelek (Kebra Nagast), 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1932), introduction, pp. xxxviii-xl (the Ethiopic work in the first half of the fourteenth century), https://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/kn/kn000-5.htm.
17. UNESCO, "Aksum"; OrthodoxWiki, "Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church," sections "Ark of the Covenant."
18. World Council of Churches profile.
19. OrthodoxWiki, "Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church," section "Jesuit interim" (which dates the submission to 1624); for the public ceremony of February 1626, Wikipedia, "Afonso Mendes," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afonso_Mendes; World Council of Churches profile.
20. OrthodoxWiki, section "Recent History"; Wikipedia, "Abuna Basilios," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abuna_Basilios; World Council of Churches profile.
21. OrthodoxWiki, section "Recent History" (which wrongly places the execution in 1976); Wikipedia, "Abune Tewophilos," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abune_Tewophilos.
22. OrthodoxWiki, section on the Eritrean Church.
23. OrthodoxWiki ("being made one"); Joint Commission of the Theological Dialogue between the Orthodox Church and the Oriental Orthodox Churches, Second Agreed Statement (Chambésy, 1990), §7, https://dss-syriacpatriarchate.org/second-agreed-statement-1990/?lang=en.
24. World Council of Churches profile.
25. Second Agreed Statement (Chambésy, 1990), §§7, 9-10.
26. World Council of Churches profile.
27. "The Ethiopian Orthodox Bible: A Unique Biblical Canon," EOTC Mahibere Kidusan, US Center, https://nextgeneration.eotcmk.org/learn-geez/blog/the-ethiopian-orthodox-bible-a-unique-biblical-canon.
28. World Council of Churches profile.
29. OrthodoxWiki, section "Similarities to Judaism."

Bibliography

Primary sources

• The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982. The NET Bible, translators' notes.
• Socrates Scholasticus, Church History, trans. A. C. Zenos; Sozomen, Church History, trans. Chester D. Hartranft. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 2, 1890.
• Athanasius, Apology to Constantius. Trans. M. Atkinson and Archibald Robertson. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 4, 1892.
• Sahih al-Bukhari. sunnah.com.
• Budge, E. A. Wallis, trans. The Queen of Sheba and Her Only Son Menyelek (Kebra Nagast). 2nd ed. London: Oxford University Press, 1932.

Orthodox and patristic sources

• Joint Commission of the Theological Dialogue between the Orthodox Church and the Oriental Orthodox Churches. Second Agreed Statement. Chambésy, 1990.
• Orthodox Church in America. "Saint Frumentius, Archbishop of Abyssinia, Ethiopia." oca.org.
• OrthodoxWiki. "Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church." orthodoxwiki.org.

Other scholarship

• Keys, David. "Medieval Houses of God, or Ancient Fortresses?" Archaeology 57, no. 6 (2004).
• Markowitz, Mike. "The Coinage of Aksum." CoinWeek, 2021.
• Medievalists.net. "Garima Gospels found to be oldest surviving Christian illustrated manuscripts." 2010.
• UNESCO World Heritage Centre. "Aksum" and "Rock-Hewn Churches, Lalibela."
• University of Hamburg, BeInf project. "Hagiography of the Nine Saints" (summarising Antonella Brita).

Sources from the Ethiopian Orthodox tradition

• World Council of Churches. "Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church" (member church profile).
• EOTC Mahibere Kidusan, US Center. "The Ethiopian Orthodox Bible: A Unique Biblical Canon."