What Is the Ethiopian Orthodox Church?

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church is an autocephalous Oriental Orthodox church with its headquarters in Addis Ababa. It confesses the Trinity, and it confesses Christ as God and man. It does not receive the Council of Chalcedon. Britannica says the Ge’ez word tewahedo means “unity,” for the church’s teaching that the human and the divine are present in one nature. (1) Its published book list includes 1 Enoch and Jubilees. The Christian history that can be tied to Aksum begins in the fourth century, not with the official in Acts.

Key Points

• Acts 8:26–40Acts 8:26–40 · King James Version^8:26 And the angel of the Lord spake unto Philip, saying, Arise, and go toward the south unto the way that goeth down from Jerusalem unto Gaza, which is desert. ^8:27 And he arose and went: and, behold, a man of Ethiopia, an eunuch of great authority under Candace queen of the Ethiopians, who had the charge of all her treasure, and had come to Jerusalem for to worship, ^8:28 Was returning, and sitting in his chariot read Esaias the prophet. ^8:29 Then the Spirit said unto Philip, Go near, and join thyself to this chariot. ^8:30 And Philip ran thither to him, and heard him read the prophet Esaias, and said, Understandest thou what thou readest? ^8:31 And he said, How can I, except some man should guide me? And he desired Philip that he would come up and sit with him. ^8:32 The place of the scripture which he read was this, He was led as a sheep to the slaughter; and like a lamb dumb before his shearer, so opened he not his mouth: ^8:33 In his humiliation his judgment was taken away: and who shall declare his generation? for his life is taken from the earth. ^8:34 And the eunuch answered Philip, and said, I pray thee, of whom speaketh the prophet this? of himself, or of some other man? ^8:35 Then Philip opened his mouth, and began at the same scripture, and preached unto him Jesus. ^8:36 And as they went on their way, they came unto a certain water: and the eunuch said, See, here is water; what doth hinder me to be baptized? ^8:37 And Philip said, If thou believest with all thine heart, thou mayest. And he answered and said, I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. ^8:38 And he commanded the chariot to stand still: and they went down both into the water, both Philip and the eunuch; and he baptized him. ^8:39 And when they were come up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord caught away Philip, that the eunuch saw him no more: and he went on his way rejoicing. ^8:40 But Philip was found at Azotus: and passing through he preached in all the cities, till he came to Caesarea.Acts 8:26–40 · King James VersionOpen the Source (3) tells of a court official of the Candace, queen of the Ethiopians. In that Greek, Ethiopia is Kush, with its capital at Meroë, not the later kingdom of Aksum. (2)
• Rufinus, Socrates, and Sozomen tell how Frumentius and Aedesius served at a royal court and how Athanasius consecrated Frumentius. Athanasius’s apology preserves Constantius’s letter to Æzanes and Sazanes of Auxumis, ordering them to send Bishop Frumentius to Egypt. (4) (5) (6) (7)
• After Ezana’s conversion, Aksumite coins replace the disc and crescent with a cross. The British Museum’s account dates that change to about 340–356. (8)
• A tradition of nine Syrian monks in the late fifth century is tied to monastic life and to the Ge’ez Bible. Scholars describe that translation as work stretching from the fourth century into the sixth, and one manuscript study says a particular translator-legend is not confirmed. (1) (11) (12)
• The church’s English worship essay treats the Tabot as the Ark, brought in that account by Menelik, son of Solomon, and says the Mass is in principle in Ge’ez. UNESCO records the eleven rock churches at Lalibela. (14) (16)
• Church practice keeps a narrower list of 81 books that includes 1 Enoch and Jubilees. The Fetha Negest’s heading also says 81, but the names it prints omit those two books. Jude 14–15 quotes a sentence of 1 Enoch. The book survives complete in Ge’ez. (23) (25)

The Ethiopia of Acts Is Kush

Acts 8:27Acts 8:27 · King James VersionAnd he arose and went: and, behold, a man of Ethiopia, an eunuch of great authority under Candace queen of the Ethiopians, who had the charge of all her treasure, and had come to Jerusalem for to worship,Acts 8:27 · King James VersionOpen the Source (3) introduces a man of Ethiopia, a eunuch of great authority under Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, who had come to Jerusalem to worship. Philip meets him on the road from Jerusalem toward Gaza, finds him reading Isaiah, and baptizes him. The chapter does not name Aksum, a highland king, or a bishop.

Peter Unseth’s study of the Greek words Aithiops and Aithiopon argues that this Ethiopia is not the modern state. Herodotus, he notes, placed the great city of Meroë as the capital of Ethiopia, south of Elephantine, in what is now northern Sudan. Candace is not a personal name. It is a Meroitic title, kdke, borne by royal consorts or queen-mothers of Kush. (2)

Some readers answer that Ezana of Aksum later conquered Meroë, so the official can still be claimed for Ethiopia. Unseth’s reply is the calendar. He reports the usual date of that conquest as around AD 350, long after Philip and the official were dead, and he reports that Aksumite control of the region did not last past Ezana. (2) Acts can be read as a baptism from the court of Kush. It cannot be read as the founding of the church at Aksum.

Britannica records a church tradition that Matthew and Bartholomew evangelized Ethiopia in the first century, and that the official in Acts was the first Ethiopian convert. (1) That is the church’s later telling. It is not what the Greek place-name in Acts denotes.

How Frumentius Reached the Aksumite Court

The narrative that names a bishop for this region is fourth century. Rufinus, continuing Eusebius, tells it at Ecclesiastical History 10.9. (4) The next chapter, 10.10, is a different story, the conversion of the Iberians. Socrates and Sozomen retell the Frumentius narrative in Greek church history. (5) (6) They do not say “Aksum” in the story itself. Socrates calls the land the interior of India, beyond the India he assigns to Bartholomew, and he says that interior had not heard Christian preaching before Constantine.

In Socrates’s account, a Tyrian philosopher, Meropius, sailed with two young relatives, Frumentius and Edesius. After a broken treaty, the people of that coast killed the ship’s company and spared the boys. The king made Edesius his cupbearer and gave Frumentius charge of the royal records. The king died. The queen asked the young men to govern for her son. Frumentius sought out Christian Roman merchants, urged them to set aside places for prayer, and had a house of prayer built. When the young king came of age, Edesius went home to Tyre. Frumentius went to Alexandria, told Athanasius, who had lately become bishop, and asked for a bishop and clergy. Athanasius ordained Frumentius himself and sent him back. (5) Rufinus, Socrates, and Sozomen all record Edesius’s later ordination as presbyter at Tyre. Rufinus says he heard the story from Edesius himself, afterwards made presbyter of Tyre. (4) Socrates repeats that report: Edesius “was afterwards ordained to the priesthood at Tyre.” (5) Sozomen says that after Edesius went to Tyre to see his relatives, he “was soon after advanced to the dignity of presbyter.” (6) Britannica uses the spelling Aedesius and says the two won the confidence of the king at Aksum and were allowed to evangelize, and that the next king, Ezana, was baptized by Frumentius and made Christianity the religion of the state. (1)

The Catholic Encyclopedia’s Ethiopia article is a summary of Rufinus, and it records the name Ethiopian tradition gives Frumentius: Abba Salama. (10) The church’s own hierarchy essay calls him the first abuna, consecrated by Athanasius, and says the head of the church was sent from Egypt from then until recent times. (19) The encyclopedia’s Axum article puts that consecration at about 330. (9)

What ties the historians’ “India” to Aksum is a letter, not their place-name. Athanasius’s Apology to Constantius 31 prints a letter of Constantius to Æzanes and Sazanes, princes of Auxumis, about Frumentius, bishop of that place. (7) The Catholic Encyclopedia identifies Aeizanes as king of Axum and describes the letter as an order to send Frumentius to Alexandria. (9)

Ezana’s Coins and Constantius’s Letter

The British Museum’s essay on Aksumite coinage says early issues carry a disc and crescent, the symbols of the South Arabian religions Aksum then shared. After Ezana’s conversion, which that essay dates to about 340–356, those symbols are replaced by a cross. Copper coins of the fourth century carry Christian mottoes, including “He conquers through Christ.” The essay names Frumentius as the traveler who converted Ezana, and it treats the cross on the gold as a public statement. (8) The date on the coins and the encyclopedia’s date for the consecration are not the same year. They are two reports of one fourth-century turn.

In 1805 Henry Salt copied a bilingual inscription at Axum. The Catholic Encyclopedia says only the Greek, thirty-one lines, remains, and that it refers to the exploits of King Aeizanes. (9) That is a royal Greek text of Ezana. The encyclopedia’s notice does not quote a creed from it. The text that names Ezana inside a Christian dispute is Constantius’s letter.

The letter’s command is this: (7)

Send therefore speedily into Egypt the Bishop Frumentius to the most venerable Bishop George

Constantius writes that Frumentius was advanced to that rank by Athanasius, and he tells the princes to have the same doctrine in their churches as in his. The letter is an emperor’s demand that Aksum’s bishop be examined in Egypt. It is also independent evidence that, in Constantius’s reign, Frumentius was already called bishop of Auxumis and that Æzanes was addressed as its prince. (7) (9)

Monks, Ge’ez, and King Kaleb

Britannica says that toward the end of the fifth century nine monks from Syria are said to have brought monasticism and to have encouraged translation of the Bible into Ge’ez. (1) Traditional sources in the church’s worship essay credit the Nine Saints: Abba Afse, one of the nine, is said to have turned the old temple at Yeha into a church, and the essay suggests the basilicas at Adulis and Hawlti-Melazo may reflect their influence. (16)

Gebre-Mikael M. Mikre-Sellassie reports the scholarly view that the Ge’ez translation was not done in one sitting. He describes a gradual process from the second quarter of the fourth century, alongside the introduction of Christianity, through the second half of the sixth, and he says the Nine Saints are believed to have translated the major part after they left the Roman Empire in the wake of Chalcedon. (11) A Hamburg manuscript study states the same tradition and then limits it. The Acts of Abbā Garimā, one of the nine, claim that he prepared an early Ge’ez Gospel. The study says that role cannot so far be verified from historical sources. Radiocarbon tests on two painted leaves from the Garimā Gospels suggested a span from 330 to 650, while philological and palaeographical study does not yield a precise date earlier than 650. (12) The tradition and the surviving books are not the same kind of evidence.

King Kaleb, also called Ella Asbeha, belongs to the next century of Christian Aksum. The Dictionary of African Christian Biography places his rule about 514 to about 530 or later. It records an allusion in the Kebra Nagast to an alliance with the Byzantine emperor Justin I, a persecution of Christians in Himyar by Dhu Nuwas, and Kaleb’s sailing in 525 with seventy ships from Gabaza, south of Adulis. The account says Zafar was taken and that a bishop for Himyar was appointed from Alexandria. (13) That campaign is Aksum acting as a Christian kingdom across the Red Sea. It is not the story of Acts.

Lalibela, the Kebra Nagast, and the Tabot

Aksum did not remain the shape of the kingdom. UNESCO’s World Heritage entry for Lalibela describes eleven medieval churches cut from living rock, in a mountain region of Ethiopia, and attributes the work to King Lalibela, who set out in the twelfth century to build a New Jerusalem after Muslim conquests had stopped Christian pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The entry says Lalibela flourished after Aksum’s decline. (14) A UNESCO note on the same site names the Zagwe dynasty, which ruled there for more than a century, and dates King Lalibela to 1181–1221. (15) The church’s worship essay describes the same churches, Medhane Alem and Bete Emmanuel among them, as hollowed from the rock, and it treats them as a medieval development of the older Aksumite plan. (16)

Each church’s innermost room, the Holy of Holies, holds the Tabot. The essay says the Tabot represents the Ark of the Covenant, believed to have been brought by Menelik I, son of Solomon, and that a church’s sanctity depends on the Tabot’s presence. Only priests and deacons enter that room. The abuna’s blessing of the Tabot consecrates the church. On the Feast of the Epiphany the Tabot is carried out, covered, and people bow as it passes. (16) The Catholic Encyclopedia records the same claim at Axum’s cathedral: the Tables of the Law and the tabout, which it says the Abyssinians say were brought from Jerusalem by Menelek, son of Solomon and the queen of Sheba. (9) Britannica says the ark is an essential object in every church. (1) The object in the sanctuary is part of the worship. The claim that it is the Ark from Solomon’s Jerusalem is the account those pages report. They do not date it as a record of Solomon’s reign.

Fasting, Feasts, and the Language of the Liturgy

The same worship essay, a 1970 publication of the church reprinted on its English site, is the church’s own account of the service. In principle the Mass is in Ge’ez. Readings and some other portions are in Amharic. The church counts fourteen anaphoras. Hymns are sung by the debtera, who are not ordained, to drums, sistra, and prayer-sticks. Britannica says the liturgy and the biblical books are typically in Ge’ez, though both have been translated into Amharic. (16) (1)

On fasting, the essay quotes the Fetha Negest: (16)

Fasting is abstinence from food, and is observed by man at certain times determined by law, to attain forgiveness of sins and much reward, obeying thus the one who fixed the law.

The essay then counts about 250 fast days in the year, not all of them required of everyone, and says an average person may fast about 180 days. It lists seven official fasts: every Wednesday and Friday except the fifty days after Easter; Lent, which it counts as 55 days; the fast of Nineveh, three days; the vigils of Christmas and Epiphany; the fast of the apostles, varying with Easter; the fast of the prophets, 43 days; and the fast of the assumption, 15 days in August. The apostles’ fast and the prophets’ fast are required of the clergy. The others are treated as binding on devout Christians except children under seven. On those days the fast excludes meat, milk, butter, and eggs, and no food or drink is taken before noon. Pregnant women, the seriously ill, and travelers are exempt. (16) That is the dietary practice this essay actually states. It is a calendar of fasts, not a second law copied out as a list of clean and unclean animals.

The essay’s feast list puts the Incarnation, the birth of Christ, Epiphany, Hosanna, the crucifixion, Easter, the transfiguration, the ascension, and Pentecost among nine major holy days. Among the lesser days it names Gizret, the circumcision, and Maskal, the finding of the True Cross. (16) A parish teaching page of Keraneyo MedhaneAlem calls that cross feast Mesekel and places it on Meskerem 17, 27 September, with a second day on Megabit 10, 19 March. That page is a parish instruction, not a decree of the patriarchate. (17) The Epiphany procession of the Tabot is the feast readers call Timkat. The church’s English essay calls it the Feast of the Epiphany and describes the Tabot leaving the church. (16)

Saturday and Sunday are not described in one sentence by every source. The 1970 essay says that in former times Saturday, the biblical Sabbath, was also observed, and that Sunday is kept as a day of rest, as elsewhere in the Christian world. (16) The parish page teaches both days: Saturday is not to be kept idle in the Jewish manner, which it anchors in Fetha Negest 19, and Sunday is the day of the resurrection. (17) Britannica says the Saturday Sabbath, in addition to Sunday, is observed by some devout believers. (1) The sources agree that Sunday is the church’s feast of the resurrection. They do not agree on whether Saturday is a present obligation of every member or a practice of some.

Britannica also says circumcision is almost universally practiced. (1) The feast called Gizret on the church’s list is a holy day of the circumcision. The essay does not, in that line, describe the surgery. The practice and the feast day should not be collapsed into one claim.

From an Egyptian Abuna to a Patriarch in Addis Ababa

For most of its life the church received its bishop from the Coptic patriarch of Alexandria. The hierarchy essay says that after Frumentius the abuna was always sent from Egypt until recent times, that five Ethiopian bishops were consecrated in 1928, that five more were consecrated in 1948, that Abuna Basilios was made archbishop in 1951, and that the Patriarch of Alexandria installed Basilios as the first patriarch of Ethiopia in 1959. The essay says the church is autocephalous and still locates its orders in that Alexandrian line. (19) Britannica dates a native abuna, Basil, to 1950 and the autonomous patriarchate to 1959, and it says the church continued to recognize an honorary primacy of the Coptic patriarch. (1) The year of the patriarchate is the point on which those two accounts meet. The step just before it is dated 1950 in one and 1951 in the other.

Between those centuries the church was not untouched by Rome. The hierarchy essay, speaking of the years before the crisis at the beginning of the seventeenth century, says the Jesuits had been working to bring the Ethiopian Church under the jurisdiction of Rome, although with no success. (19) The Dictionary of African Christian Biography describes the later reign, after that crisis had begun. Emperor Susneyos proclaimed Roman Catholicism the official religion in 1622. When the Roman Catholic patriarch Affonso Mendez arrived in 1624, rebellions spread. On 24 June 1632 Susneyos proclaimed the restoration of the Faith of Alexandria. The biography says the church was restored and the emperor was obliged to abdicate. He died at Danqaz on 16 September 1632. (18)

Under the Solomonic monarchy the church was the state church. Britannica calls it a bulwark of Haile Selassie I. In 1974 the monarchy was abolished and socialism was instituted. The church was disestablished, its landholdings were taken, and its patriarch was executed. It was placed on the same legal footing as Islam and other religions, and Britannica still calls it Ethiopia’s most influential religious body. (1)

The Dictionary of African Christian Biography names that patriarch. Tewoflos, born Meliktu Welde Mariam in 1910, was elected patriarch on 6 April 1971, the second patriarch and the first ordained in Ethiopia. The biography says he refused public support after the Derg killed imperial officials in November 1974, that he was arrested in February 1976, and that on Saturday 14 July 1979 guards took him from prison. After the regime fell, the account says, he was found to have been strangled with others and buried in the compound of Ras Asrate Kassa. His body was exhumed on 29 April 1992 and buried at Gofa Gebriel, a church he had built. (20) Britannica states the execution and does not give the day. The 1979 killing is the biography’s report.

A second break followed the change of government. The World Council of Churches reported that the church declared an end to a 27-year schism and recognized one Holy Synod and two canonical patriarchs. It says the split began in 1991, when political change sent the former patriarch, Abune Merkorios, into exile in the United States, and a synod in exile formed there. From the agreement, those labels were to cease. Abune Mathias was to carry the administrative office. Merkorios was to return with the rank of patriarch. (21) That is a reconciliation of synods. It is not a statement of who holds the office in a later year.

Pew Research Center’s chapter 1, in the report of 8 November 2017, counts 36 million Orthodox Christians in Ethiopia in 2010, about 43 percent of the country’s population. (22) Britannica, updated 9 September 2026, says that in the early twenty-first century the church claimed more than 30 million adherents in Ethiopia. (1) Pew’s count is for 2010. Britannica reports the church’s claim. The two figures are not one census.

What Tewahedo Says About Christ

The church is Oriental Orthodox: with the Coptic church it receives Nicaea, Constantinople, and Ephesus, and it does not receive Chalcedon. What Is the Coptic Orthodox Church? quotes the sister church’s confession that Christ is fully divine and fully human, and Dioscorus’s formula, “the one nature of God the incarnate Logos.” Eastern Orthodox vs Oriental Orthodox: What Is the Difference? sets those sentences next to Chalcedon and next to the 1990 Chambésy statement. The statement did not restore communion.

Britannica states the Ethiopian position in its own words. Opposed to the Chalcedonian teaching that the human and divine natures are equally present in one person without commingling, the Coptic and Ethiopian churches held that the human and the divine are equally present, through the incarnation, within a single nature. Britannica calls that miaphysitism. It also says the Roman and Greek churches interpreted the position as monophysitism, the belief that Christ had only one nature and that the nature was divine. The name Tewahedo, “unity,” is the church’s word for the miaphysite claim, not for the charge that the humanity was swallowed. (1)

Chalcedon’s definition, in Tanner’s English on a third-party site, says the one Christ is acknowledged in two natures, without confusion, change, division, or separation, the property of each nature preserved, concurring in one person and one subsistence. (31) The two sentences do not deny the same thing. Both mean to say that the Son is truly God and truly human. They do not agree on whether “two natures” may be said after the union. The monophysite label, as Britannica defines it, erases the humanity. That is not the sentence the church’s name is built to carry. What Is the Incarnation? is the claim that the Son took a human nature and remained God. The Trinity and What Is the Deity of Christ? are the Nicene confession both families share. This comparison does not issue a verdict on the fifth-century wording.

Enoch, Jubilees, and the Count of Eighty-One

The Ge’ez Bible is also why this church’s catalogue is wider than the Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant lists. Mikre-Sellassie describes two Ethiopian counts, each of them aiming at eighty-one. He ties the narrower one to what the church reads in practice: Enoch and Jubilees are in it, within an Old Testament group of fifty-four titles, the New Testament contributing its twenty-seven books. The law book called the Fetha Negest puts eighty-one in the heading. The titles written out number seventy-three, and that list, together with its commentary, leaves Enoch and Jubilees off. (23) A legal list can omit them while the list the church reads still contains them. The English catalogue on the church’s site contains them.

That catalogue, on the church’s books page, places Jublee and Enoch after Chronicles. The spelling Jublee is the page’s. (24) How Was the Bible Canon Decided? is the longer account of how the Jewish and the major Christian lists were drawn, and of where this eighty-one sits beside them. How Was the Bible Canon Decided, and What Is the Apocrypha? keeps the class name Apocrypha for the books those Western lists argue about. 1 Enoch and Jubilees are not that set. They are on the Book of Enoch and Jubilees.

Jude 14–15 (25) says Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of the Lord’s coming with his holy ones to judge the ungodly. The matching sentence is 1 Enoch 1:9Book of Enoch (1 Enoch) 1:9 · R. H. Charles, 1917Non-CanonicalNot received as Scripture by the Jewish canon or by the major Christian churches, apart from local exceptions such as the Ethiopian Orthodox canon, which includes 1 Enoch and Jubilees. This is not the Apocrypha.And behold! He cometh with ten thousands of ⌈His⌉ holy ones To execute judgement upon all, And to destroy ⌈all⌉ the ungodly: And to convict all flesh Of all the works ⌈of their ungodliness⌉ which they have ungodly committed, ⌈And of all the hard things which⌉ ungodly sinners ⌈have spoken⌉ against Him.Book of Enoch (1 Enoch) 1:9 · R. H. Charles, 1917Open the Source in R. H. Charles’s 1917 translation. (29) Jude uses that sentence. He does not print a table of contents for the 108 chapters. History of the Book of Enoch follows the quotation, what Augustine and Jerome did with it, and the Qumran dates. What Is the Book of Enoch and Why Isn’t It in the Bible? is the short account of the five parts.

Joseph Fitzmyer, reviewing the Aramaic fragments, reports Cave 4 copies of the Watchers, the Dreams, and the Epistle, plus the astronomical copies, and he stresses that the Parables have not turned up among them. (26) The Israel Antiquities Authority’s Leon Levy library catalogs 4Q201 as 4Q Enoch, in Aramaic. (27) The Library of Congress exhibition dates that copy to about 200–150 BC and says the Qumran find supplied parts of the Aramaic original. (28) The Enoch manuscripts in that Cave 4 run are 4Q201–202 and 4Q204–212. 4Q203, which sits between those numbers, is a copy of the Book of Giants, not of 1 Enoch. Charles’s English, the public-domain SPCK volume of 1917, is on the Internet Archive and, chapter by chapter, on this site. (29) Nickelsburg and VanderKam’s Hermeneia volume, 1 Enoch 2, covers chapters 37–82, the Parables and the Astronomical Book. (30)

What has survived as a whole book is the Ge’ez text. The Greek and Aramaic witnesses are pieces. An Ethiopian copy could remain the only complete form, even while the Fetha Negest’s shorter list and the list the church reads do not name the same books.

1 Enoch, 2 Enoch, and 3 Enoch

The three books that share the name are not one work. 1 Enoch is the composite Jewish apocalypse the Ethiopian list includes, the book Jude’s sentence matches, and the book Charles translated. The church’s English catalogue calls it Enoch. (24) (29) 2 Enoch, the Secrets of Enoch, is a different ascent, preserved in Slavonic. Secrets of Enoch (2 Enoch) is that book. It is not the book on the Ethiopian list, and it is not the book Jude quotes. 3 Enoch is a later Hebrew work in which Enoch is identified with the angel Metatron. What Is 3 Enoch? is that book. No church, including this one, receives it as Scripture. Calling all three “the Book of Enoch” hides the only one the Ethiopian catalogue names.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the Man in Acts 8 From Aksum?

No. The Greek of Acts 8:27Acts 8:27 · King James VersionAnd he arose and went: and, behold, a man of Ethiopia, an eunuch of great authority under Candace queen of the Ethiopians, who had the charge of all her treasure, and had come to Jerusalem for to worship,Acts 8:27 · King James VersionOpen the Source (3) places him under the Candace, a title of the queens of Meroë in Kush. Aksum’s conversion is a fourth-century event, told of Frumentius and Ezana, and Ezana’s reach into Meroë is dated long after Acts. (2) (1) A church tradition that the official was Ethiopia’s first convert is a tradition about Acts. It does not change the geography of the verse.

Does One Nature Mean Jesus Was Not Human?

Not in the church’s formula, and not in Britannica’s account of it. The miaphysite sentence says the human and the divine are present in one nature. The monophysite charge says the one nature is divine and the humanity is gone. Chalcedon says two natures in one person, without confusion or separation. (1) (31) The Coptic sister church’s wording is on What Is the Coptic Orthodox Church?. The side-by-side texts are on Eastern Orthodox vs Oriental Orthodox: What Is the Difference?.

Which Enoch Book Does the Church List?

1 Enoch, on the church’s English list and in the narrower canon of practice. (24) (23) Not 2 Enoch, and not 3 Enoch. Jude’s quotation is one sentence of 1 Enoch 1:9, not a reception of every chapter, and not a reference to the Slavonic or the Hebrew book.

When Did an Ethiopian Become Patriarch?

The church’s hierarchy essay says Abuna Basilios was installed as the first patriarch of Ethiopia in 1959 by the patriarch of Alexandria, after centuries in which the abuna was an Egyptian sent from Cairo. (19) Britannica agrees on 1959 for the patriarchate. (1) Patriarch Tewoflos, elected in 1971, was the first ordained in Ethiopia, and he was killed under the Derg in 1979. (20)