A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Ethiopia’s Semitic links are also apparent in the unique fascination with Judaism which has developed in its Christianity. This is reminiscent of the distinctively close relationship with Judaism in early Syriac Christianity (see pp. 178–9), but over a much longer period the character has become much more pronounced in Ethiopia. This may not originally have arisen so much from direct contacts with Jews as from Ethiopian pride in that foundation episode in the Book of Acts, in which Christianity’s Jewish heritage already lies at the heart of the story of Philip and the eunuch. Meditation on this during the passing of centuries in the isolation of Africa has made that seed grow into a major theme in a Church which honours the Jewish Sabbath, practises circumcision (female as well as male, unlike the Jews), and makes its members obey Jewish dietary laws. External sources as early as the thirteenth century record the Church as treasuring an object which was claimed to be the Ark of the Covenant once housed in the Temple in Jerusalem. The report that the Ark was decorated with crosses does present problems for this provenance, given that, if genuine, it had been constructed a millennium before the Crucifixion.31 At its extreme, the preoccupation with the Hebrew past in Ethiopian Christianity has produced a grouping of peoples first attested in Ethiopia in the fourteenth century, who have been styled by other Ethiopians Falasha, ‘Strangers’, but who call themselves Beta Israel (...