History & overview · every faith gets one
Tewahedo — made one. Its own canon, its own calendar, and the Ark.
Ethiopia's national church, Christian since the fourth-century conversion of the Aksumite king Ezana, governed from Alexandria for sixteen centuries and by its own patriarch since 1959. It prays in Ge'ez, keeps a biblical canon of eighty-one books that includes Enoch and Jubilees, and builds every church around a tabot — a consecrated tablet standing for the Ark of the Covenant.
The founding
Two Syrian brothers, Frumentius and Aedesius, were shipwrecked on the Red Sea coast and ended up at the Aksumite court; Frumentius went to Alexandria, was consecrated bishop by Athanasius, and returned. The date, around 330, is traditional. For the next sixteen centuries the head of the Ethiopian church was an Egyptian monk sent from Alexandria — until Pope Cyril VI granted autocephaly and enthroned an Ethiopian patriarch in 1959.
Its founding is bound to Frumentius (Abba Salama), first bishop of Aksum — 330 CE.
What it holds
Reality. A world with a visible order and an invisible one laid over it, both governed by the same God..
The divine. One God in three persons. Tewahedo means made one: in Christ the divine and human are united in a single nature, and the church holds this against Chalcedon rather than against the incarnation..
Death and after. Resurrection and judgment; the dead are commemorated at the fortieth day, the eightieth, and the year..