The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church

Denomination·Founded 330 CE·est. ~36 million and rising; Ethiopia's 2007 census put Orthodox Christians at 43.5 per cent of the population, and the church claims closer to 50 million.

Judaism → Christianity → Oriental Orthodoxy → The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo ChurchTewahedo Media Center

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Story of The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church

Makeda, Solomon, and the son who took the Ark.

In the Kebra Nagast the queen of Sheba visits Solomon, bears him a son, and that son Menelik returns to Jerusalem as a young man and leaves with the Ark — with the connivance, the text says, of the firstborn sons of Israel's priests. The story made Ethiopia the second Zion and its kings the house of David; the 1955 constitution still traced Haile Selassie's line to Menelik I. The dynasty ended in 1974 and the story did not.

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Where it is toldThe Kebra Nagast, compiled in Ge'ez in the fourteenth century
Who appearsMakeda queen of Sheba, Solomon, and their son Menelik
What it teachesThat Ethiopia holds the covenant, and that its kings held it by descent
Understanding it — context, not catechism: how this passage is held

The Kebra Nagast — the Glory of Kings — was compiled in Ge'ez around 1320, drawing on older Coptic and Arabic material, at the point when the Solomonic dynasty was displacing the Zagwe. Its political work is obvious and it is also a genuinely popular religious text. The claim it makes for Ethiopia is not merely that Christianity arrived early but that the covenant itself relocated. Rastafari took the same book and read it forward to Haile Selassie; the Ethiopian church, which does not regard the emperor as divine, has never been comfortable with that reading.

The same ground, other faiths

claims that share this one's ideas
A covenant binds a people to God across generations. Judaism · core tenet Go deeper →
A nation was baptised, not a congregation. The Armenian Apostolic Church · core tenet Go deeper →
A covenant makes the church, not a parish boundary. Congregationalism · core tenet Go deeper →
The church — one body, many members. Christianity · community Go deeper →
The Hijra. Islam Read it in full →
Vaisakhi. Sikhism · rite Go deeper →

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