It is easy to tell the history of the Bible as a story that moves from Jerusalem to Rome and then north into Europe. But some of the earliest translations of the Bible were made in Africa. In Egypt, Christians translated the scriptures into Coptic from the third century onwards. In the kingdom of Aksum, in what is now Ethiopia and Eritrea, they were translated into Ge’ez, probably beginning in the fourth or fifth century. Both translations are still read in worship today.

The New Testament itself records an African reader of scripture: an official of the queen of the Ethiopians, reading Isaiah in his chariot on the road from Jerusalem (Acts 8:27–35). In biblical usage “Ethiopia” usually means the kingdom of Kush, in what is now Sudan, rather than the later kingdom of Aksum. Ethiopian Christians have nevertheless long claimed him as a forerunner.

Coptic: the last stage of Egyptian

Coptic is the final stage of the ancient Egyptian language, the language of the pharaohs. By the Roman period, Egyptian had long been written in hieroglyphs and in a cursive script called Demotic, both difficult to learn. Coptic was written instead in the Greek alphabet, with a handful of extra letters borrowed from Demotic for sounds Greek lacked. This made it far easier to read and write, and it became the vehicle of Egyptian Christian literature.

Coptic was not one uniform language. It had several regional dialects, and the Bible was translated into a number of them. Two matter most:

  • Sahidic, the dialect of Upper (southern) Egypt, was the main literary dialect of early Coptic Christianity. Most of the Bible was translated into Sahidic, probably beginning in the third century.
  • Bohairic, the dialect of the Nile Delta in the north, gradually became the standard and, from around the eleventh century, the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church.

Biblical manuscripts also survive in smaller dialects, such as Akhmimic, Fayyumic and the Middle Egyptian dialect sometimes called Mesokemic or Oxyrhynchite. Some of these manuscripts are very early. Coptic codices of the fourth and fifth centuries containing books of the Bible are among the oldest copies of New Testament books in any language other than Greek.

Monks and memorisation

Coptic Bible translation was bound up with the rise of Egyptian monasticism. According to Athanasius’s Life of Antony, the young Antony heard the Gospel read in church, took Jesus’s command to the rich young man as addressed to himself, and gave away his property. Antony is usually said to have known no Greek, so what he heard may well have been read or explained in Coptic.

In the fourth century, Pachomius organised communal monasteries in Upper Egypt. The rules attributed to him required that a monk who could not read be taught to read, and that monks learn by heart at least the New Testament and the Psalter. In such communities the scriptures were heard, recited and copied constantly, in Coptic.

Nag Hammadi and other books

Coptic was used for many religious texts, not only the Bible. In 1945 a collection of thirteen leather-bound Coptic codices was found near Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt. Copied in the fourth century, they contain translations of Greek works, among them the Gospel of Thomas and many texts often described as Gnostic. Nobody knows for certain who owned them; some scholars think they belonged to monks, others doubt it. The find is important for the history of early Christianity, but these were not books of the Coptic Bible. It shows how much was being translated into Coptic, and how varied Egyptian Christianity was.

After the Arab conquest of Egypt in the 640s, Arabic gradually replaced Coptic as the spoken language. By the later Middle Ages, Coptic Christians were reading the Bible in Arabic, often in manuscripts that set Coptic and Arabic side by side (see The Bible in Arabic). Bohairic Coptic survives today as a liturgical language.

Aksum and the conversion of Ezana

The kingdom of Aksum was one of the great trading powers of late antiquity, controlling the Red Sea coast and minting its own gold coins. In the fourth century its king, Ezana, became a Christian. His early coins carry the pagan crescent and disc; later ones carry the cross, and his later inscriptions invoke the God of heaven in Christian terms. He was one of the first rulers anywhere to put a cross on his coinage.

The story of how this happened is told by the Latin historian Rufinus, writing around 400 (Ecclesiastical History 10.9–10). Two young Christians from Tyre, Frumentius and Aedesius, were captured when their ship put in on the Red Sea coast. They were taken to the royal court, rose to positions of trust, and encouraged Christian merchants to gather for worship. Frumentius later went to Alexandria and asked Bishop Athanasius to send a bishop to Aksum. Athanasius consecrated Frumentius himself. Ethiopian tradition remembers him as Abba Salama, “father of peace.”

Rufinus’s account has legendary touches, but its core is supported by an independent document: Athanasius preserved a letter from the emperor Constantius II to the rulers of Aksum, naming them as Aizanas and Sazanas, about Frumentius (Apology to Constantius 31).

Translating into Ge’ez

Ge’ez is a Semitic language, related to Arabic, Hebrew and the languages of southern Arabia. Its script developed from the ancient South Arabian alphabet. In the fourth century, around the time of Ezana, it began to mark vowels by adding small changes to each consonant, creating the syllabic script still used for Amharic, Tigrinya and other Ethiopian languages. Some scholars have linked this change to the needs of Christian scripture and liturgy, though this is not certain.

The Bible was translated into Ge’ez from Greek, probably over a long period from the fourth or fifth century to the sixth or seventh. The Old Testament was translated from the Septuagint, not the Hebrew. Ethiopian tradition credits much of the work to the Nine Saints, monks who came from the Roman world, perhaps from Syria, in the late fifth century and founded monasteries in the north. The written lives of the Nine Saints date from many centuries later, so historians treat the details with caution, but many accept that monks from the eastern Mediterranean played a large part in the work.

In the later Middle Ages, from about the thirteenth or fourteenth century, the Ge’ez Bible was revised, often against Arabic versions used in the Coptic church in Egypt, to which the Ethiopian church was then closely tied. As a result, Ge’ez manuscripts often contain a mixture of older and revised readings, and scholars are still working out the history of the text.

The Garima Gospels

At the monastery of Abba Garima, near Adwa in northern Ethiopia, the monks have kept two ancient illuminated Gospel books. Tradition says that Abba Garima, one of the Nine Saints, copied a Gospel book in a single day, the sun standing still until he finished.

For a long time scholars assumed the manuscripts were medieval. Radiocarbon tests carried out in Oxford and reported in 2010 suggested something very different: dates in the late antique period, perhaps between the fourth and seventh centuries. Later analysis has refined the dates for each book, but on any reckoning the Garima Gospels are among the oldest surviving illuminated Gospel books in the world and the oldest surviving manuscripts in Ge’ez. Radiocarbon dates the parchment rather than the writing, and give a range rather than a year, so they should be held with some caution.

The broadest canon

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church has the broadest biblical canon of any church. Its list is often counted as eighty-one books, though the count and the contents vary between lists and traditions.

It includes books found in no other church’s Bible. The most famous are 1 Enoch and Jubilees. Both were written in Jewish circles before the time of Jesus, probably in Aramaic and Hebrew respectively. Fragments of both were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. But the only complete copies of either book survive in Ge’ez. The New Testament letter of Jude quotes 1 Enoch directly:

About these also Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied, saying, “Behold, the Lord came with ten thousands of his holy ones.” (Jude 14)

Without the Ethiopian church, which copied and read these books for many centuries, they would be known today only in pieces. The Ethiopian canon also includes books such as the three books of Meqabyan, which are different from the books of Maccabees.

Africa’s place in the story

Ge’ez remains the liturgical language of the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox churches, though few people speak it, and the Bible is now read in Amharic, Tigrinya, Oromo and other languages. The Coptic church continues to use Bohairic in its services alongside Arabic. Both are reminders that Christianity has been an African religion from its first centuries, and that African translators have been carrying scripture into their own languages for as long as anyone.

That story continues. Open Word Bible’s translation is under way in English, with Spanish, French and Swahili following, each made from the Hebrew and Greek rather than from English (see The Bible in Swahili). Like everything in the project, the Swahili work is AI-assisted, and none of it will be marked reviewed until named native-speaking reviewers have checked it.

Sources

  • Athanasius. Apology to Constantius 29–31; Life of Antony 2.
  • Rufinus. Ecclesiastical History 10.9–10.
  • Knibb, Michael A. Translating the Bible: The Ethiopic Version of the Old Testament. Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1999.
  • McKenzie, Judith S., and Francis Watson. The Garima Gospels: Early Illuminated Gospel Books from Ethiopia. Oxford: Manar al-Athar, 2016.
  • Metzger, Bruce M. The Early Versions of the New Testament: Their Origin, Transmission, and Limitations. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977.
  • Phillipson, David W. Foundations of an African Civilisation: Aksum and the Northern Horn, 1000 BC–AD 1300. Woodbridge: James Currey, 2012.
  • Robinson, James M., ed. The Nag Hammadi Library in English. 4th rev. ed. Leiden: Brill, 1996.
  • Ullendorff, Edward. Ethiopia and the Bible. The Schweich Lectures 1967. London: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1968.
  • Veilleux, Armand, trans. Pachomian Koinonia. 3 vols. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1980–1982.
  • Bible quotations are from the World English Bible (public domain), except where the article quotes a historic translation or gives its own literal rendering.