The Book of the Covenant

The second book of the Mets'hafe Kidan, the Book of the Covenant of the Ethiopian canon: the discourse of the risen Lord to the eleven, which circulates elsewhere as the Epistle of the Apostles. Guerrier published the Ethiopic as the Testament of our Lord in Galilee, and M. R. James rendered it into English in 1924 from that Ethiopic and from Schmidt's Coptic beside it.

The Book of the Covenant is in two parts and this is the second of them. The first, sixty sections of church order, has no public-domain English translation of any version, so the book is here in part and the coverage table says so rather than counting it complete.

The section numbers are James's. Where his text carries a reading from the Coptic or the Latin rather than the Ethiopic he says so in the running text, and those remarks are his and are left where he put them.

Every biblical book in this volume is checked verse for verse against independent reference counts. None exist for this text, so there is nothing to check it against but the scan itself, and it is marked unverified for that reason. Read it as a text recovered rather than as a text verified.

The scanner's reading was mended in 1 place. A word is only mended when this volume's own million and a half words have never seen it, when the change is a substitution this scanner is known to make, and when exactly one such change turns it into a word the volume does know. Two candidates and it is left as it is, because a visible misprint is better than a confident guess.

172 words here appear nowhere else in this volume and were left exactly as the scan has them, mended or not. Most of them are not mistakes at all — they are words this library simply never uses elsewhere, and the Ge'ez forms of names — and the rest are the scanner's worst pages, left visible rather than smoothed over.

The scan misread 88 for 38. Each was accepted because the divisions run in the printed order and the sequence says which one this is, not because the shape was read twice.