The Sinodos

One of the five books of the Ethiopian canon this volume listed as absent. The Ge'ez has been public domain for centuries; what was scarce was an English translation old enough to be public domain too. Horner printed one in 1904, with the Ge'ez and his English in the same volume, to argue about where the eighth book of the Apostolic Constitutions came from.

What is here is the Statutes of the Apostles, which is the largest part of the Ethiopic Sinodos and not the whole collection: the Sinodos is a body of canon law, and Horner printed and translated this part of it. The text opens by naming itself — “This is the Sinodos of the fathers, the Apostles” — and the divisions, the numbers and the titles below are his.

Horner numbers two consecutive statutes 40. That is his edition, not a fault in this reading of it, and it is kept so that a citation of him still lands where he put it.

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 2 places. 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.

642 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.