The Testament of Our Lord

The church order that in Ge'ez is the first book of the Mets'hafe Kidan, the Book of the Covenant of the Ethiopian canon: the risen Lord, before his ascension, laying down how the church is to be built, who may be ordained, how the eucharist and baptism are to be done, and what a bishop owes the poor. It opens with an apocalypse and closes with the apostles sending copies out of Jerusalem.

This is not the Ge'ez. Cooper and Maclean translated the Syriac, and say in the same book that the Ethiopic version was then unpublished; it has no public-domain English now either. What is printed here is a witness to the same work in another version, which is a different thing from the version the Ethiopian church reads, and this paragraph exists to say so.

The chapters are theirs, in the two books they print.

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.

627 words here appear nowhere else in this volume and were left exactly as the scan has them, and nothing was mended. 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 lost 11 of the printed headings outright, so I. 1, I. 3, I. 5, I. 7, I. 11, I. 19, I. 33, I. 47, II. 15, II. 17, II. 20 get no division of their own and their text reads on inside the one before. The words are all here; the breaks are not.