Garima Gospels
As such, they represent amongst the earliest versional witnesses to the early Byzantine text-type of the Gospels, and are the oldest surviving Ethiopian manuscripts of any kind known to modern scholars.
[3] Monastic tradition ascribes the gospel books to Saint Abba Garima, said to have arrived in Ethiopia in 494.
[2] Definitive radiocarbon tests have indeed supported the dating of Abba Garima 2, the earlier of the two books, to the sixth century,[4] but otherwise recent research tends to contra-indicate many aspects of the traditional account, proposing instead that the text-base for the Garima gospels is Greek, not Syriac, that the iconography and palaeography look to Egyptian not Syrian sources, and that the gospel translation witnessed in the Garima gospels had been completed over a century before the traditional dates for the Nine Saints.
[8] Recent restoration has separated the three books, and repaginated in the original order and volumes; relocating a number of folios and miniatures which over the centuries had been displaced between the three manuscripts.
A further illuminated page depicts the Temple of Solomon, or perhaps the Fountain of Life, with a staircase of unusual form unique in Christian iconography.
[3] The Garima Gospels first became known outside Ethiopia in 1950, when Beatrice Playne, a British art historian visited the monastery.
[3] The two Garima Gospels became known to biblical scholars through microfilm photographs collected by Donald M Davies who realised that they represented a much earlier text than that of any other surviving Ethiopian manuscript.
Later Ethiopic manuscripts (and following them, all previous printed Ethiopic editions) commonly descend from an extensive revision undertaken in the 13th century, by which the Gospel texts were corrected to convey more literal and accurate renderings of Greek word order and terminology, and also to conform more closely to Egyptian Arabic versions.
[12] Jacques Mercier a French expert in Ethiopian art, examined the manuscripts at the monastery; and, because the manuscripts were deteriorating to the point where they crumbled every time they were examined, he was permitted in 2000 to take two small detached fragments of parchment to the Oxford University Research Laboratory for Archaeology.
[13] This accords with the date proposed by Marilyn Heldman in the catalog to the 1993 Exhibition African Zion: the Sacred Art of Ethiopia.
Marilyn Heldman had previously contributed notes on the illuminated pages of Garima 1 and Garima 2 to Donald Davies's study of dating Ethiopic manuscripts, in which she had argued that the correct depiction of classical architectural forms in the Garima canon tables precluded a date later than the sixth century; while the nearest parallels to the evangelist portraits (especially the forms of furniture depicted in the portrait of Mark) were also of that century.
[8] Mercier's proposal of a much earlier date for the Garima Gospels was taken into account in the revision of Zuurmond's work undertaken by Curt Niccum in 2013.
[7] In November 2013, a two-day conference was held at the Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies at Oxford, sponsored by the Ethiopian Heritage Fund, with the title "Ethiopia and the Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity: The Garima Gospels in Context".
[6] Otherwise papers presented at the conference included the first full published translation by Getatchew Haile of the various historical notes found in the two gospel books; together with various iconographic and palaeographic studies, including a paper from Jacques Mercier arguing that the common grid of scored lines underlying both illustrations and text demonstrates that both were executed in Ethiopia, and that consequently a school of painting and a workshop for the production of manuscripts must have been active in the Kingdom of Axum in Late Antiquity.
[6] Alessandro Bausi presented a paper comparing the Ge'ez language and palaeography of the Garima gospels with those found in a recently identified manuscript witness to the 'Aksumite Collection' or 'Synod of Qefrya'; an edited compendium of selected Greek synodical texts, which is believed to have been translated into Ge'ez in the later fifth century.
