Garima Gospels

The Gärima Gospels are two illuminated Ge'ez language Gospel Books; of which Gärima 2, the earlier, is believed to be "the most ancient Christian manuscript decorated with paintings". Both gospel books had long been thought to date from c. 1100 or later, but radiocarbon analysis of samples from Garima 2 proposed a revised date in the range 390-570, while counterpart dating of samples from Garima 1 proposed a date in the range 530-660, making them the oldest surviving Ethiopian manuscript of any kind. These dates are considerably earlier than had been previously suggested on palaeographic grounds.

Together, the two manuscripts provide the major witness to the Ethiopic version of the Gospels and have been applied as proof texts for the creation of critical editions of the Ethiopic Gospels by Rochus Zuurmond (Gospel of Mark, 1989; Gospel of Matthew, 2001) and Michael G Wechsler (Gospel of John, 2005). As such they represent amongst the earliest versional witnesses to the early Byzantine text-type of the Gospels.

The Gospels are housed in Ethiopia's Abba Garima Monastery. They are not known ever to have left the monastery; although, as the surrounding area was occupied by Muslims from the ninth to the fourteenth centuries, it is possible that they may have remained hidden in a cave for centuries, and then rediscovered. The Gospels were included the catalog of an American museum exhibition that toured from 1993–96, African Zion: the Sacred Art of Ethiopia, but were never actually lent to the exhibition.

Monastic tradition ascribes the gospel books to Saint Abba Garima, said to have arrived in Ethiopia in 494. Abba Garima is one of the Nine Saints traditionally thought to have come from Syria, and to have evangelized the rural populations of the ancient Ethiopian kingdom of Axum in the sixth century; and the monks regard the Gospels less as significant antiquities than as sacred relics of Abba Garima. According to tradition, Abba Garima wrote and illustrated the complete Gospels in a single day; God stopped the sun from setting until the Saint completed his work. Definitive radiocarbon tests have indeed supported the dating Abba Garima 2, the earlier of the two books, to the sixth century, 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 looks 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. Furthermore, the supposed Syrian origin of the Nine Saints is no longer maintained in most recent scholarship.

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