Martin Luther saw Ethiopia's ancient church as a forerunner of Protestantism
More than a thousand years before European missionaries reached the Horn of Africa, the kingdom of Aksum had adopted Christianity. Its church, now the largest of the Oriental Orthodox family, kept married priests, scripture in the local language and communion in both bread and wine, practices that caught Martin Luther's attention in the 1500s.
Tradition ties the faith in Ethiopia to the Book of Acts, where Philip the Evangelist baptises a treasurer serving the Kandake, a queen of Ethiopia, after explaining a passage of Isaiah to him. The firmer history begins in the 4th century with Frumentius, a Syrian Greek shipwrecked as a youth with his brother on the Eritrean coast. Taken to the royal court, the brothers rose to influence, and Frumentius baptised King Ezana, making Christianity the established faith of Aksum. Ethiopians still call him Father of Peace, Revealer of Light. In 2016, archaeologists dated a basilica at Beta Samati to the 4th century, the oldest known church building in sub-Saharan Africa.
The word Tewahedo is Ge'ez for being made one. It expresses the belief that Christ's divine and human natures form a single united nature, the position of churches that rejected the Council of Chalcedon in 451, which taught two natures. Outsiders sometimes label this monophysite, meaning a solely divine nature, but Ethiopians insist the correct term is miaphysite. For roughly sixteen centuries the church was administratively part of the Coptic Church of Alexandria, gaining its own patriarch only in 1959.
Medieval Ethiopia had lively internal debates. The monk Ewostatewos insisted on keeping the Saturday Sabbath, and by the mid-15th century observing both Saturday and Sunday became official. The later Stephanite movement refused to venerate the cross or accept royal authority over the church and was persecuted under Emperor Zara Yaqob.
Europe's arrival brought upheaval. Portugal, seeking allies against the Ottomans on the Red Sea route to India, sent embassies, and Jesuits followed. Emperor Susenyos formally submitted to the pope in 1624 and made Catholicism the state religion, but resistance forced him to abdicate in 1632. His son Fasilides restored Orthodoxy and expelled the Jesuits the following year. The historian David Daniels argues that the church, as an apostolic body outside papal authority, lent legitimacy to Luther's vision of reform.
Source: Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church
