"Stunning Discovery" in Ethiopia—The Garima Gospels

Teresa Neumann : Jul 8, 2010
Staff - The Daily Mail

It may contain the first ever Christian illustration of the Temple of the Jews.

(Ethiopia)—The "incredible" Garima Gospels—supposedly the world's earliest illustrated Christian book—has been saved by the British charity, Ethiopian Charity Fund, which located it at a remote Ethiopian monastery near Adway in the Tigray region at about 7,000 ft. elevation.

As reported in The Daily Mail, the book is named after Abba (Father) Garima, a monk who arrived in Ethiopia from Constantinople in 494 AD. Legend has it that the monk was able to copy the Gospels in a day because God delayed the sun from setting.

The book was reportedly written on goat skin in the early Ethiopian language of Ge'ez, and experts believe it is also the earliest example of book binding still attached to the original pages.

Blair Priday from the Ethiopian Heritage Fund said: "Ethiopia has been overlooked as a source of these fantastic things. Many of these old Christian relics can only be reached by hiking and climbing to remote monasteries as roads are limited in these mountainous regions. All the work on the texts was done in situ and everything is reversible, so if in the future they can be taken away for further conservation we won't have hindered that.

"The pages had been crudely stitched together in a restoration in the 1960s," he adds, "and some of the pages wouldn't even turn. And they were falling to pieces. The Garima Gospels have been kept high and dry which has helped preserve them all these years and they are kept in the dark so the colors look fresh. This was the most astounding of all our projects and the Patriarch, the head of the Ethiopian Church, had to give his permission."

Laura Roberts, writing for The Telegraph U.K., says the manuscript "may be the first ever Christian illustration of a building, the Temple of the Jews." And Mark Winstanley is quoted in the same report as saying, "although the monks have always believed in the legend of Abba Garima the new date means it could actually be true."