Selam thought for a moment. "Because you were never conquered by Rome," she said. "When Constantine and the later councils purged the scriptures, the Axumite Kingdom was a free power. You didn't attend Nicea or Carthage. So you kept what others burned."
The elderly monk, Father Gebre, agreed to show her the ancient Ge'ez manuscript only if she could answer a riddle: "Why does our Bible have more books than any other?"
Unlike any other Christian canon, the Ethiopian Bible contains . The Protestant Bible has 66; the Catholic has 73. But Ethiopia kept what others lost: the Book of Enoch, the Book of Jubilees, the Ascension of Isaiah, and the Me’raj (the apocalypse of Peter). These were texts that other councils had deemed too strange, too dangerous, too wild .
Selam smiled, remembering Father Gebre’s final words: "Your world changes its Bible every few centuries. Ours has been the same since the time of Menelik I, son of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. We are not the ones who forgot."
