Introduction to This Volume
How this book is arranged
This is the hundred and ninth volume of a series that gathers the writings of the early Church. The first volumes of the series follow the writers in order of date; this volume belongs to the later part of the series, which gathers the apocryphal and pseudepigraphal writings: the Ethiopic Contendings of the Apostles. This volume holds the whole of the Ethiopic Contendings of the Apostles, in E. A. Wallis Budge’s English: the preaching and martyrdoms of Peter, Paul, Andrew, Thomas and the other apostles.
Within each work the text is divided into chapters and numbered sections, so that any passage can be found again and cited. The small bold figures in the text are the section numbers.
The translations
The text is in English only. Wherever a modern English version has been prepared for SermonIndex it is used here; otherwise the book prints an older public-domain translation. In both cases the wording is the translator’s own: older translations have not been altered beyond dividing them into sections. The sources for every work are listed at the back of the book, together with the licence under which each text is released. All the works in this volume are printed in older public-domain translations. Budge’s translation was read by machine from scans of the printed books and has not been proofread against the pages, so a misreading may remain. Page numbers, footnotes, the Ethiopic text and the Arabic and Greek words in Budge’s notes are left out; where a footnote was joined to the text in the scan, it has been removed.
In this volume
The Contendings of the Apostles is a large collection in Ethiopic. It tells in order the lives and martyrdoms of the twelve apostles and of Paul, with long speeches and prayers of the saints, and many miracles. The collection is translated here from the edition of E. A. Wallis Budge, and the volume is made of the two parts of that work.
Its stories were read in the churches and monasteries of Ethiopia. The books were copied with a note of the copyist and the patron, and these notes are kept at the end of each work. Much of the matter appears nowhere else in English, and the reader should treat it as legend that was taken for history.
Dates and authorship
None of these books is part of the Bible. Some were written by Jews before the time of Christ, some by Christians in the first centuries, and some much later, and many carry the name of a patriarch, an apostle or a Father who did not write them. Some of them contain stories that the Church never received and teaching that it rejected. They are printed here so that a reader can see what they say and judge them against the Scriptures, as the Fathers themselves did. The Contendings are a medieval collection of legends in Ethiopic, made from older Coptic and Arabic texts.