Greetings in that Divine and Most Precious Name of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ!
Easy. Constantine being the most evil and powerful man on earth gathered every single historical text and included references about Christianity into them and then gave them back to their original owners while forging the entirety of the Ante Nicene fathers and the bible.
While none of them have ever said this, I have had a few say Constantine made bible.
In part, this premise is true. Not necessarily the part about Constantine, but the reality that many manuscripts have been destroyed. In the Ethiopian experience, many scholars wrongfully assert that the Solomonic legends were added or embellished during the era of Zara Yacob. It is a fact of Ethiopian history that a sheer majority of the texts, writings, and manuscripts which our Church has to day originated in the 13th-15th centuries. HOWEVER, this shouldn't suggest that they were magically invented at this time as many scholars loftily assert. Rather, different eras of strife and political divisions, as well as internal Church struggles with various indigenous and exogenous heresies results in the destruction of much of Ethiopian historical documents and artifacts. During the "Gudith raids" was the first wave of this process. Gudit (or Judith) may actually have never even existed (I believe she did) rather the stories of her campaigns are a collective and symbolic narrative to explain a century of Christian persecution and political destruction which culminated in the ascendancy of the Zagwe dynasty (some call a Solomonic pretender, others say a Solomonic side branch). Then again in the 16th century under the Turkish and Somali invasions, literally THOUSANDS of Churches were burned, looted, and destroyed. In Ethiopia at this time (as in MANY Tropical regions) Churches were by and large the ONLY stone structures, which meant that they were also the majority of libraries and archives. To destroy Churches was to try to erase the evidence of history. However, embedded in the collective memory of the Ethiopian people, Tradition survived and was revived and restored in the Gonderine Restoration. Let us also not forgot the Catholic controversies which tried to wipe out Orthodox in Ethiopia and replace it with Latinism. In Gonder, just like under Zara Yacob two centuries earlier, many Ethiopian courts and churches were rebuilt and the literature redrafted.
This should not suggest that Ethiopia lost all her treasures, after all she is a vast and mountainous place, absolutely criss-crossed by mountains and river valleys, making even MODERN travel strenuous and difficult. In many flung parishes and monasteries we find some of the oldest coinage from places as far away as India and China, we even find ancient texts lost to the outside world, and not just Christian, but philosophies and histories too.
Sometime historians have wrongfully labelled Ethiopia a "living museum" but nothing could be further from the truth, she is not a museum, rather this ancient history which she preserves is alive, dynamic, and active. It is not uncommon for Ethiopians at the Bunna Bet to get into a heated and detailed argument about a local or regional history that is hundreds of years removed as if it literally happened yesterday
Much like in the Pacific Islands, Ethiopia as a less material civilization has focused instead much of her efforts on oral history, language, and cultural development which is why in the collective imagination of even the most rural folks is a in-depth understanding of the continuity of history. It used to be the same in Medieval Europe where any old peasant woman knew every symbol, motif, and gossip about events even a thousand years before their time
Materialism robs us of spiritual and cultural energy, which is particularly why I feel that fasting culture is so critical in Orthodox, to combat this.
stay blessed,
habte selassie
