The written word was very important. It was, you know, you got all those books, the Bible, you know, you’ve got the the different gospels and stuff that people are quite familiar. What if everything you thought you knew about Jesus was incomplete, deliberately hidden? Deep in the mountains of East Africa, for nearly 2,000 years, monks have guarded a Bible you will never see. A Bible with dozens of books erased from your version. books that describe Jesus not as a gentle shepherd but as a being of fire and light, a cosmic force so overwhelming even angels could not look at him. And the strangest part, some of these texts were written centuries before he was born, predicting events that match revelation almost word for word. This is not lost history. It was hidden. And what it reveals could change everything. The secret scriptures. In this page of my notebook, I wrote down Satan and he became my first real topical study in the scriptures. >> Set the stage properly because the scale of what we are talking about tends to get lost in casual conversation. Most Christians in the western world and whether Catholic or Protestant grew up with a Bible containing somewhere between 66 and 73 books. That number was decided centuries ago by councils of men who sat in rooms and voted on which texts were divinely inspired and which ones were not. The books that made the cut became scripture.
The books that did not were labeled apocryphal, meaning hidden or worse, heretical, meaning dangerous. They were pulled from circulation, banned from churches, and in many cases physically destroyed. The assumption most people carry, whether they realize it or not, is that the books in their Bible are the complete story. That everything God intended us to know is right there between the covers. >> Christianity is a monotheistic religion that centers on the teachings of Jesus Christ, almighty universal God. >> But here is the problem with that assumption. And there is an entire branch of Christianity that is older than the councils that made those decisions, older than the Roman Empire’s adoption of the faith, older than the arguments, the politics, and the power struggles that shaped Western Christianity into what it is today. And that branch kept everything. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tiwaho Church traces its origins back to the 4th century, but its roots reach much deeper than that. The Ethiopian tradition claims a direct connection to the ancient Israelites through the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon. >> The Egyptian record of the campaign that’s mentioned in the Bible and he took the treasures of Solomon.
> Whether you take that claim literally or symbolically, the historical fact is that Christianity arrived in Ethiopia before it arrived in most of Europe. These were not late comers adopting a foreign religion. These were among the first people on earth to call themselves followers of Christ. And because of geography, because Ethiopia is surrounded by mountains and deserts and was extraordinarily difficult to reach for most of human history, the Ethiopian church developed in near total isolation from the political machinery that was reshaping Christianity in Rome, Constantinople, and Alexandria. While councils in the Mediterranean world were debating which books to keep and which to discard, the Ethiopian monks were copying everything. The Vatican, the central authority of the Roman Catholic Church, seemed to fear the Ethiopian Bible.