ADDIS ABABA / LONDON — A viral headline declaring an “Ethiopian Bible bombshell” is drawing global attention to one of Christianity’s oldest scriptural traditions, after an online article claimed that newly translated Ge’ez manuscripts contain post-resurrection words attributed to Jesus that do not appear in Western Bibles. The claim, circulated by the website Family Stories, has been framed as a dramatic “rediscovery” — but scholars note that Ethiopia’s biblical tradition has long preserved a broader canon and a vast manuscript culture, and that any newly highlighted passage would require careful, document-by-document verification before it could be treated as a significant addition to the historical record.

A canon that has always been different
The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church maintains the largest biblical canon in continuous use in mainstream Christianity. Church listings commonly describe a total of 81 books, reflecting a long development history shaped by local transmission, language, and liturgy.

That canon includes texts familiar to Western Christians — the Gospels and Pauline letters — but it also preserves books that are not part of most Protestant or Catholic Bibles, such as 1 Enoch and Jubilees, alongside other writings used in Ethiopian tradition.

This matters for interpreting viral “new passage” claims: differences between the Ethiopian canon and Western collections are not, by themselves, evidence of a modern discovery. They are a known feature of a distinct canonical tradition that has remained liturgically alive for centuries.

The language of the manuscripts
Much of Ethiopia’s classical Christian literature is written in Ge’ez (Classical Ethiopic), an ancient Semitic language that is no longer spoken as a community vernacular but remains central to worship and religious scholarship.

Encyclopaedia Britannica notes that the Bible was translated into Ge’ez broadly between the 5th and 7th centuries, and that the language continues in liturgy even after it ceased to be widely spoken in daily life.

The Family Stories article builds its “bombshell” around a translation project focused on post-resurrection material in Ethiopian manuscripts, presenting the passages as “previously untranslated or unstudied.” But researchers familiar with Ethiopic materials caution that “newly translated” often means “newly accessible in English,” rather than newly discovered in a historical sense — a distinction that can be lost in social-media retellings.

A deep and still-growing archive
Ethiopia’s manuscript tradition is extensive, and major libraries outside Ethiopia hold large collections of Ethiopic codices that scholars continue to catalogue and digitize.

Cambridge University Library, for example, maintains an Ethiopian manuscript collection spanning many centuries and encompassing a range of religious works. Princeton’s Digital PUL also hosts an open collection of Ethiopic manuscripts, emphasizing that these codices are chiefly written in Ge’ez and often contain marginalia in later languages such as Amharic.

In parallel, the craft of handwritten manuscript production remains culturally and religiously significant in Ethiopia. A recent Guardian report described workshops preserving illuminated manuscript traditions — copying sacred texts in Ge’ez on parchment using historical methods — underscoring that “ancient” does not always mean “inactive.”

What the viral claim actually says
The Family Stories piece does not present photographs of the specific manuscript pages, provide shelf marks from known collections, or identify a critical edition that would allow independent specialists to review readings. Instead, it offers a high-level description: the “new” material allegedly includes post-resurrection instruction on leadership and teaching, warnings about misleading figures, and encouragement to persevere — framed as complementary to canonical resurrection accounts.

Such themes are not unusual in early Christian literature broadly; post-resurrection teaching scenes and community-order instructions appear across multiple ancient traditions. The key scholarly question is not whether the themes sound plausible, but whether the wording can be traced to a specific Ethiopic textual tradition, dated and contextualized within manuscript lineages, and compared rigorously with Greek, Syriac, Coptic, and Latin witnesses.

Why verification is hard — and why it matters
Translating Ge’ez manuscripts is highly technical work. Differences between manuscripts, copying errors, regional transmission, and damaged pages can all affect what a passage appears to say. Even for well-known works, scholars typically rely on critical editions built from multiple manuscript witnesses rather than a single copy.

That is why specialists tend to be cautious about viral claims that present a “hidden” teaching as if it were a newly unearthed quotation from Jesus. Without clear manuscript identifiers, publication details, and peer review, the public cannot easily distinguish among:

a genuine textual variant,
a paraphrase or interpretive rendering,
a later devotional expansion,
or a modern embellishment attached to Ethiopia’s very real and very old canon.
The bigger story: Ethiopia’s place in Christian history
Even if the specific “post-resurrection words” highlighted in the viral story remain unproven as a major discovery, the attention is landing on something historically solid: the Ethiopian Orthodox tradition is a central, ancient stream of Christianity with its own scriptural inheritance, maintained through Ge’ez liturgy and a living ecclesial culture.

That continuity is visible far beyond Ethiopia. An Associated Press feature on an Ethiopian Orthodox church in Washington, D.C., described Ge’ez as part of the diaspora’s religious life, used alongside Amharic and English to preserve heritage and worship.

Bottom line
The online article has succeeded in doing what viral religion-and-history stories often do: it turns a complex scholarly field into a cliffhanger. But Ethiopia’s larger canon, Ge’ez manuscript tradition, and ongoing translation work are real — and they deserve attention on their own terms.

If a “newly spotlighted” resurrection passage is to be taken seriously in academic biblical studies, readers should look for the basics: a published critical edition, manuscript shelf marks, a transparent translation methodology, and independent evaluation from experts in Ethiopic texts. Until then, the most responsible framing is not “bombshell,” but “claim — awaiting documentation,” set against the genuinely rich reality of the Ethiopic biblical tradition.