The picture above shows John 1:1-7 in Ge'ez language

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THE REVISED AMHARIC BIBLE OF 1962 IN XML FORMAT

HOSKIER: ALIGNMENTS OF THE ETHIOPIC VERSION AND PAPYRUS P46

This page offers resources about the Bible of the Ethiopians and covers material about the Ge'ez as well as the Amharic versions.

The Encyclopedia of New Testament Textual Criticism writes:

... Unlike many of the languages into which the Bible was translated, Ethiopia already had developed writing at the time Christianity reached the country (the alphabet resembles the Semitic in that it uses letters for consonants and lesser symbols for vowels; however, the letter forms diverge widely from the Phoenician, and the language reads from left to right. It has been theorized that the Ethiopic alphabet is actually derived from the Old Hebrew alphabet, abandoned by the Jews themselves in the post-Exilic period. The modern "Hebrew" alphabet is actually Aramaic. Ethiopic, however, added vowel symbols at a very early date -- not as extra letters but as tags attached to letters. This is further evidence of Semitic origin -- and, probably, of the absence of Greek influence).

Because written Ethiopic predates the New Testament, we cannot date the version based on the dates of the earliest written documents. Nor are the dates of the earliest manuscripts much help, since all Ethiopic manuscripts are of the eleventh century or later and the vast majority are of the fourteenth century or later. Nor did printing immediately affect the version; manuscripts continued to be copied into the seventeenth century and even beyond. Perhaps the most common theory is that the version dates from about the fifth century, when Christianity probably became widespread in Ethiopia.

It is not clear what language formed the translation base for the Ethiopic version, although Greek and Coptic are the leading candidates (the Apocalypse, in particular, contains a number of transliterations from Greek) It is possible that both were used in different books. Syriac and Arabic have also been mentioned (the version bears significant orthographic similarities to those languages), and revisions based on the latter cannot be ruled out. On the other hand, Ethiopic is not Indo-European, so many of the noteworthy features of Greek (e.g. noun declensions, word order, and many verb forms) cannot be rendered. Hints of Syriac or Arabic influence on the version may simply be because Ethiopic is closer to those languages. The problem is not simplified by the fact that the language is not well-known to scholars and the version has not been properly edited. In addition, it appears likely that different translators worked on different books (since the style ranges from the free to the stiltedly literal); it is possible that different base texts were used. It is worth noting that the Ethiopic Bible includes several works not normally considered canonical.

Based on the available information, it would appear that the Ethiopic has an Alexandrian text -- but an uncontrolled, with very primitive Alexandrian readings alternating with primarily Byzantine readings and some variants that are simply wild. Zuurmond calls it "Early Byzantine" in the Gospels, and also notes an "extreme tendency toward harmonizations." Hoskier noted that Eth had a number of unusual agreements with P46 in Paul, but undertook no detailed study. It may be that the Ethiopic is based on the sort of free text that seems to have prevailed in Egypt in the early years of Christianity: Basically similar to the Alexandrian text, with a number of very primitive readings (the latter often rather rough), but with some wild readings, others characteristic of the later text, and a number of readings that resulted simply from scribal inattentiveness. The lack of a detailed study prevents us from saying more.