The Forty Days: Christ After the Resurrection - Secrets Preserved in the Ethiopian Orthodox Canon

For forty days after the Resurrection, Christ taught His disciples, "speaking of the things pertaining to the kingdom of God" (Acts 1:3). The Bible records almost none of what He said.

One church kept more. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, whose Bible holds eighty-one books, preserved ancient texts that claim to record those forty days: the Testamentum Domini, the Testament of Our Lord, with its companion, the Epistula Apostolorum. They are among the "lost books" readers of the Ethiopian Bible ask about most, and they are rarely found in English.

THE FORTY DAYS is the doorway to them. What you will find inside:

• The Search. How the text was kept, lost to the West, and found again, and an honest chapter on what scholars know and what they dispute.
• What He Said. Thirty scenes in which the witnesses answer one another across five languages: the Geʿez of manuscript EMML 2358, the Syriac, a newly identified Greek fragment, the Coptic-Arabic line, and the companion gospels. Where they agree, where the West received differently, and what only Ethiopia kept.
• The Testament of Our Lord. The discourse read straight through, in the cadence of the King James Bible: the revelation of the last days, the ordering of the early Church and its ministers, the Eucharistic prayer, the Marian and Ascension teaching, and the Testament in Galilee.
• A transmission map and a family tree of the witnesses, showing how the Word travelled from tongue to tongue.

The teaching appears twice by design: first scene by scene, witness beside witness, then whole and unbroken. Every source is named. Nothing is hidden.

Second edition, corrected and augmented. For every reader: believer, scholar or seeker.

Plínio Bezerra dos Santos Filho, Ph.D. holds a doctorate in Physics from Washington University in St. Louis and completed post-doctoral research at Harvard University. Named Outstanding Teacher of the Year at North Carolina State University, he founded the Conservation and Restoration Laboratory of Olinda (UNESCO World Heritage Site) and directed UNESCO conservation projects as founder of AERPA. This book opens the Testamentum Domini Collection, prepared with Claude (Anthropic) as credited co-author.