First Book of Dominos study guide: the sixty-chapter Testamentum Domini.

First Dominos quick facts

Who wrote the First Book of Dominos?

The book presents instruction from the risen Jesus to disciples. Mary, Martha, and Salome participate in the opening revelation. That voice supplies literary and traditional authority; it is not a surviving author signature. The Greek author, Ethiopic translator, and later redactors are anonymous.^{[7][8][9][10][11][12][13]}

Calling the work “anonymous” describes the limits of historical evidence; it does not deny the authority the Ethiopian Orthodox tradition gives the text.

When did the Testamentum Domini take shape?

Most scholarship places the Greek antecedent in the late fourth or fifth century, although exact date and provenance remain contested. The complete versions are later witnesses to that earlier work. A Syriac recension was associated with James of Edessa by 687, while a recently identified Greek fragment offers late-fifth-century evidence without restoring the complete original.^{[14][15][16][17][19][20]}

The work revises traditions also associated with the Apostolic Tradition. That strong literary relationship does not reduce every version to one recoverable source document.^{[18][21][22][23][24]}

How did the work survive?

The work survives completely in Syriac, Arabic, and Ge'ez, with smaller Latin, Georgian, Greek, and Coptic witnesses. The Ge'ez is commonly understood as an early translation from Greek, perhaps in the Aksumite period, but the exact pathway is reconstructed through comparison rather than preserved in a translator's colophon.^{[7][11][12][13][19][20]}

Catalogued codices in Stuttgart, Paris, and London place the work beside the Galilee testament and other church-order material. Their dates and segmentations show a living manuscript collection, not one uniform modern volume.^{[28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38]}

How are the sixty chapters arranged?

The chapter-level Ge'ez work record, editions, liturgical studies, and Ethiopic reference works control this outline.^{[6][8][11][14][15][39][40]}

What should readers notice?

Specialist studies of liturgy, women in ministry, magic, law, and the Sinodos help separate the primary text from modern extrapolation.^{[22][23][25][26][27]}

Five claims to carry forward

• First Dominos is the sixty-chapter Mäṣḥafä Kidan or Testamentum Domini.
• The risen Jesus is the literary speaker; the historical human author is unknown.
• A late-fourth- or fifth-century Greek antecedent is likely, but precise date and place are debated.
• Ge'ez is a complete and independent witness that must not be collapsed into the Syriac editions.
• Its call to worship, care, and accountable community must be received with explicit anti-coercion safeguards.

How does First Dominos relate to other church orders?

The Testamentum Domini reworks patterns associated with the Apostolic Tradition: ordination, Eucharistic prayer, initiation, fasting, and care. The relationship is strong, but shared order or vocabulary may reflect source use, adaptation, translation, or a common tradition. Direction must be argued passage by passage.^{[16][17][18][21]}

Within the Ethiopian list, Abtilis precedes First Dominos and Second Dominos follows it. Proximity signals a church-order context, not common authorship or identical content.

What remains uncertain?

Why is First Dominos called a New Testament book?

The EOTC official list counts thirty-five New Testament books and places First Dominos among eight broader church-order books. Other Ethiopian descriptions distinguish that broader list from a narrower twenty-seven-book printed New Testament. Both facts must remain visible: the work has real Ethiopian canonical reception, and that reception is not universal.^{[1][2][3][4][5]}

“Broader canon” does not mean secret or recently recovered. It describes a community's reception and enumeration.

Read historically, devotionally, and safely.

• Do not use apocalyptic images to date current wars, identify a living antichrist, induce panic, or solicit money.
• Reject antisemitism, collective Jewish blame, religious harassment, and coerced conversion.
• Reject ableism; disability and mental distress are not impurity, moral failure, or possession.
• Never delay qualified medical or mental-health care because of fasting, ritual, exorcism, or discipline.
• Reject sexual coercion, forced marriage, gendered violence, retaliation, and every return of a survivor to danger.
• Do not let ordination rules bypass safeguarding, evidence, due process, civil law, or professional accountability.
• Receive care for widows, sick people, poor people, and strangers as protection and material support, never surveillance.
• Describe Ethiopian reception without claiming that other churches stole or suppressed the book.

First Dominos frequently asked questions