The contendings of the Apostles

A rare portal into the contested lives of the earliest apostles.Scholarly, readable, and quietly gripping.E. A. Wallis Budge’s The Contendings of the Apostles, Volume II presents Ethiopic Christian texts now edited from manuscripts in the British Museum and rendered into English. It gathers the histories of the lives, martyrdoms and deaths of the twelve apostles and evangelists, creating an apostolic acts anthology that intersects hagiography, local oral traditions and doctrinal debate. Drawn from ancient Ethiopia manuscripts, the collection supplies vivid martyrdom accounts, miracle narratives and disputations of authority that helped shape early church writings and the wider corpus of late antiquity literature. The narratives preserve regional variants of apostolic memory and illuminate practices of devotion and sanctity long studied within patristic literature collection. As a religious studies reference the volume is essential for scholars of Christianity; as lively storytelling it offers curious readers direct access to the sources behind christian saints history.Historically significant and literarily compelling, the work sits within the influential E. A. Wallis Budge works that opened anglophone scholarship to non-Western Christian traditions. Its value is double: reliable primary material for historians, theologians and students of hagiography, and an evocative anthology for anyone drawn to biography, ritual and the drama of witness. Librarians and postgraduate researchers will find it indispensable for work on comparative hagiography, textual transmission and the intersection of African and Mediterranean Christianity. The translation renders complex Ethiopic idioms into accessible English while preserving the force and urgency of the original narratives. Casual readers will be arrested by the dramatic lives and the stark martyrdom accounts; classic-literature collectors and specialist libraries will appreciate the text’s provenance, rarity and its role in mapping apostolic tradition across regions. Out of print for decades and now republished by Alpha Editions. Restored for today’s and future generations. More than a reprint - a collector’s item and a cultural treasure.