Zera Yacob and the Hatata's Rationalist Method

Zera Yacob (Zar'a Ya'eqob) was born on August 28, 1599, near Aksum in the Ethiopian highlands. His life coincided with one of the most turbulent religious episodes in Ethiopian history: the reign of Emperor Susenyos I, who converted to Roman Catholicism in 1622 under the influence of Portuguese Jesuit missionaries, most prominently Pedro Páez and, after Páez's death, the more rigid Afonso Mendes, who was installed as Catholic Patriarch of Ethiopia. Susenyos's conversion triggered a decade of religious persecution against Ethiopian Orthodox clergy and laypeople who refused to abandon the Tewahedo faith and the traditional Alexandrian rite, provoking rebellions across the highlands. According to his own account, Zera Yacob, then a teacher trained in the traditional Ge'ez church schools, was denounced to the emperor for privately doubting both the imported Catholic doctrine and the received teaching of his own church, and in 1626 he fled Aksum, taking refuge in a cave near the Tekezé River, where he lived in isolation for roughly two years before Susenyos's death and the restoration of Orthodoxy under his son and successor, Fasilides, in 1632.