The Jesuit missionaries’ encounter with Ethiopian Christians at the outset of the 17th century was an unparalleled period of cultural and religious interchange. During this  period, European Jesuit missionaries attempted to ‘clean out’ the ‘flawed’ elements in  order to proselytize the Catholic faith among the Ethiopian Orthodox believers. Their  main goal was to convert those local religious expressions into a uniform faith that  subscribes to European Catholicism. 
With this aim in mind, an extensive set of European Catholic literature was translated  into Ge’ez during that period. While some of these works were originally written in  the context of the Catholic Reformation, others were authored by Jesuits who lived and  worked in Ethiopia. These writings had a common goal: to convince the Ethiopian Orthodox population to accept Catholicism and recognize it as the righteous faith.  

However, and with the sole exception of the Antonio Fernandes’ Mäqśäftä hassätat, all these works were deliberately burned and destroyed after 1632. This lucky exception  will be an essential source for the development of this paper. The survival of the  Mäqśäftä hassätat provides us with a unique opportunity to look into a testimony of the  language and nature of the theological dispute between the Latin Catholic and the  Ethiopian Orthodox sides during the 17th century. The Mäqśäftä hassätat covers some  of the theological and sacramental practices that were at the center of the Catholic Ethiopian debate during the 17th century.  

Therefore, and with the aim of getting a better understanding of the interaction between  these two Christian traditions and the textual milieu of the 17th century, the proposed  paper will aim to describe the nature of this treatise and its main characteristics in an  effort to shed light on this proselytizer’s attempts to debunk contemporaneous  Ethiopian Christian rituals, sources, and beliefs. Moreover, a better knowledge of this  fluctuating but thriving period in Ethiopian history shall help us to understand the  environment in which the Ḥatäta Zär’a Ya‛ǝqob might have – or might have not – been written.