The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church reads a Bible of 81 books because it kept copying writings that churches elsewhere stopped using. The 66-book Bible many of us were handed is the count of one church family, the Protestant churches that grew out of the European Reformation of the 1500s. Between the two sit the Bibles of the Catholic and other Orthodox churches, which include a shared set of additional books and whose counts vary by tradition. Church historian Dr. Vince Bantu speaks of 66-, 79- and 81-book canons held by different churches. That spread is not a sign that the Bible is unstable. It reflects decisions about books at the edges, made at different times in different places.
So the useful question is less “Why did Ethiopia add books?” than who kept which books, when, and why others let some go. Answering it means following events in order. Bantu, who teaches church history and Black church studies at Fuller Theological Seminary, approaches the subject as a historian rather than a biblical specialist. He says he is “not technically a Bible scholar,” which is a helpful reminder to separate what the record shows from what anyone can only infer.
Where the Number 66 Comes From
The familiar count is 39 books of Israel’s Scriptures and 27 apostolic writings. Even 39 depends on how one counts. The Jewish Tanakh holds the same material as 24 books, because pairs such as 1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, and Ezra and Nehemiah were each one scroll, as were the twelve Minor Prophets. Some differences in book counts are simply differences in how the same text is divided.
The real difference in content lies elsewhere, and Ethiopia is not the only church involved. Roman Catholic Bibles are larger than Protestant ones, and so are the Bibles of the two Orthodox families:
- Eastern Orthodoxy includes the Greek, Russian, Ukrainian, Romanian, Bulgarian and Albanian churches.
- Oriental Orthodoxy includes churches of Africa and the Middle East: the Syrian, Indian or Malankara, Ethiopian, Eritrean and Coptic Egyptian churches.
Bantu’s larger claim is that for most of church history, most theologians accepted a canon larger than the one European Protestants finally adopted.
He adds a detail many Western readers have never encountered. Ethiopia had a reformation of its own, by his account a century before the European one. When someone mentions the Reformation, it is fair to ask which one.
A Shelf of Books That Was Never Lost
The books shared by Catholic and Orthodox Bibles but missing from Protestant ones carry several names, and most of them mislead. Bantu puts it bluntly: “one of my least favorite names is when people call these the Lost Books of the Bible.” Communities have read them for centuries. Calling them hidden fails too. “They ain’t been hidden either,” he says. They were copied and translated from the church’s beginning, and earlier, since they began as Jewish books.
The technical labels have problems of their own. Apocrypha comes from a Greek word meaning hidden, repeating the same error. Pseudepigrapha means writings falsely attributed to their authors. That is an insult to anyone whose church receives these books as Scripture, though it does name one real reason some Christians rejected them: doubt about who wrote them.
The neutral term, whatever one’s view of their authority, is deuterocanon, meaning a second canon, much as Deuteronomy was the second giving of the law. For Catholic and Orthodox Christians, “second” marks order. They hold these books equal in authority to the rest.
The deuterocanon includes Tobit, the Maccabees, Bel and the Dragon, the Wisdom of Solomon, Baruch, Psalm 151, and additional chapters of Daniel and Esther. Nearly all are set in the Second Temple period, the four centuries and more between the return from exile in Malachi’s era and the Herodian world of Matthew’s opening genealogy. They tell of life after exile, Greek rule over Israel, the Maccabean revolt, wisdom teaching and purity laws. Bantu, speaking as a pastor, finds nothing in them that teaches against the gospel or against the God of Israel.
The Two Books Only Ethiopia Kept
Ethiopia’s Bible goes further. In Bantu’s words, it “is, by book count, the largest book in all of Christianity.” Beyond the shared deuterocanon, it includes its own set of 1, 2 and 3 Maccabees, distinct in content from the Greek ones though covering the same revolt. It also includes the two books that have drawn the most scholarly attention, Jubilees and Enoch.
Jubilees reads almost like a commentary on Genesis, a reflective retelling with a strong interest in festivals and the jubilee calendar. That character explains one reason other churches set it aside: they read it as commentary on Scripture rather than as Scripture itself.
Enoch takes two thin threads in Genesis and spins them out. The first is Enoch himself:
“And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him.” (Genesis 5:24)
The book of Enoch describes where he was taken: into heaven, among angels, receiving visions. The second thread is the Nephilim of Genesis 6 and the giants the Israelite spies later report in the land. Enoch offers an account of the origins of angels, demons and the Nephilim, naming particular spirits and their roles. It also develops Daniel’s Son of Man into extended messianic prophecy, which many Christians have read as pointing to Jesus. Some have even argued that a Jewish Christian wrote it in the second or third century, though Bantu notes that most scholars treat it as a Jewish work.
That last point anchors the chronology. Most scholars think Enoch was first written in Aramaic and Jubilees in Hebrew, in the land of Israel and not in Ethiopia. Fragments of both turned up among the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran, placing them before the Christian era, probably by the first century BC. Yet complete copies survive only in Ge’ez, Ethiopia’s ancient language. Ethiopia did not compose these books. It preserved full copies of books that others stopped copying.
Why there? Bantu points to the distinctly Jewish shape of Ethiopian Christianity: Sabbath observance, a long Jewish presence and, in every Ethiopian Orthodox church, a maqdas, a holy of holies behind the altar laid out like a temple. A church formed that way had reason to keep books saturated in Second Temple Jewish life.
Who Let the Books Go, and When?
Here Bantu reverses the usual question. “Why do Protestants not accept them when Protestants came much later?” he asks. His sequence runs like this:
- Before Christ, Enoch and Jubilees circulated among Jews in Aramaic and Hebrew, as the Qumran fragments show.
- In the early church, by his account, writers such as Tertullian, Irenaeus and Justin Martyr treated the deuterocanon as Scripture, and Tertullian and Origen mention Enoch and Jubilees as canonical. Those are his readings of the early writers, and a reader who wants to test them would go to the texts themselves.
- In the 300s, as Christianity became dominant in the Roman Empire in the era of Nicaea, Enoch and Jubilees faded from common use there while the other deuterocanonical books remained. In the same century, the Bible, with all these books, was present in Ethiopia.
- In the 1500s, Luther and the European reformers set aside the deuterocanon as a whole.
The record has a gap at its most interesting point. On why Rome and the other churches let Enoch and Jubilees slip, Bantu says plainly, “I don’t know if anybody really knows.” Doubts about authorship, a judgment that Jubilees was commentary or simple disuse are possibilities, not findings. A confident story about suppression, or about careful scholarly rejection, would claim more than the evidence holds.
Ethiopia’s own starting point is debated too. Ethiopian Orthodox tradition holds that Enoch wrote his book thousands of years ago and that Ethiopia was a Jewish nation reaching back to the Queen of Sheba. Others date Ethiopian monotheism to the 300s. Accounts of who brought the Scriptures differ. Some credit Jewish Christian travelers in the early 300s. One Ethiopian tradition credits the Nine Saints, monks from Syria who translated the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into Ge’ez. One of them, Garima, gives his name to the Garima Gospels, which Bantu reports some carbon dating places in the fifth century. That would make them the oldest surviving books written in Ge’ez. The hedge belongs in the sentence.
The Protestant Case Deserves a Fair Hearing
The shorter canon was not arbitrary. Two reasons are often proposed for the Reformers’ choice. One is the wish to distinguish themselves from Rome. The other is the reason many Protestants still hold: Jesus and the apostles quote the Hebrew Scriptures and call them the word of God, and they do not quote the deuterocanon. If Jesus is God in the flesh and treats those books as God’s word, they carry a priority the others lack. First-century Jews also did not count the deuterocanonical books as Scripture, perhaps partly because some were written in Greek as Hellenistic Jewish literature rather than in Hebrew.
The letter of Jude complicates the quotation test:
“And Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these, saying, Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints.” (Jude 1:14)
Many readers take verses 14–15 as a direct quotation from the book of Enoch. If citation by an apostolic writer counts, some argue, Enoch qualifies. Others answer that Enoch may itself echo Deuteronomy 33, where the Lord comes with ten thousands of saints, which would make Jude’s line a quotation of a quotation. Luther, Bantu notes, had doubts about Jude itself. Quoting a book does not necessarily endorse all of it as Scripture, and the verse alone cannot settle the question.
Enoch’s speculative material calls for the same care. Its detailed teaching on angels, demons and their mixing with humans goes beyond anything else in Scripture. “That could be true, but also it’s not, you know, confirmed in any of the other books,” Bantu says. Hold such details loosely, and build no doctrine on what one disputed book alone supplies.
Does Disagreement Over the Count Undermine the Bible?
This is the strongest objection. If churches cannot agree on how many books the Bible has, why trust any of them? Bantu’s answer looks at what the books teach: “nothing in these 81 books or in these 79 books or these 66 book canons that these different churches have, none of them contradict the gospel of Jesus Christ.” Each canon proclaims a Jewish Savior who is God in the flesh, who died for sin and rose again, and through whom every nation is blessed. The disagreement concerns books at the edges, and none of them overturns that center.
A different set of writings shows what a real threat to the gospel looks like. The Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Judas and the Gospel of Mary were rejected by every branch of the early church, in Ethiopia, Egypt, Europe, Syria and India. They were written later and carried Gnostic teaching. Some denied that Jesus was truly God. Others denied that he truly came in the flesh, the denial 1 John 4 identifies with the spirit of antichrist. Bantu rejects the claim that imperial power forced this verdict. For three centuries, Christians were persecuted minorities wherever they lived, and still they agreed. “And there was no political, financial, social incentive for them to reject these other books.”
Set side by side, the two cases are instructive. Where books taught nothing against the gospel, faithful churches kept different lists. Where books contradicted the gospel, the scattered, powerless church agreed against them. The shared test was faithfulness to the gospel.
What the Ethiopian Story Adds
Bantu asks readers of African descent to sit with one fact. Ge’ez script, he says, is the only Sub-Saharan African writing system still in use. “And the first book ever written in that writing system was the Bible, was the word of God.” From this he concludes that “the Bible and the word of God has been a part of Africa from day one.”
He is clear that the point is not a call to switch churches. “I’m not saying people need to convert to Orthodoxy,” he says, and he names theological differences that keep him from doing so. He welcomes those who join Ethiopian, Eritrean or Coptic Orthodoxy as fellow believers because they confess the Trinity and the gospel. What he hopes believers in the diaspora will see is that “Black people have been following Jesus and submitting to the rule of the Holy Spirit in their own unique, distinct ways even longer than Europeans have.”
There is a practical caution as well. A reader excited about Enoch may be skipping the basics. Lisa Fields, founder of the Jude 3 Project, warns that some people argue about other books “but you haven’t read the 66 books yet.” Bantu agrees, adding that the Ethiopian books themselves point back to the rest: “those books tell you to read the other 66 books.” Both urge working through these questions in a Bible-believing church rather than alone with online videos.
Put in order, the evidence reverses the assumption most readers start with. Enoch and Jubilees were Jewish books before Christ. They were read in the early church. They faded in the Roman world after the 300s for reasons no one can now state with confidence, while Ethiopia kept copying them. The broader deuterocanon dropped out of Protestant Bibles only in the 1500s. The 66-book count is the newest of the three, and the 81-book count belongs to the church that held on longest to what it had received.
