Ethiopian Bible Versus the King James Bible: Books and Differences

Last reviewed 13 July 2026. See our sources and editorial standards.

66 against 81: the shape of the gap

The King James Version, as sold today, contains 39 Old Testament books and 27 New Testament books. Sixty-six in total.

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo canon contains 81: conventionally 46 in the Old Testament and 35 in the New.

The difference is not evenly distributed, and this is the first thing most comparisons get wrong. It is not simply that Ethiopia has “more Old Testament books.” Eight of the fifteen extra books are in the New Testament — and that is the part nobody expects.

A KJV reader encountering the Ethiopian canon expects to find some extra Old Testament material and an unchanged New Testament. In fact the New Testament is where the larger surprise lies.

The KJV used to have the Apocrypha

Now the fact that reframes this entire comparison.

The King James Bible of 1611 contained the Apocrypha. The original printing included Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus (Sirach), Baruch, the Letter of Jeremiah, the additions to Daniel and Esther, 1 and 2 Maccabees, 1 and 2 Esdras, and the Prayer of Manasseh — set between the Old and New Testaments as a distinct section.

The translators did not regard these books as fraudulent or dangerous. They translated them, carefully, and printed them in the same volume. Anglican lectionaries appointed readings from them.

So when a modern KJV reader is told that the Ethiopian Bible contains Tobit and Sirach and reacts with alarm at these “extra” books — they are reacting to books that were in their own Bible, in the edition they venerate, for the first two centuries of its existence.

The books were not added to the Ethiopian Bible. They were subtracted from yours, and recently.

Who actually removed it, and why

Not King James. Not the translators. Not a council.

The Apocrypha disappeared from most printed English Bibles across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the decisive force was commercial and organisational rather than theological. Bible societies committed to distributing scripture as cheaply and widely as possible faced sustained pressure — particularly from Protestant constituencies who regarded these books as non-canonical — to stop funding the printing of material they did not consider scripture. Omitting the Apocrypha made Bibles cheaper to print and avoided the dispute entirely.

The effect, over a few generations, was total. English-speaking Protestants inherited a 66-book Bible and came to assume it had always been so.

The deeper split: Hebrew versus Greek

Beneath the arithmetic lies a decision about which text to translate from, and it explains almost everything.

The KJV Old Testament is translated from the Hebrew. The Reformers returned to the Hebrew Bible — the collection used in Judaism — and treated it as the boundary of Old Testament scripture. Books surviving only in Greek fell outside it.

The Ethiopian Old Testament is translated from the Greek Septuagint — the Bible of the early church, the version the New Testament authors themselves usually quote. The Septuagint contains a larger collection, and Ge’ez inherited all of it.

That single upstream choice cascades. It is why Ethiopia has Tobit and Sirach. It is why the Ethiopian Psalter has 151 psalms rather than 150. It is why Ethiopian Daniel contains Susanna and Bel and the Dragon, and Ethiopian Esther contains prayers and decrees the KJV Esther lacks. None of these are Ethiopian innovations. They are simply what the Greek Bible says.

Book-by-book comparison

Everything not shown below — Genesis through Malachi, Matthew through Revelation — is common to both.

Read the last column. Eight of the books an Ethiopian Bible contains were printed in the King James Bible of 1611 — and one book, Maccabees, was in the 1611 KJV and is not in the Ethiopian canon at all.

The New Testament nobody expects

Most comparisons stop at the Old Testament, because that is where readers expect the difference to be. It is a mistake, and it hides the more interesting half of the story.

The KJV New Testament has 27 books. The Ethiopian New Testament has 35. Every one of the 27 is present — Matthew through Revelation, unchanged, canonical, read in the liturgy. Nothing has been taken away. The Ethiopian New Testament is the KJV New Testament plus eight further books.

And those eight are not what anyone guesses. They are not lost gospels. There is no Gospel of Thomas here, no secret sayings, no suppressed account of Jesus. Ethiopia has never accepted such texts and does not now.

The eight are books of church order: the four books of Sinodos, the two Books of the Covenant, the Ethiopic Clement, and the Ethiopic Didascalia. They contain apostolic canons, rules for ordination, instructions on worship, discipline and the conduct of clergy — the machinery of running a church, presented as apostolic instruction.

This is genuinely radical, and it is almost never discussed. Other churches preserved similar literature. The difference is where they filed it: the Western church treated such material as canon law, authoritative but beneath scripture, a category clearly subordinate to the Bible. Ethiopia put it in the Bible.

Sit with what that implies. In the Ethiopian canon, the rules governing how a bishop is ordained are not merely church regulation — they are scripture, in the New Testament, alongside the Gospels. The line between revelation and church governance, which the West drew firmly, Ethiopia never drew at all.

The eight extra New Testament books are not lost gospels. They are the constitution of a church, treated as revelation.

For a King James reader, this is the deeper difference — deeper than Enoch, deeper than Tobit. The disagreement is not simply about which ancient books are old enough or Jewish enough to count. It is about what scripture is for, and whether the ordering of a church’s life belongs inside the covers.

Differences inside the shared books

Even where both Bibles contain the same book, they do not always contain the same book.

• Psalms. The KJV has 150. The Ethiopian Psalter has 151, following the Septuagint, and in liturgical use is bound with the canticles and the Song of Songs as one volume.
• Daniel. Ethiopian Daniel includes Susanna, Bel and the Dragon, and the Prayer of Azariah with the Song of the Three. To an Ethiopian these are not additions. They are simply Daniel.
• Esther. The Ethiopian Esther is the longer Greek Esther, with prayers and royal decrees. The Hebrew Esther famously never mentions God. The Greek one does, repeatedly.
• Samuel and Kings. Ethiopia follows the Septuagint in calling all four books “Kings.” What your KJV prints as 1 Samuel appears in an Ethiopian list as 1 Kings. Same text, different label — and the single most common cause of confusion when comparing lists.
• Jeremiah. Ethiopia counts Jeremiah, Lamentations, Baruch and the Letter of Jeremiah as a single bundled book. The KJV splits Jeremiah and Lamentations and omits the other two.

Ge’ez against Jacobean English

One further contrast is worth drawing, because it cuts against a common assumption.

The KJV is revered partly for its language — the cadence of Jacobean English, four centuries old, felt by many readers as the sound of scripture itself. It is a translation made in 1611 from Hebrew and Greek, into a language that has since changed considerably.

The Ge’ez Bible is a translation too, made roughly a thousand years earlier, from Greek into a language that has not changed at all — because Ge’ez stopped being spoken and was preserved intact by liturgical use. An Ethiopian priest today reads the same Ge’ez a priest read in the sixth century, without the drift that separates a modern English speaker from Shakespeare.

Neither is the original. Both are translations. But the Ge’ez is the older translation, into the more stable language, and it has been read continuously for far longer than English has existed in a form we would recognise.

What the 1611 translators actually thought

The men who produced the King James Bible left a long preface explaining themselves, and almost nobody reads it. It is worth knowing what is in it, because it does not sound at all like the way the KJV is often defended today.

The translators were frank that translation is a difficult, imperfect, human craft. They defended their decision to render the same Hebrew or Greek word differently in different places, resisting the demand for rigid uniformity. They acknowledged working from the labour of earlier English translators rather than starting fresh. And they argued that even a poor translation of scripture is still scripture — that the word of God survives the roughness of the vessel carrying it.

This is the posture of careful scholars, not of men who believed they were producing a final, sealed, untouchable text.

And these same men translated the Apocrypha and printed it in their Bible. They did not regard the presence of Tobit and Sirach as a contamination. They set those books apart, in their own section, distinguished from the canonical Old Testament — but they translated them with care, and they published them, and the Church of England appointed readings from them.

The modern reader who recoils at the Ethiopian canon in the name of the King James Bible is invoking an authority that would not have recognised the objection.

A problem for King James Only-ism

Some Christians hold that the King James Version is uniquely authoritative — that it is the preserved word of God in English, and that later translations are corruptions of it. The position is held sincerely and defended vigorously.

It runs into an awkward fact.

The 1611 King James Bible is not the book being defended. The 1611 edition contained the Apocrypha. It also used spelling, typography and orthography no modern reader could comfortably navigate, and it went through a series of revisions across the following centuries — the text most KJV readers own descends from an eighteenth-century revision, not from the 1611 printing itself.

So the version being held up as untouched is a revised text with a section removed. If the 1611 KJV is the standard, then Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch and Maccabees belong in it. If the modern 66-book KJV is the standard, then the standard was set by nineteenth-century publishers making decisions about printing costs and denominational politics.

The Jude problem

Every King James Bible contains the letter of Jude. And Jude quotes the Book of Enoch, by name, as prophecy.

Enoch is not in the King James Bible. It was not in the 1611 edition either.

So the KJV — like every other Bible in the world except the Ethiopian one — contains a book that cites, as authoritative prophecy, a book it does not include. This is not an argument for the Ethiopian canon, and it is not a trick question. It is simply an awkward feature of canon history, noticed and debated by Christian writers since antiquity.

The Ethiopian church is the only church on earth for which this creates no tension whatsoever. Jude quotes scripture, and the scripture he quotes is on the shelf.

Which is “the real Bible”?

This site will not answer that for you, and any site that does is selling something.

What can be said is that the question is badly framed. There is no neutral, original, uncontested Bible from which the others deviate. Every canon is the product of decisions made by particular communities at particular times, and every canon can be criticised from the standpoint of another.

The Protestant case is serious: the Old Testament should be the scripture Jesus and the apostles received, which is the Hebrew Bible; the Greek additions are later and lack the same standing.

The Ethiopian case is equally serious: the church received its scripture from the Greek, as the New Testament authors themselves largely did, and has never seen reason to shorten what it was given.

What is not defensible is the assumption that the 66-book Bible is the default and everything else is an addition. Sixty-six is a position, arrived at through history, and a recent one at that. Eighty-one is another position, arrived at through a different history. Knowing that both are positions is the beginning of understanding either.

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