If you've ever compared a Catholic Bible to a Protestant Bible, you've noticed something: they don't have the same number of books. Protestant Bibles have 66. Catholic Bibles have 73. And if you pick up the Bible used by the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, you find 81.
How did this happen? And which one is right?
How the Western Canon Was Formed
The Christian biblical canon was not handed down complete at Pentecost. It developed over centuries through debate, council decisions, and the gradual consolidation of tradition across different regional churches. The major milestones:
The Council of Laodicea (364 AD) produced an early list of approved texts for public reading, excluding a number of texts widely circulated in early Christian communities — including the Book of Enoch and the Book of Jubilees.
The Council of Carthage (397 AD) affirmed a 73-book canon that included the deuterocanonical books (Tobit, Judith, 1 and 2 Maccabees, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, and Baruch) — books that Protestant reformers later removed.
The Protestant Reformation (16th century) saw reformers like Luther and Calvin return to the Hebrew Bible as their Old Testament standard, removing the deuterocanonical books that weren't in the Hebrew canon. Result: 66 books.
Why the Ethiopian Church Has More
The Ethiopian Orthodox Church was established in the 4th century AD and developed its canon largely independently of the Western councils. They preserved texts that were widely used in Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity but were eventually excluded by Western decision-making bodies.
These include the Book of Enoch, the Book of Jubilees, the Books of Meqabyan, and others — books that were read, copied, and treated as scripture for generations before the Western canon closed around them.
No One "Added" Books
It's important to understand: from the Ethiopian perspective, they didn't add books. The Western churches removed them. These texts existed, were read, and were considered authoritative before any council decided otherwise. The question of which canon is "correct" is ultimately a question about which community's authority you recognize — and the Ethiopian tradition has a 2,000-year claim that is hard to dismiss.