Which books are in the Ethiopian Orthodox canon but not in the King James Bible?
The desk
The answer depends on whether you compare the Ethiopian canon to a modern 66-book King James Version or the original 1611 edition, which included 14 books of the Apocrypha between the testaments.
The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church traditionally counts 81 books in its canon, which exists in a "narrower" and a "broader" form.
The following books are in the Ethiopian canon but are absent from all standard editions of the KJV:
- Old Testament: 1 Enoch and Jubilees. The Ethiopian Old Testament also includes 1–3 Meqabyan (Ethiopian Maccabees); these are entirely different works from the Greek 1–2 Maccabees found in the 1611 KJV Apocrypha. Some reckonings of the Ethiopian canon also include the historical book Josippon.
- New Testament (Broader Canon): The broader Ethiopian canon adds eight books of church order to the standard 27-book New Testament. These are four sections of the Sinodos, two divisions of the Book of the Covenant (Mäshafä Kidan), Ethiopic Clement (Qälëmentos), and the Ethiopic Didascalia.
If comparing the Ethiopian canon to a modern 66-book KJV (which drops the Apocrypha, a practice standardized by the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1826), the differences are even wider. The Ethiopian canon includes several books that were in the original 1611 KJV but are missing from modern Protestant printings, including Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, and the additions to Esther and Daniel.
For a detailed scholarly breakdown of the specific books and their internal variations, R. W. Cowley’s "The Biblical Canon of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church Today" (1974) remains a standard reference.