Stop 4. The four branches

Look at the branches. Each one has its own Old Testament and its own number of books.

The Ethiopian branch. The church in Ethiopia put the Bible into its own language, called Geʿez, between the 300s and the 500s. It worked from the Greek Old Testament. The church counts 81 books, but that number is a tradition, and no church council ever fixed it. The Book of Enoch, which survives in full only in Geʿez, is part of its Bible. The first bishop of Ethiopia was sent by Athanasius, the same man who wrote the letter naming the 27 books.

The Orthodox branch. The Orthodox Church uses the Greek Old Testament, the Septuagint. Its Bibles have about 76 or 77 books, depending on the church. It has never officially fixed one list.

The Catholic branch. The Catholic Church follows Jerome’s Latin Bible and the longer Old Testament list. That makes 73 books. A church council at Trent, in 1546, stated the list. The English Catholic Bible used today is the NABRE, which stands for New American Bible, Revised Edition. A new one, the Catholic American Bible, is due on February 10, 2027.

The Protestant branch. In the 1500s, Protestants went back to the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament. They kept the Hebrew list for the Old Testament, which has 39 books, and added the 27 of the New. That makes 66. Luther set seven Old Testament books in a separate section. The KJV printed them between the Old and New Testaments.

Catholics and Orthodox say the longer list is the one the early church used. Protestants say the Hebrew list came first. Serious Christians still disagree here, and the tree shows all four branches.

Figure 2. Where each branch gets its text (detail from the tree). A dagger (†) marks a line recalled from general knowledge, not re-verified.