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, from the 300s to the 500s. It worked from the Greek Old Testament. The church counts 81 books, but that number is a tradition. No church council is known to have fixed it, and the lists of which books make up the 81 differ. The Book of Enoch, which survives in full only in Geʿez, is part of its Bible. The first bishop of Ethiopia, Frumentius, was consecrated 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. Scholars call its canon open, because it has no single fixed 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 expected in 2027. Its publisher gives Ash Wednesday, February 10, as the date.

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 put the longer-list books in a separate section, and the KJV of 1611 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.

The box at the left of the trunk. Find the box called "Where each branch gets its text." It answers one question for each family of Bibles: what did the translators work from? The first column is the Old Testament. The second is the New. Here is the box in words.

The Received Text line (the KJV, the NKJV and the Reina-Valera). The Old Testament follows the standard Hebrew text, the Masoretic Text. The KJV used the form that Daniel Bomberg printed in 1524 and 1525. The New Testament follows the later Greek copies, the line that starts with Erasmus's Greek of 1516. The NKJV names the same base for its New Testament. The first Reina-Valera, in 1569, used the same two kinds of text. It was made 42 years before the KJV and does not come from it. The Reina-Valera of 1960 revised that old Spanish Bible. The sources we could read describe its New Testament as the same Received Text, but we did not find the revisers' own statement of their base.

The revised and fresh Bibles (the ESV, NIV, NET, NLT and others). The Old Testament is still the Masoretic Text, but the translators check the Scrolls, the Septuagint and other old witnesses at hard spots. The ESV preface says it translates a hard Masoretic reading as it stands where it can, and turns to the other witnesses only in difficult cases. The NLT and the CEB name the same kind of base. The New Testament comes from Greek editions that weigh all the old copies, the early papyri and the great codices as well as the later ones. The NASB is a revision of the American Standard Version. Its preface says its Old Testament comes from Kittel's Hebrew Bible with help from the Scrolls, and that its New Testament mostly follows Nestle's Greek text.

The NET. Its Old Testament follows the standard Hebrew text, the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, and the translators sometimes corrected it from other manuscripts, from old translations and from the Scrolls. Its New Testament follows a Greek text that weighs all the copies. The preface says that text departs in places from the Nestle-Aland 27th edition and the United Bible Societies' fourth edition. Stop 8 comes back to it.

Older Catholic Bibles (the Douay-Rheims). Both columns say "Jerome's Latin Bible, itself a translation." These Bibles were made from the Latin, not straight from Hebrew and Greek. Jerome worked on the Latin Bible from about 383 to 405. He translated most of the Old Testament from Hebrew, and Tobit and Judith from Aramaic. The Psalter in Vulgate Bibles is the Gallican Psalter, which he made from the Greek. Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch and the Maccabees stayed in the older Latin text, which was made from Greek. The Latin New Testament is the older Latin text corrected against Greek copies. Jerome corrected the four Gospels, and we do not know who corrected the rest. So the Douay-Rheims is a translation of a translation, as Stop 7 says.

Modern Catholic Bibles (the NABRE). These go back to the roots. The NABRE's Old Testament follows the Masoretic Text, with some corrections from the Septuagint and the Scrolls. The books in the longer list follow the Greek Old Testament, and the Scrolls where they survive. Its New Testament follows the United Bible Societies Greek text, third edition, with the Nestle-Aland 26th edition consulted.

Orthodox Bibles. The Old Testament is the Septuagint. The New Testament is the Byzantine text, the Greek of the later copies. In 1904 the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople published a standard edition of it, called the Patriarchal Text. One scholar counts 116 manuscripts behind it, all used in Orthodox worship, and they come mostly from the 900s to the 1300s. No single Greek New Testament is accepted by every Orthodox church.

The Ethiopian Bible. The New Testament was translated from Greek. So was the Old Testament, from the Greek Old Testament, between the 300s and the 500s. It was revised later, most likely in the 1300s, against Arabic Bibles.

What the tree leaves out. The tree does not show the Syriac, Coptic or Armenian Bibles, or many other English Bibles. It maps the Bibles on this shelf, not every Bible.

How the box was checked. Every line in the box was checked against the sources listed on the sources page. Where we could read only a summary and not the publisher's own words, that page says so.