AKSUM · Publishing house

The Ethiopian canon, translated for readers

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church preserved a wider Bible than the one most of the world reads. We publish it in modern European languages, with every source named.

See the editions
87 books
Sources named
PDF and EPUB
Human editing
Why this canon is wider

A list of books that was never narrowed


Not a conspiracy. A different history, well documented and open to anyone who wants to check it.

4th century

A church outside the empire

The kingdom of Aksum adopted Christianity around the year 330, before many of the councils that shaped the Western list of books. Its church kept its own canon and never had to align it with Rome or with the Reformation.

Jude 1:14

Quoted, then not printed

The New Testament quotes the Book of Enoch by name. In Ethiopia that book stayed inside the Bible. In the West it drifted out of the printed editions and survived mainly in Geʽez manuscripts.

Today

Scattered across scholarly volumes

Most of these texts are in the public domain, but they sit in nineteenth century anthologies, in old typefaces, wrapped in an academic apparatus. Almost nowhere are they set as one readable volume together with the Bible itself.

A plain comparison

What is in which Bible


Ksiąg Henoch Jubileusze Meqabyan
Protestant Bible 66
Catholic Bible 73
Ethiopian canon (AKSUM) 87

How many books are genuinely new to you depends on the edition you already own, so we say it plainly instead of quoting one number to everyone. Every title is listed on the page of each edition.

Editions

Choose your language


Each edition is prepared separately, from sources in that language. None of them is a machine translation of another.

Polski

Biblia Etiopska

The first edition, complete: 87 books, an audiobook of the Ethiopian books and a companion course.
View the edition
Deutsch

Die Äthiopische Bibel

The full Ethiopian canon in German, built on Rießler and the Menge Bible. Nine of these books are missing even from a Luther Bible with Apocrypha.
In preparation
Español

La Biblia Etíope

The full Ethiopian canon in Spanish, with the source of every book documented. Ten books that a Catholic Bible does not have, twenty one if yours is the Reina-Valera.
In preparation