Scripture in parallel

The Ethiopic canon, and where each book stands here

The Ethiopian Orthodox Church reads a wider Bible than any other. The library's witness to its shape is J. M. Harden, An Introduction to Ethiopic Christian Literature (1926); his words are quoted below and every book in the list he prints is matched to what these shelves hold, with the gaps left as gaps.

The canon of the Ethiopic Bible differs both in the Old and in the New Testament from that of any other Church. In the New Testament the difference is a simple one. The number of the books is reckoned as thirty-five. This number is obtained by adding to the twenty-seven books of our New Testament the eight books of a collection of constitutions and canons of the Church known as the Sinodos.J. M. Harden, An Introduction to Ethiopic Christian Literature (1926), p. 22 of the transcription

As to the Old Testament canon there is more uncertainty. The number of the books is given uniformly as forty-six, but ‘hardly two lists of these books agree.’J. M. Harden, An Introduction to Ethiopic Christian Literature (1926), p. 22 of the transcription

One such list, from a British Museum manuscript (Add. 16188), “runs as follows”: Octateuch, 8; Kufélé (Jubilees), 1; Kings and Chronicles, 5; Job, 1; Solomon, 5; Greater Prophets, 4; Minor Prophets, 12; Ezra, 2; Maccabees, 1; Tobit, 1; Judith, 1; Assenath, 1; Esther, 1; Sirach, 1; Psalter, 1; Uzziah, 1.J. M. Harden, An Introduction to Ethiopic Christian Literature (1926), p. 22 of the transcription

The total number here, it will be seen, is forty-six, but this list lacks all mention of the Book of Enoch, Baruch, Third (or Fourth) Esdras. These as well as others are included in other lists.J. M. Harden, An Introduction to Ethiopic Christian Literature (1926), p. 22 of the transcription

Other books, in addition to those already mentioned, which seem to have had at least a semi-canonical authority, were, in the Old Testament, the Ascension of Isaiah, and in the New, the Shepherd of Hermas.J. M. Harden, An Introduction to Ethiopic Christian Literature (1926), p. 23 of the transcription

Beyond the canon

We pass once more to romance when we come to the work called the Glory of Kings, or Kebra Nagast. Not that it is so accounted in Abyssinia. There it passes for genuine history. It is a work written in the thirteenth century with a very definite purpose.J. M. Harden, An Introduction to Ethiopic Christian Literature (1926), p. 50 of the transcription

Harden is quoted from the library's own transcription of the 1926 printing; three scanning errors on those pages are restored to his print here (“Szzodos” to Sinodos, “tuns” to runs, and the spacing of the list), and the quotation links go to the transcription so the reader can see both. Chapter numbers under Enoch, Jubilees and the Didascalia link to the page in the reader where that chapter begins, as the translation's own headings place it; where a heading did not survive the transcription the chapter is simply not linked. The Ethiopic Maccabees (Meqabyan), the Sinodos, the Book of the Covenant, the Ethiopic Clement and Josippon have no public-domain English translation, so the library does not hold them and does not pretend to.