The Bible did not arrive bound in leather with a table of contents. It was written, copied, collected, argued over and translated across fifteen centuries, by a Church that was reading it aloud in its worship long before anyone settled which books it held. To read it well, learn two things: its history and its tradition. They are not the same thing, and you need both.
History and tradition
The record
History
What happened, and when: who wrote each book, which manuscripts survive, when the councils met, who translated what, from which text, and for whom. History is evidence. It can be checked, dated and argued from.
In legal terms, history is the record of the case.
What was handed down
Tradition
From the Latin tradere, to hand over: the creeds, the liturgy, the way the Church has always read a passage, and the teaching passed from bishop to bishop. Tradition is how the text has been lived and understood.
In legal terms, tradition is the body of precedent.
A reader who knows only the history can recite dates and still miss what the words meant to the people who kept them. A reader who knows only a tradition can repeat its teaching without knowing where it came from. Learn both, and notice where they meet.
The original Church: a question of title
Three Bibles, three traditions
Ge'ez · about 81 books
The Ethiopian Bible
The Bible of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and the largest canon in use. Translated into Ge’ez, mostly from the Greek Septuagint, after the kingdom of Aksum became Christian in the 4th century.
It keeps books almost every other church set aside: 1 Enoch, Jubilees and the three books of Meqabyan (not the Maccabees). 1 Enoch survives complete only in Ge’ez.
Latin · 73 books
The Latin Vulgate
The Church’s Bible in the West for more than a thousand years. Jerome began it in 382 at the request of Pope Damasus and translated most of the Old Testament directly from Hebrew, finishing around 405.
It holds the full Catholic canon, including Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch and 1 and 2 Maccabees. The Council of Trent confirmed it as the authentic text in 1546; the Clementine edition of 1592 stood until the Nova Vulgata of 1979.
English · 66 books
The King James Bible
The Authorised Version of the Church of England, commissioned by King James I in 1604 and published in 1611, a Bible of the break. About fifty scholars translated it from the Hebrew Masoretic Text and the Greek Textus Receptus, leaning heavily on Tyndale.
The 1611 printing carried the Apocrypha between the Testaments; most copies today have 66 books. What most people read is the 1769 Oxford revision.
Ethiopian Bible
Latin Vulgate
King James Bible
Language
Ge’ez
Latin
Early Modern English
Made
From the 4th century on
382–405
1604–1611
Translated from
Mostly the Greek Septuagint
Mostly Hebrew, plus Greek and Old Latin
Hebrew Masoretic Text and Greek Textus Receptus
Books
About 81
73
66 (80 with the 1611 Apocrypha)
Kept by
Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox churches
The Catholic Church
Anglican and Protestant churches
Other Bibles to compare
Ancient texts and translations
Hebrew Masoretic Text, in the Aleppo (c. 930) and Leningrad (1008) codices
Dead Sea Scrolls, about 250 BC to AD 68
Samaritan Pentateuch
Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament of the early Church and the Orthodox
Targums, Aramaic paraphrases read in the synagogue
Old Latin, the texts Jerome revised
Peshitta, the Syriac Bible
Coptic, Gothic, Armenian, Georgian and Old Church Slavonic translations
Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus, the oldest nearly complete Greek Bibles (4th century)
English Bibles
Wycliffe (1380s), from the Vulgate
Tyndale New Testament (1526)
Coverdale (1535), Matthew’s (1537), Great Bible (1539)
Geneva (1560) and Bishops’ (1568)
Douay–Rheims (1582–1610), the Catholic English Bible, from the Vulgate
King James (1611)
Young’s Literal (1862), English Revised (1881–85), American Standard (1901)
How many books? The Hebrew Bible counts 24, the same writings as the Protestant Old Testament grouped differently. Protestant Bibles have 66, Catholic 73, Eastern Orthodox about 76 to 79, and Ethiopian about 81.