Ask how many books are in the Bible and you will get a different answer depending on who you ask. Protestants generally say 66. Catholics say 73. Eastern Orthodox churches count 76. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church counts 88. None of these traditions is being careless with scripture. Each arrived at its number through a distinct, well-documented history.
The 66-book Protestant canon reflects a decision by the Reformers to follow the shorter Hebrew Bible for the Old Testament, setting aside a set of Second Temple-era Jewish writings that had circulated for centuries in Greek translation. Martin Luther printed these texts in a separate section of his German Bible rather than removing them outright, and the King James Bible followed the same pattern until the 1800s.
The Catholic Church kept seven of those texts, known as the deuterocanonical books, arriving at 73 total. This reflects the older Greek Septuagint tradition, formally affirmed at the Council of Trent in the 16th century in response to the Reformation.
Eastern Orthodox churches kept a broader set still, landing around 76 books depending on the specific tradition and how certain texts are counted or combined.
The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church stands apart. Christianity reached Ethiopia in the 4th century, early enough that the wider range of Jewish and early Christian writings still circulating at the time became part of its scripture and simply stayed there. Ethiopia’s geographic distance from the councils in Rome and Constantinople meant its canon was never revisited or narrowed the way others were. The result is a canon of 88 books that includes Enoch, Jubilees, and texts found nowhere else in the Christian world.
None of these traditions contradicts another on the books they share. The differences come entirely from which additional texts each community kept reading as scripture, and why.
The Complete Ethiopian Bible lays out all 88 books in English, letting you see for yourself what the broadest surviving Christian canon actually contains. Compare it for yourself here.