In December 2025, the Ethiopian Orthodox Bible Project published an article titled "Beware of 'Complete' and '81 Book' Ethiopian Bibles In English! They are ALL FRAUDS!" It is one of the most important pieces written about the state of Ethiopian biblical publishing in English. And it is the article that started this project.
We are not writing this to argue with them. We are writing this because they are right, and because their article put into words something we had been thinking for months: the Ethiopian canon deserves better than what it has been getting.
The Ethiopian Orthodox Bible Project has been working for years to translate the books of the Ethiopian canon that have never appeared in English. Their frustration is with an entire category of books on Amazon that claim to be complete Ethiopian Bibles but are not. Their verdict is unambiguous:
"On amazon.com there are listed for sale several Bibles which were intended by their publishers or their editors to pass for Ethiopian Orthodox Bibles, or Bibles with all of the books in the Ethiopian Orthodox Bible canon. In some cases including additional books by their admission. They are ALL frauds. They are all misleading. They are all incorrect. In addition, most of them are in very tiny print, riddled with typos and appear hastily assembled."
Ethiopian Orthodox Bible Project
They then proceed to dismantle specific editions, one by one. The pattern is consistent: books with impressive titles, contrived author names, missing content, and no honest accounting of what is actually inside.
Consider their review of one typical edition:
"'Ethiopian Bible in English Complete 88 Books: The Entire Text with Missing Deuterocanonical Apocrypha Enoch, Jubilees and The Lost Writings' by 'Bob Henry Oakland.' If you read the reviews, buyers warn that it doesn't have 88 books, it has 78. Remember some of the books of the Ethiopian canon were never translated into English. Even if it did have 88 books, they wouldn't be the RIGHT books since those books are not in English yet!"
Ethiopian Orthodox Bible Project
And another, citing a deceased scholar as co-author:
"'THE COMPLETE ETHIOPIAN BIBLE WITH 88 BOOKS' By 'Jeremy Copson,' 'Anonymous Anonymous,' and 'R.H. Charles.' R.H. Charles was a translator for Enoch, Jubilees, and other books. He is long deceased and had nothing to do with this book. They may have reprinted some of his material though. Again, a sloppy book, missing verses, and more importantly missing those books of the ETOC Bible never translated into English!"
Ethiopian Orthodox Bible Project
The article names over a dozen editions, all with the same fundamental deficiency. And it surfaces a pattern that anyone browsing Amazon's religious books section will recognize immediately:
"A reoccurring element is that most of these 'Complete' 'Bibles' have extremely small text, so that in addition to not being what they purport, they also are extremely hard for people to read. This was no doubt done to save money."
Ethiopian Orthodox Bible Project
The contrived publisher names are another tell. "Sacred Scriptures Press." "Celestial Manuscripts." "Holy Apocrypha." As the article observes:
"A lot of these names sound contrived. Is Dante S. Harvard a real person? We doubt it. Who is 'Anonymous Anonymous?'"
Ethiopian Orthodox Bible Project
The article's central argument is not just that these books are sloppy. It's that they cannot be what they claim, because several books in the Ethiopian canon had never been translated into English at all. No amount of careful assembly can produce a complete edition from sources that do not exist.
"If you don't believe us that there is no complete Ethiopian Orthodox Bible in English, and that they are all fakes, ask an Ethiopian Orthodox priest. He will tell you the truth. He will say he doesn't know of one. He will also tell you that there isn't a single bound volume — even in Ethiopia containing all of the books of the Ethiopian Orthodox Bible canon!"
Ethiopian Orthodox Bible Project
This is the fact that most publishers either don't know or don't care about. The books that make the Ethiopian canon unique (the three books of Meqabyan, the complete Sinodos, Qalementos, the Book of the Covenant, the Ethiopic Didascalia) are exactly the books that were missing from the English-language record.
You cannot assemble a complete Ethiopian Bible by collecting existing public-domain translations. The math does not work. The texts are not there.
While others were selling fraudulent compilations, the Ethiopian Orthodox Bible Project was doing the actual work. Their site catalogs what is available in English and directs readers to legitimate translations:
This is the honest, unglamorous work of building an actual scholarly record. No inflated book counts. No contrived publisher names. Just the slow accumulation of real translations from real sources.
We read this article in early 2026. We had already been publishing modern English editions of ancient texts (Enoch, Jubilees, the Apostolic Fathers, the Lost Gospels) through Clear Text Editions. We had the editorial infrastructure, the translation pipeline, and the design capability. What we did not have was a clear picture of the Ethiopian canon's actual state in English.
The Ethiopian Orthodox Bible Project gave us that picture. Most of the canon does exist in published scholarship, scattered across public-domain translations in multiple languages, academic journals, and the Project's own work. What was missing was someone willing to track it all down and be honest about what they found.
So we built a translation pipeline and started collecting sources. Brenton's 1851 English Septuagint for the Old Testament, because the Ge'ez OT was translated from the Greek, not the Hebrew. The World English Bible for the New Testament. R.H. Charles for Enoch and Jubilees. Horner's 1904 Statutes of the Apostles for three books of the Sinodos. Harden's 1920 Ethiopic Didascalia, translated directly from multiple Ge'ez manuscripts. Schodde's 1885 Apostolic Canons, also from the Ge'ez.
And when the English-language record ran out, we kept going. Guerrier and Grebaut's 1913 French translation of the Mashafa Kidan, published in the Patrologia Orientalis, translated from the Ge'ez. Grebaut's multi-volume French translation of the Qalementos, published in the Revue de l'Orient Chretien between 1911 and 1920, also from the Ge'ez. We translated these French sources into English through our editorial pipeline.
Every source is documented. Every editorial decision is recorded. Nothing is hidden behind a generic publisher name.
This edition is not a direct translation from Ge'ez. We want to be clear about that, because clarity is the whole point.
Our operating principle: use the best available public-domain text for each book, regardless of language, supplemented by the best available scholarly understanding of structure, scope, and content. The Ge'ez Old Testament was translated from the Greek Septuagint, so Brenton's English Septuagint is the right base text. The Sinodos books exist in English translations made directly from Ge'ez manuscripts in the 1800s and early 1900s. The Mashafa Kidan and Qalementos survive in French translations from Ge'ez published in academic journals. We used what exists.
Someone will point out that Brenton's Septuagint is Greek, not Ge'ez. They will be right. But the alternative is what every other "complete Ethiopian Bible" on Amazon has done: repackage the King James Version, skip the books that are hard to find, and hope nobody checks. We chose a different path. We followed the actual textual lineage of each book, found the closest available public-domain source, modernized it into readable English, and told you exactly what we used.
A direct Ge'ez-to-English translation of the complete canon would be a better product. It would also be a decade-long academic undertaking that does not yet exist anywhere in the world. We did not want to wait for the perfect to prevent the honest.
We translated 1,578 chapters across seven canonical groupings (Torah, Historical, Wisdom and Prophets, New Testament, Deuterocanonical, Unique Texts, and Church Order) into modern English. Not King James archaisms. Not unedited public-domain dumps. Actual editorial work.
The core texts that make the Ethiopian canon unique, the ones most editions silently omit, are in our manuscript:
The Josippon (Zena Ayhud), the final book of the Old Testament in the broader canon, required a different approach. No public-domain translation of the Ethiopian Josippon exists in any European language. The principal critical edition of the Ge'ez text (Kamil, collated 1937, published 1938) is an edition of the Ethiopic, not a translation, and is not available to us as a public-domain basis for an English edition. So we built an English approximation of the Ethiopian text's scope and structure, using Munster's 1541 Latin translation of the Hebrew Sefer Yosippon as the base, with chapter selection guided by Binyam's (2017) comparative mapping of the Hebrew and Ethiopic recensions. The Alexander material is replaced with Budge's 1896 translation made directly from the Ge'ez, the one section where a direct Ethiopic source exists. It is not a translation of the Ge'ez. It is the closest honest approximation we could build from what is available, and it is clearly labeled as such.
All eight Books of Church Order are represented by full text, along with the Josippon.
The Ethiopian Orthodox Bible Project ends their article with this:
"We know that many people would like a single bound volume containing all the books in English. There isn't one though because some of them haven't been translated into English yet. The goal of this project is to translate the remaining books into English. To propagate accurate information about the EOTC Bible, and to draw attention to those editions of the books already available."
Ethiopian Orthodox Bible Project
We share that goal. Our approach is different. We built a single-volume edition using every available public-domain source, in every language we could find one, rather than waiting for every last text to appear in English. Where we have the Ge'ez, we used the Ge'ez. Where we have French from the Ge'ez, we used that. Where neither exists, we built the closest honest approximation from the parent tradition and told you exactly what we did.
Every source we use is named on our Sources & Methodology page. Every book in the canon is listed on our Books page with its source, chapter count, and provenance. Where we used public-domain material, we credit the original translator. Where we modernized archaic text, we explain what we changed and why. Where a text comes from a parallel tradition rather than the Ge'ez directly, we tell you that too.
The Ethiopian Orthodox Bible Project asked readers to demand honesty from publishers. We are trying to be the kind of publisher they were asking for.
The original article can be read at the Ethiopian Orthodox Bible Project. We encourage anyone interested in the Ethiopian canon to read it in full, explore their site, and consider supporting their translation work.