Which specific books are in the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo New Testament that are not in the Catholic New Testament?

1. The canonical count and what it implies

Ethiopian Orthodox authorities list a New Testament of 35 books, giving their whole Bible 81 books (46 Old Testament, 35 New Testament), a figure repeatedly stated in the church’s own materials and modern summaries ^{[1] [5]}. Scholars and encyclopedic summaries note that the Ethiopian “narrower” New Testament does include the standard 27-book Christian protocanon, but the local canon is broader because of a cluster of additional works that other churches typically classify as apocryphal, liturgical, or church-order literature ^{[2] [6]}.

2. Which specific extra books appear on the New Testament side

The supplied reporting explicitly names the Books of Synodos (also written Synodos or Sinodos)—a collection of church orders—and the Book of the Covenant as part of the Ethiopian New Testament additions ^{[3] [4]}. Those sources treat the “Sinodos” not as a single short text but as an ecclesiastical corpus of canons and liturgical/legal materials that the Ethiopian tradition places within the New Testament section, and they identify the Book of the Covenant alongside this material ^{[3] [4]}. The church’s own listing of 35 New Testament books confirms the institutional acceptance of these and other similar texts, though the exact set of extra New Testament titles is not exhaustively spelled out in the provided snippets ^[1].

3. How this differs from the Catholic New Testament

Roman Catholic New Testaments contain the 27 books of the Christian protocanon and do not include the Sinodos or the Book of the Covenant among their canonical New Testament writings; Catholic tradition treats church orders and many of the Ethiopian extras as noncanonical or as ecclesiastical rather than scriptural texts ^[2]. The Ethiopian canon’s inclusion of church-order literature inside the New Testament section thus represents a substantive structural and theological difference: texts that other communions place outside the biblical canon are embedded within the canon in Ethiopian practice ^{[2] [3]}.

4. Scholarly context, church practice, and reporting limits

Academic accounts and church sources agree that Ethiopia’s canon grew from long internal practice and local synodal decisions, producing a broader corpus that sometimes appears as 81 books or even larger counts when church-order materials are added; some modern summaries attribute the finalized counts to medieval commentaries on the Fetha Negest and other canonical guides ^{[2] [3]}. However, the supplied materials do not furnish a single, definitive enumerated list of each of the eight New-Testament additions by name, and they emphasize that some canonical items—especially certain church-order texts—are variably classified or hard to locate in printed/online corpora ^{[3] [6]}. That gap in the reporting means a fully itemized comparison—book-for-book named extras with manuscript citations—cannot responsibly be supplied from these sources alone.

5. Alternative perspectives and why it matters

Observers sympathetic to Ethiopia’s tradition argue that retaining Sinodos, the Book of the Covenant, and related texts preserves apostolic practice, liturgy, and church governance as scripture-adjacent sources for faith and life ^{[3] [4]}, while critics from other traditions caution that folding church-order works into the New Testament blurs the line between apostolic Scripture and later ecclesiastical legislation ^[2]. The divergence affects not just academic taxonomy but liturgical reading, theological orientation, and the lived authority of texts inside the Ethiopian Church—points emphasized across the church’s own statements and scholarly commentaries cited above ^{[1] [2] [3]}.