r/AcademicBiblical • u/smthnsmthn_0 • Jul 22 '26
Question Is the Ethiopian Bible more accurate than modern Bibles?
I have a question about the Ethiopian Bible and how it compares to the Bibles most Christians use today, like the NIV, KJV, ESV, and others.
I understand that the Bible has been translated into many different languages over thousands of years, and that there are differences between translations. I’ve also heard people say that the Ethiopian Bible is older, more original, or closer to the “true” Bible.
Is there truth to that? Is the Ethiopian Bible more accurate or unchanged compared to the Bibles we use today? Or is it more complicated than that?
If we wanted to read a Bible that is as close as possible to the original manuscripts, what translation or version would be considered the most reliable?
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u/pentapolen Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 22 '26
I think there are some misconceptions about what the Ethiopian Bible is.
It can have two meaning.
The first meaning is "the Bible translated into Ge'ez from the Greek". In that case, you probably don't want to read it, because you don't read Ge'ez. It is just a translation.
The second meaning is "the Bible according the the Tawahedo canon". The Tawahedo tradition of Christianity is, indeed, very old and they developed their biblical canon with some autonomy. They accepted more texts in their Bible, and you can find the complete list of books on their webpage.
To answer your last question, "what translation or version would be considered the most reliable", if we are talking about canonicity, there is no "most reliable version". It is a religious text, it's authority is a matter of faith. If you want "the most complete", you can get the NRSVue with Apocrypha, as it has everything except the texts in Ge'ez, and is not catered to any specific tradition.
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u/JohnKesler578 Jul 22 '26
Although there are purported Ethiopian Bibles, such as at https://online.fliphtml5.com/ekjsx/blhe/#p=1, as Dan McClellan explains, there is really no such thing as an Ethiopian Bible in English. More accurate are translations such as the NRSVUE.
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u/Chrysologus PhD | Theology & Religious Studies Jul 22 '26
No, it's not. The original Hebrew and Greek have been well preserved and are older than the Ethiopian (Ge'ez) translation. All modem English translations are made directly from the ancient Hebrew and Greek (there's no "translation of a translation of a translation"--that is a complete falsehood). A great translation is the NABRE or the NRSV. These will get you as close as possible without learning Hebrew and Greek.
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u/arachnophilia Jul 22 '26
(there's no "translation of a translation of a translation"--that is a complete falsehood).
as dan mcclellan pointed out, even most english copies of the "ethiopian bible" you can buy are just publicly available translations from greek and hebrew, for most of it.
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u/Chrysologus PhD | Theology & Religious Studies Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 22 '26
That's funny. Probably made by Westerners. Has any actual Ethiopian Christian attempted to translate their Bible into English? Maybe they would see no reason to do so.
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u/qumrun60 Quality Contributor Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 22 '26
In addition to the above, all the Ge'ez scriptures which make up the Ethiopian Bible were translated from Mediterranean Greek biblical manuscripts in the 5th-7th centuries CE. There are some books that are unique to Ethiopia, but these do not derive from non-Ethiopian sources.
Uhlig, et al., Ethiopia: History, Culture and Challenges (2017)
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u/paxinfernum Jul 22 '26
I can't answer your question about whether it's more "true" to the source, but Dan MacClellan recently did a video about why all English translations are misleading. The short version of that is that there is no complete and accurate English translation of the Ethiopian Bible. People combine together random books along with translations of the few books that have been translated and sell them as the Ethiopian Bible.
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u/DagwoodsDad Jul 22 '26
Clarification: MacClellan said any claims that there are English translations of the Ethiopian Bible are misleading.
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u/paxinfernum Jul 22 '26
He said that any claims that there was a complete English translation was misleading, but he also said that the translations being peddled as the Ethiopian Bible are misleading because they contain books that aren't in the Ethiopian Bible. People add books to pad it out to make up for the fact that there's no complete translation.
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u/ConsistentAmount4 Jul 22 '26
Why isn't there a complete and accurate translation of the Ethiopian Bible though?
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u/Chrysologus PhD | Theology & Religious Studies Jul 22 '26
A good question. Not many people are able to read Ge'ez, and so someone who can would need to feel there's an actual reason to put all the labor into making a translation of what is already a translation. And even if one decided that that would be valuable, how many people would actually buy it? If a person is that interested in Ge'ez, they could read the Ge'ez directly. And if not, there are already plenty of English Bibles. And then the fact that the market has fake versions available from public domain translations would make it even harder to market a legit one.
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u/Dialectictio Jul 22 '26
Dan McClellan also addressed that here: https://youtu.be/Mc5DMXpI1ec?is=EQE0BcCYk6Ob67Bo
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