Your Bible Used to Have More Books. Here's How It Got Down to 66.
The earliest Christians weren't reading a 66-book Bible. They were
reading a much bigger library, and quoting it openly.
Jude quotes the Book of Enoch by name, right there in the New
Testament (Jude 1:14). The original 1611 King James carried 80 books,
not 66. These weren't fringe texts. They were Scripture to the people
who built the early church.
Then the editing started. During the Protestant Reformation, certain
books were pulled from the main text and set apart in a section
labeled the “Apocrypha.”
The real break came in 1826, when the British and Foreign Bible
Society voted to stop printing them altogether. No conspiracy—just a
printing decision that quietly shrank the Bible most of the West
reads today.
One church never went along with it: the Ethiopian Orthodox Church
kept the full 88-book canon, exactly as it was handed down.