Topic 2 of 33 - Your Place in the Learning Journey
The Different Christian Bibles
Not all Christian Bibles contain the same books. Protestant Bibles contain 66 books - 39 in the Old Testament and 27 in the New. Roman Catholic Bibles contain 73 books, adding seven more to the Old Testament. Eastern Orthodox canons vary by tradition but generally include additional books as well. Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity has the largest canon of all, with 81 books. These differences are not minor details. They reflect centuries of debate about which texts carry divine authority and they trace back to a genuine historical question: which books belong in the Old Testament?
The books that Catholics and Orthodox Christians include but Protestants do not are called the Deuterocanonical books by Catholics and the Apocrypha by Protestants. They include 1 and 2 Maccabees, Tobit, Judith, Sirach (Ecclesiasticus), Wisdom of Solomon, Baruch, and additions to Esther and Daniel. These books were included in the Septuagint - the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures used by most early Christians - but were not part of the shorter Hebrew canon that emerged from Jewish scholarship in the centuries after the Temple's destruction.
The Reformation brought this difference into sharp focus. Martin Luther, returning to what he called the Hebrew truth, argued that only books with a Hebrew original should be considered fully canonical. He placed the Deuterocanonical books in a separate section of his German Bible - valuable for reading but not authoritative for doctrine. Protestant churches largely followed this approach. The Council of Trent (1546) responded by formally affirming the Catholic canon, including the Deuterocanonical books, which had been part of Catholic practice for over a thousand years.
For the Baptist reader, this history is a reminder that even the question of which books constitute "the Bible" has a complex answer. The 66-book Protestant canon is not the only canon that has existed in Christian history, and the reasons for its boundaries are historical as well as theological. The Deuterocanonical books contain valuable literature - 1 and 2 Maccabees are the primary sources for the Maccabean revolt, and Sirach and Wisdom of Solomon are genuine contributions to the wisdom tradition. Knowing they exist and understanding why they are or are not in your Bible is part of knowing what the Bible actually is.