Catholic Bible vs. Protestant Bible
How many books are in the Bible?
The answer differs depending on whether you are Catholic or Protestant.
The canon of the Catholic Church includes 73 books in the Bible.
Protestant bibles typically contain 66 books in the Bible.
Both bibles contain 27 books of the New Testament but they differ in the number of books of the Old Testament accepted as canon.
Canon is the word we use to refer to the books that we believe to be inspired by God.
The books in the Catholic Bible but not Protestant versions are called the deuterocanonical books. The word deuterocanonical means “second canon.” These seven books are Tobit, Judith, Baruch, Ecclesiastes, Wisdom, First and Second Maccabees, Esther, and Daniel.
These books were officially acknowledged by the Catholic Church as canonical in the 4th century and continued to be included in the canon up to and after the Council of Trent in 1546.
The deuterocanonical books were removed by Martin Luther, one of the forerunners of Protestant churches. Luther chose to remove these books for a number of reasons:
1. Original Language: These books were written in Greek unlike the other Old Testament books written in Hebrew.
2. Jewish Canon: The Jews of the first century AD created a list of canonical books in response to Christianity that did not include these Greek texts at the Council of Jamnia. (The historical accuracy of this event, however, is now in question.)
3. Doctrinal Issues: These books support some Christian teachings that Luther opposed like purgatory and praying for the dead.
Sola scriptura (Bible only) was important to Luther and to the many Protestant groups that followed. Therefore, it was very important to decide which books they considered to be canon and which ones they did not.
Luther’s canon was popularized, however, when the King James Version of the Bible was published in 1611. The KJV identified the deuterocanonical books along with other Old Testament texts as “Apocrypha.” Apocrypha comes from the word meaning hidden and these books were considered by Protestants at the time as something to be read in private but not as a part of Christian church services or preaching.
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