Why Do Catholic Bibles Have More Books?

An apostle writing at a desk

“You accursed wretch, you dismiss us from this present life, but the King of the universe will raise us up to an everlasting renewal of life, because we have died for his laws.”

2 Maccabees 7:9

Open a Catholic Bible and a Protestant Bible side by side and count the books. The Catholic Old Testament has forty-six; the Protestant has thirty-nine. The seven at issue — Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, and the two books of Maccabees, along with passages of Esther and Daniel — are called the deuterocanon by Catholics and the Apocrypha by Protestants, and the two names carry the whole dispute between them: are these books Scripture, or are they merely edifying reading that Rome promoted to the canon?

The question matters more than a table of contents suggests. If the Church added books to the Bible to shore up disputed doctrines, that is a serious charge against her honesty. If instead the Reformation removed books that Christians had read as Scripture for over a thousand years, that is a serious problem for the claim that Scripture alone is the rule of faith — because the list of what counts as Scripture would itself have been changed by men. One side or the other altered the Bible. Which?

The quotation above is from a mother and her seven sons dying rather than break the law of God — a scene the Letter to the Hebrews appears to hold up for admiration. Whether the book that records it belongs in your Bible is the question this page sits down to answer: from the Bible the apostles actually used, from the councils that listed the books, and from the honest difficulties on both sides.

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Protestant View

Jump to the Catholic View ↓

The Protestant position is that the sixty-six books of the Protestant Bible are the complete canon of Scripture, and that the seven additional books in Catholic Bibles — with the longer forms of Esther and Daniel — are Apocrypha: ancient, sometimes edifying, but not inspired. On this view the Reformers removed nothing; Rome elevated the extra books to canonical rank at the Council of Trent in 1546, in the heat of the Reformation controversy.1

What the Confessions Say

The Reformation churches stated the position formally. The Westminster Confession of Faith: “The books commonly called Apocrypha, not being of divine inspiration, are no part of the canon of Scripture; and therefore are of no authority in the Church of God, nor to be any otherwise approved, or made use of, than other human writings.”2 The Church of England’s Thirty-Nine Articles are gentler but agree on the decisive point: “the other Books (as Hierome saith) the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine.”3

The Oracles of God Were Entrusted to the Jews

Paul writes that the Jews were “entrusted with the oracles of God” (Rom. 3:2) — and the Jewish canon does not contain these books. Josephus, writing at the end of the first century, counts the sacred books of his people at twenty-two — the equivalent, combined and divided differently, of the Protestant thirty-nine — and says that nothing written after the time of Artaxerxes was held worthy of equal credit.4 Jesus speaks of “the law of Moses and the prophets and the psalms” (Luke 24:44), the three divisions of the Hebrew Bible, and in all His recorded teaching neither He nor the apostles ever quote a deuterocanonical book with “it is written” or “Scripture says.” The people to whom the books were entrusted did not receive these seven, and the Lord who quoted their Scriptures constantly never quoted these.

Jerome and the Hebrew Truth

Nor is this only a Reformation judgment. Jerome, the greatest biblical scholar of the ancient Church and the translator of the Latin Vulgate, distinguished the books found in the Hebrew Bible from those current only in Greek, and wrote in his prefaces that the church reads books such as Judith, Tobit, and the books of Maccabees, but does not receive them among the canonical Scriptures — they are read for the edification of the people, not to establish the authority of church doctrines.5 The distinction never entirely disappeared: on the eve of the Reformation, Cardinal Cajetan — Luther’s own opponent at Augsburg — still followed Jerome’s division of the books.6

The Books Disqualify Themselves

The contents point the same way. Judith opens by calling Nebuchadnezzar the king of Assyria, ruling from Nineveh — he was king of Babylon, and Nineveh had fallen before his reign.7 Tobit teaches that almsgiving “purges away every sin” (Tobit 12:9), and 2 Maccabees commends sacrifice offered for the dead “that they might be delivered from their sin” (2 Macc. 12:45) — which is why these books matter so much to Rome, for they supply what the Hebrew Scriptures do not: proof-texts for purgatory and works of atonement.8 The author of 2 Maccabees even closes by apologizing for his own performance — “if it is poorly done and mediocre, that was the best I could do” (2 Macc. 15:38) — not the voice, Protestants observe, of the Holy Spirit.

A Canon Defined to Win a Controversy

And the timing tells. No ecumenical council of the Church defined the canon of Scripture until Trent — April of 1546, twenty-nine years into the Reformation — and when Trent defined it, the books it raised to full canonical rank were the very books that supplied ammunition against the Reformers on purgatory, prayers for the dead, and merit. The canon, on this reading, was fixed late, under pressure, and to purpose. The Reformers did not shorten the Bible; they declined an enlargement that served a doctrinal need.9

Endnotes
  1. Council of Trent, Session IV (8 April 1546), Decree Concerning the Canonical Scriptures, which lists the books and receives them “with an equal affection of piety, and reverence.” ↩
  2. Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), I.3. ↩
  3. Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion (1571), Article VI, which lists the disputed books by name before the sentence quoted. ↩
  4. Josephus, Against Apion 1.8. ↩
  5. Jerome, Preface to the Books of Samuel and Kings (the Prologus Galeatus), and his Preface to the Books of Solomon, where the reading–doctrine distinction is drawn. ↩
  6. Cajetan, Commentary on All the Authentic Historical Books of the Old Testament (1532), at the end of Esther. ↩
  7. Judith 1:1. ↩
  8. Tobit 12:9; 2 Maccabees 12:43–45. ↩
  9. The regional councils of the late fourth century (Hippo, Carthage) are acknowledged, but as local synods without the authority of an ecumenical definition; the argument is that the universal Church left the question formally open until Trent closed it. ↩

Catholic View

The Catholic answer begins with a concession, because the concession is honest and the case does not need to hide it. Jerome’s doubts were real. Some Fathers hesitated over these books, which is exactly why they are called deutero-canonical — the second-tier debate is part of their history, not a Catholic secret. The question is not whether the books were ever disputed. It is who had the authority to settle the dispute, and when it was settled, and by whom the settled Bible was carried for the next thousand years.

The Bible the Apostles Actually Used

Start where the apostles started. The Old Testament of the early Church was the Septuagint, the Greek Bible of the Jewish diaspora — and when the New Testament writers quote Scripture, they overwhelmingly quote it in the Septuagint’s wording.1 That Bible carried the deuterocanonical books. The apostles never pause to warn their readers away from them, and the New Testament breathes their air. Wisdom describes the righteous man condemned to a shameful death by mockers who taunt, “if the righteous man is God’s son, he will help him” (Wis. 2:18) — and at the Cross the mockers say, “He trusts in God; let God deliver him now, if he desires him; for he said, ‘I am the Son of God’” (Matt. 27:43).2 Hebrews praises those who “were tortured, refusing to accept release, that they might rise again to a better life” (Heb. 11:35) — a description with no home in the Hebrew canon, and an exact one in the mother and seven sons of 2 Maccabees 7, the scene quoted at the top of this page.3 The books the apostles’ Bible contained, and the books their letters echo, are the books in question.

The List Predates Trent by Eleven Centuries

The charge that Rome added the books in 1546 fails on the dates, and it fails four times over. The Council of Hippo in 393 listed the canon of Scripture — all seventy-three books, deuterocanon included. Carthage confirmed the same list in 397, and Pope Innocent I sent the same list to Exsuperius, bishop of Toulouse, in 405.4 In 1442 — a lifetime before Luther posted his theses — the Council of Florence set out the identical list in its decree for the Copts, naming Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, and the two books of Maccabees among the books of the one canon whose author is God.5 Trent did not construct a canon to win a controversy; it solemnly defined, against a new challenge, the same list the Church had been reading at her lecterns for eleven hundred years. The late date belongs to the challenge, not to the canon.

Whose Jewish Canon?

“The Jews did not accept these books” assumes there was one settled Jewish canon in the first century for Christians to inherit. There was not. The Sadducees held to the books of Moses; the Greek-speaking synagogues of the diaspora read the larger collection; and the idea that a rabbinic council at Jamnia closed the canon around A.D. 90 is a scholarly legend that the scholar who examined it most closely has asked everyone to stop repeating.6 Nor were the disputed books Greek compositions foreign to the Holy Land: the Dead Sea Scrolls yielded Tobit in both Aramaic and Hebrew, and Sirach in Hebrew — at Qumran and again at Masada.7 The Jewish canon that eventually excluded them was closed by a community that had also weighed the Gospels and rejected those. A Christian who takes that canon as decisive has accepted the judgment of the synagogue on one shelf of books and overruled it on the other.

A Bible Cannot List Its Own Books

Beneath the historical question sits a logical one, and it is the one that should give a thoughtful Protestant the longest pause. Scripture nowhere lists the books of Scripture. The table of contents is not an inspired text; it is a judgment about inspired texts, and someone must have had the authority to make it. The Reformers made it by private discernment — and their discernment did not stop at the Old Testament. In his 1522 New Testament, Luther wrote that the Epistle of James was “really an epistle of straw” compared with the books that preach Christ — a remark his later editions quietly dropped, but the principle that produced it remained.8 Reformed theology, to its credit, states the resulting position candidly: the canon, R. C. Sproul writes, is on the historic Protestant view “a fallible collection of infallible books.”9 A fallible list of the infallible Word means no Christian can be certain the Bible in his hands is the right Bible. The alternative was stated by Augustine sixteen centuries ago: “I should not believe the gospel except as moved by the authority of the Catholic Church.”10 The canon is a gift that comes with a giver. Receive the list, and you have already trusted the Church that drew it up. This is the canon question’s quiet verdict on sola scriptura itself, examined on its own page.

Subtraction, Not Addition

The doctrinal-motive argument, finally, runs in reverse. The books were not inserted to prove purgatory; prayer for the dead had stood in the Church’s Bible — and in her liturgy — for a millennium before anyone objected to the doctrine. What changed in the sixteenth century was not Rome’s canon but the challengers’: the Reformers moved the disputed books to an appendix between the testaments, and later Bible societies dropped the appendix altogether.11 The historical difficulties raised against Judith read the book as the flat chronicle it never claims to be; and the author of 2 Maccabees apologizing for his prose no more disproves inspiration than Paul’s “I write this, not as a command” disproves his — inspiration guarantees the truth God intends, not the elegance of the penman. If a book must be dropped whenever its humanity shows, the canon will not stop shrinking at sixty-six.

The full essay walks the whole road: the Septuagint in the apostles’ hands, the councils and their lists, Jerome’s submission to the judgment of the Church he served, the Reformation’s revision, and what the canon question finally decides between the two sides of this page. Download it from the summary below, read it with your own Bible open — whichever Bible it is — and the comments are open to you, anonymously if you prefer.

Endnotes
  1. The majority of the New Testament’s Old Testament quotations agree with the Septuagint, including where it differs from the Hebrew text; see the standard tabulations in G. L. Archer and G. Chirichigno, Old Testament Quotations in the New Testament. ↩
  2. Wisdom 2:12–20; Matthew 27:39–43. The whole Wisdom passage — the righteous man who calls God his Father, is condemned to a shameful death, and is tested to see whether God will deliver him — should be read beside the crucifixion narrative. ↩
  3. Hebrews 11:35; 2 Maccabees 7, esp. verses 9, 11, 14, 23, and 29 on resurrection. The “better life” refused-release detail matches no account in the protocanonical books. ↩
  4. Council of Hippo (393); Third Council of Carthage (397); Innocent I, letter to Exsuperius of Toulouse (405). All three lists contain the deuterocanonical books without distinction, and are identical with the catalogue of Trent. ↩
  5. Council of Florence, Bull Cantate Domino (4 February 1442). ↩
  6. Jack P. Lewis, “What Do We Mean by Jabneh?” Journal of Bible and Religion 32 (1964), pp. 125–132, the study that dismantled the “Council of Jamnia” hypothesis; its conclusion is now the scholarly consensus. ↩
  7. Tobit: 4Q196–200, four manuscripts in Aramaic and one in Hebrew, together attesting all fourteen chapters. Sirach: Hebrew fragments at Qumran and the Hebrew Ben Sira scroll found at Masada. ↩
  8. Luther, Preface to the New Testament (1522). The “epistle of straw” paragraph was removed from editions of his Bible after 1537. His prefaces also disparaged Hebrews, Jude, and Revelation, which he grouped at the back of his New Testament. ↩
  9. R. C. Sproul, “The Establishment of Scripture,” in Sola Scriptura! The Protestant Position on the Bible, ed. Don Kistler (Soli Deo Gloria, 1995): “the historic Protestant position… has been that the canon of Scripture is a fallible collection of infallible books.” ↩
  10. Augustine, Against the Letter of Mani Called Fundamental, 5. ↩
  11. Luther’s 1534 Bible printed the books under the heading “Apocrypha: these books are not held equal to the Scriptures, but are useful and good to read,” between the testaments; the British and Foreign Bible Society ceased printing the Apocrypha in its Bibles in 1827, after which the empty space became the familiar sixty-six-book Bible. Paul: 1 Corinthians 7:6. ↩

Summary

One side or the other changed the Bible, and the dates say which. The charge is that Rome added seven books at Trent in 1546 to win the Reformation’s arguments. But the Council of Hippo listed the same seventy-three books in 393, Carthage confirmed the list in 397, Pope Innocent I sent it to Toulouse in 405, and the Council of Florence set it out again in 1442 — a lifetime before Luther. Trent defined, under attack, the Bible the Church had been reading for eleven centuries. The sixteenth-century novelty was the shorter canon, not the longer one.

The apostles’ own Bible carried these books. The early Church’s Old Testament was the Septuagint, and the New Testament quotes Scripture overwhelmingly in its wording. Wisdom’s mockers taunt the righteous man — “if the righteous man is God’s son, he will help him” — and the mockers at the Cross repeat the taunt almost word for word. Hebrews praises martyrs who refused release that they might “rise again to a better life” — the mother and seven sons of 2 Maccabees, found nowhere in the shorter canon.

“The Jews rejected them” proves less than it seems. There was no single closed Jewish canon in the first century — the “Council of Jamnia” is a scholarly legend, and the Dead Sea Scrolls turned up Tobit in Aramaic and Hebrew and Sirach in Hebrew, at Qumran and Masada. The canon that finally excluded these books was closed by the same community that rejected the Gospels. To treat its verdict as binding on one shelf of books and void on the other is not a principle; it is a preference.

A Bible cannot list its own books. Scripture nowhere names the books of Scripture; the table of contents is a judgment someone must have had authority to make. Luther made it privately — and called James “an epistle of straw” while he was at it. Reformed theology concedes the result: the Protestant canon is, in R. C. Sproul’s words, “a fallible collection of infallible books.” A certainty about every word of the Bible that rests on an admittedly fallible list is borrowed certainty — borrowed, in fact, from the Catholic councils that drew the list up.

The books were not added to prove doctrines; they were subtracted because of them. Prayer for the dead stood in the Church’s Bible and liturgy for a thousand years before anyone objected. The change of the sixteenth century was the Reformers moving the disputed books to an appendix, and the Bible societies of the nineteenth dropping the appendix. The deuterocanon did not enter the Bible late; it left some Bibles late.

For a more complete essay on this topic, download Why Do Catholic Bibles Have More Books? (.docx) or (.pdf)

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