Pick up a Bible in a Protestant bookshop and count its books: there will be 66. A Catholic Bible has 73. A Greek Orthodox Bible has more again, and the Bible of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church more still. The New Testament is the same in all of them, with one exception discussed below. The differences are in the Old Testament.

This is not a matter of one church adding books or another removing them on a whim. It goes back to the two forms in which the Jewish Scriptures reached the early church: the Hebrew Bible and the Greek Septuagint.

Two collections

By the time of Jesus, Jews in the Greek-speaking world read their Scriptures in Greek. The translation known as the Septuagint, begun in Alexandria in the third century BC, came to include books that were not part of the Hebrew collection that rabbinic Judaism later recognised (see The Septuagint). Some of these were written in Hebrew or Aramaic, as fragments of Tobit and Sirach among the Dead Sea Scrolls show; others, such as the Wisdom of Solomon and 2 Maccabees, were composed in Greek.

The early church, which mostly spoke Greek, inherited the Septuagint. Christian writers quoted these books freely, though some, notably Jerome in the late fourth century, distinguished between the books in the Hebrew canon and the others, which he called apocrypha and said could be read for edification but not used to establish doctrine. Others, such as Augustine, and the North African councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397), accepted them as Scripture. Jerome translated some of them for his Latin Bible anyway, and through the Vulgate they remained part of the Bible of the Western church for a thousand years (see Jerome and the Vulgate and How the Old Testament was gathered).

The Reformation divide

The Reformers returned to the Hebrew Bible and to Jerome’s distinction. Martin Luther, in his complete German Bible of 1534, gathered the extra books into a separate section between the Testaments, headed “Apocrypha,” and described them as books not held equal to Holy Scripture, yet useful and good to read (see Luther and the German Bible). The Church of England’s Thirty-Nine Articles took a similar view, quoting Jerome: the church reads them “for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine.”

The Council of Trent responded in 1546 by listing all the books of the Vulgate Old Testament, including these, as canonical Scripture. Catholics call them deuterocanonical, “of the second canon,” because their status was settled later, not because they have lesser authority. Later Reformed confessions went further than Luther. The Westminster Confession (1646) declared that the Apocrypha are no part of the canon and of no more authority than other human writings.

The Protestant total of 66 is therefore 39 Old Testament books (the Hebrew Bible’s books counted in the Christian way) and 27 New Testament books. The Catholic 73 adds seven books: Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, 1 Maccabees and 2 Maccabees, and longer forms of Esther and Daniel. Baruch’s sixth chapter, the Letter of Jeremiah, is printed as a separate book in some Bibles.

Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox Bibles

The Eastern Orthodox churches use the Septuagint as their Old Testament, and their Bibles include, besides the Catholic deuterocanonical books, further books found in Septuagint manuscripts: 1 Esdras (also called 3 Esdras in some numbering), 3 Maccabees, the Prayer of Manasseh and Psalm 151, with 4 Maccabees often printed as an appendix. Slavonic Bibles have included 2 Esdras (sometimes called 3 Esdras) as well. The Orthodox churches have never defined the limits of the Old Testament as sharply as Trent did, and practice varies from church to church; Orthodox writers sometimes call these books anagignoskomena, “the books that are read.”

The Oriental Orthodox churches have their own traditions. The canon of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church is usually counted as 81 books, though counts vary depending on how books are divided. It includes 1 Enoch, which the Letter of Jude quotes, and Jubilees, a retelling of Genesis and Exodus, both of which survive complete only in Ge’ez, the classical language of Ethiopia. It also includes three books of Meqabyan, which, despite the name, are unrelated to the Books of the Maccabees. A broader count adds church-order books to the New Testament. This is the one place where the New Testament itself differs between Christian traditions.

The additions to Esther and Daniel

Two books exist in longer and shorter forms, and how a Bible prints them is a good test of which tradition it follows.

Esther in Hebrew never mentions God. The Greek version adds six passages, about 107 verses, including prayers of Mordecai and Esther, the texts of royal decrees, and a dream with its interpretation. Jerome, translating from the Hebrew, moved the additions to the end of the book, so in the Douay-Rheims and other Vulgate-based Bibles they appear as chapters 10:4 to 16:24, out of narrative order. Many modern Catholic Bibles, such as the NABRE, put them back in their place in the story and label them A to F. Protestant editions with the Apocrypha usually print the additions separately, while the NRSV prints a translation of the whole Greek Esther in its Apocrypha section.

Daniel in Greek has three additions: the Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Jews, sung in the furnace; Susanna, a story of a woman falsely accused and Daniel’s wisdom in exposing her accusers; and Bel and the Dragon, in which Daniel exposes the priests of an idol. In Catholic Bibles the prayer and song stand in chapter 3, and Susanna and Bel become chapters 13 and 14. The seam is visible in Protestant Bibles, which follow the Hebrew. In the World English Bible, Daniel 3:23 and 3:24 read:

These three men, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, fell down bound into the middle of the burning fiery furnace. Then Nebuchadnezzar the king was astonished, and rose up in haste.

In a Catholic Bible, sixty-seven verses of prayer and song come between those two sentences, so the later verses of Daniel 3 are numbered differently.

How English Bibles print the extra books

The early English Protestant Bibles, including Coverdale’s, the Great Bible, the Geneva Bible and the Bishops’ Bible, all included the Apocrypha, usually as a separate section between the Testaments (see From Coverdale to Geneva: the English Bibles before 1611). The King James Version of 1611 did too. Its Apocrypha contained 1 and 2 Esdras, Tobit, Judith, the rest of Esther, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus (Sirach), Baruch with the Epistle of Jeremiah, the Song of the Three Children, Susanna, Bel and the Dragon, the Prayer of Manasses, and 1 and 2 Maccabees.

Over time Protestant publishers began to leave the section out. In 1826 the British and Foreign Bible Society decided not to fund the printing of Bibles containing the Apocrypha, after a long dispute among its supporters, and the American Bible Society took a similar line (see Bible societies and missionary translators). Partly for that reason, most English-speaking Protestants have never seen these books in their Bibles, though the Church of England still appoints readings from them.

Modern translations take several approaches:

  • Catholic Bibles (NABRE, the Jerusalem Bible family, RSV-CE, ESV-CE) place the deuterocanonical books among the others, in the order of the Vulgate (see Catholic English Bibles).
  • Ecumenical editions print them in a separate section. The RSV’s Apocrypha appeared in 1957, and the ecumenical “Common Bible” of 1973 was approved by both Protestant and Catholic authorities; a later expanded edition added books used by the Orthodox churches. The NRSV (1989) and its updated edition are published with an Apocrypha section that includes the books used by Catholics and also those used by Orthodox churches, with notes explaining which churches accept which books.
  • Protestant translations usually appear without these books, but some publishers have added them: the ESV has an edition with the Apocrypha (2009), and the Common English Bible (2011) was published with the Apocrypha from the start. Editions of the King James Version with the Apocrypha remain in print.

Orthodox Study Bible and the English Septuagint

Because the Orthodox Old Testament is the Septuagint, a translation from the Hebrew is, strictly, the wrong book for Orthodox readers. Several projects have filled that gap:

  • Lancelot Brenton’s translation of the Septuagint (1844), now in the public domain, was the standard English Septuagint for well over a century.
  • A New English Translation of the Septuagint (NETS, Oxford University Press, 2007), edited by Albert Pietersma and Benjamin G. Wright, is a scholarly translation that takes the NRSV as its base and revises it to follow the Greek, so that readers can compare the Greek and Hebrew traditions. It aims to show what the Greek translators made of their Hebrew.
  • The Orthodox Study Bible (Thomas Nelson, 2008) pairs the New King James New Testament with an Old Testament translated from the Septuagint by a team at St Athanasius Academy, starting from Rahlfs’ Greek edition and using the NKJV’s Old Testament wording where the Greek matched the Hebrew. Its Old Testament is in Septuagint order, ending with Daniel.
  • The Lexham English Septuagint (digital edition 2012; second edition, edited by Ken Penner, 2019) is a more literal translation designed to show the Greek as it was read.

These translations reveal differences even in books that all Bibles share. The Greek Jeremiah is about one-eighth shorter than the Hebrew, and the Greek Job is shorter too; numbers and names differ in many places. A reader who compares NETS with a translation from the Hebrew is comparing two ancient forms of the same Scripture.

What this means for readers

When two Bibles differ in their table of contents, neither has lost or invented books. Each follows a historical decision about which writings the church should read as Scripture, and those decisions were made for reasons that each tradition can explain. A reader who knows the history can handle any of these Bibles with understanding, and can read the books of one tradition with the respect its readers give them.

Open Word Bible translates its Old Testament from the Westminster Leningrad Codex, a Hebrew text, so at present it contains the books of the Hebrew canon, in the order familiar from Protestant Bibles. Its reasoning records note where the Septuagint differs from the Hebrew in a way that affects the meaning. Its drafts are AI-assisted and unreviewed until named human reviewers approve them, and other translations are used for comparison only, never as the basis for its wording. The text is dedicated to the public domain under CC0.

Sources

  • Metzger, Bruce M. An Introduction to the Apocrypha. New York: Oxford University Press, 1957.
  • deSilva, David A. Introducing the Apocrypha: Message, Context, and Significance. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018.
  • McDonald, Lee Martin. The Biblical Canon: Its Origin, Transmission, and Authority. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2007.
  • Council of Trent. Fourth Session, “Decree concerning the Canonical Scriptures,” 8 April 1546.
  • Cowley, R. W. “The Biblical Canon of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church Today.” Ostkirchliche Studien 23 (1974): 318–323.
  • Pietersma, Albert, and Benjamin G. Wright, eds. A New English Translation of the Septuagint. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
  • The Orthodox Study Bible. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2008. Introduction.
  • Penner, Ken M., ed. The Lexham English Septuagint. 2nd ed. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2019.
  • Brenton, Lancelot C. L., trans. The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament. London: Samuel Bagster, 1844.
  • Bible quotations are from the World English Bible (public domain).