Why the lists differ
السجلIn the first century, Jews counted their Scriptures as 22 books, as Josephus does (ضد أبيون 1.8), or as 24, a number you reach by subtraction in 2 Esdras 14:44–46. The Talmud names the 24 books and their order (Bava Batra 14b). Greek-speaking Jews and the first Christians also read the Scriptures in Greek, and the Greek Old Testament that came down to the church held more books: Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, the Maccabees, and longer forms of Esther and Daniel.
السجلIn the early 390s Jerome was translating the Old Testament into Latin from the Hebrew, and he wrote that books outside the Hebrew list were "not in the canon". The church reads Wisdom and Sirach, he said, "for the edification of the people", but not to give authority to doctrine. A few years later Augustine counted 44 Old Testament books, with Tobit, Judith and Maccabees among them (عن العقيدة المسيحية 2.8.13), and the Latin church went on reading these books in its Bibles.
السجلIn 1442 the Council of Florence listed these books as Scripture. When Luther published his complete German Bible in 1534, he gathered them between the Testaments under the heading "Apocrypha: books not held equal to Holy Scripture, yet useful and good to read". Then on 8 April 1546 the Council of Trent named the longer list, received "entire with all their parts", as sacred and canonical. Catholics call these books deuterocanonical, a word Sixtus of Siena first used in 1566.
السجلProtestant Bibles went on printing the Apocrypha for a long time, and the King James Version of 1611 printed fourteen books between Malachi and Matthew. The Church of England read them "for example of life and instruction of manners", but not "to establish any doctrine" (Article VI). The Westminster Confession of 1647 went further and said they "are no part of the Canon of the Scripture".
السجلOrthodox councils at Jassy in 1642 and Jerusalem in 1672 called these books genuine Scripture, but the Orthodox never closed their list as tightly as the Catholic one. The Church of Greece prints 1 Esdras, 3 Maccabees and Psalm 151, with 4 Maccabees in an appendix, while the Russian Synodal Bible prints 3 Ezra but no 4 Maccabees and marks the extra books with a star as non-canonical. Many Orthodox scholars today rank these books below the Hebrew ones.
السجلThe Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church counts its Bible as 81 books, and its website lists 46 in the Old Testament and 35 in the New. In 1974 R. W. Cowley showed that the same total is also reached another way, as 54 and 27, and that is the form printed in Ethiopian Bibles. Bruk Asale (2016) found that Amharic Bibles from 1918 to 2007 list different books, and that no church decision has fixed the 81. Enoch and Jubilees are in both reckonings.
Each church's reasons, in its own terms
Our readingلـ اليهود, the Hebrew Bible is Scripture in its own right and complete as it stands, and its shape, in Torah, Prophets and Writings, carries its own meaning.
Our readingالكاثوليك point to the place these books held in the Greek and Latin Bibles the early church read, and to lists such as Augustine's, and they hold that the church recognised them as Scripture. Trent settled the question for Catholics, but it did not invent the books.
Our readingالبروتستانت hold that the Old Testament is the Scriptures of Israel, kept in Hebrew, and they follow Jerome in drawing a line between the canon and the books to be read for example. Lutherans and Anglicans kept reading the Apocrypha in church, while the Reformed churches gave them no authority.
Our readingالأرثوذكس churches read the Old Testament in Greek, and they read the wider books in worship, though the exact rank of those books has been discussed more than defined.
Our readingمن المتوقع أن تحافظ المسيحيين church received its Bible in Ge'ez with books that others did not keep, such as Enoch and Jubilees, and it holds them as Scripture.
How much of the shelf is exact
- السجلThe shelf is النطق الدقيق about which books the Hebrew, Protestant, Catholic and 1611 King James Bibles hold, and how many, which we take from the documents cited. The order of the books follows named editions: the JPS Bible of 1917, the New American Bible on vatican.va, the Church of Greece's online Bible, the Ethiopian church's own list and the 1611 contents page.
- السجلSome things are disputed or unsettled. The Orthodox list varies from church to church, and the place of the Prayer of Manasseh in the Church of Greece's printed Bible is unconfirmed. How the Ethiopian 81 is reckoned is disputed, and we show the list on the church's website. We could not confirm whether the Ethiopian Psalter has Psalm 151. What we show of the Clementine appendix comes from a scholar's quotation of the 1592 note, and we did not open a facsimile.
- Our readingThree Ethiopian identifications are our groupings: we take "Ezra (2nd)" to be 1 Esdras, Baruch and Lamentations to be bound inside Jeremiah, and the two "Dominos" books to be the Book of the Covenant. Cowley's account supports each of them, but the church's list does not spell them out.
- ReconstructionThe size of each book is modelled: we draw it 9.5 mm thick for its covers plus 0.076 mm for every verse, which makes Psalms about 19 cm of paper and Obadiah about 2 mm. We count verses by the standard English numbering, with the World English Bible for the deuterocanon and the New American Bible's 107 verses for the Additions to Esther. Enoch and Jubilees are drawn at our rough estimates of 1,000 and 1,300 verses, the Meqabyan at 20 verses a chapter, and 4 Baruch, Josippon and the eight Ethiopian church-order books at a nominal size, and the cards for those books say so.
- ReconstructionMuch of the picture is drawn for illustration. No church binds its Bible as separate volumes, and the leather colours, the gold tooling, the oak case and the room are our own. We set the spine titles larger than a binder would, so that you can read them.
- ReconstructionThe shelf simplifies by ignoring several differences. The Greek additions to Esther are spread through the book rather than printed as a block, the Greek Jeremiah is shorter than the Hebrew, Ethiopian Baruch is shorter than the Greek, and Psalm numbering differs between Hebrew and Greek Bibles.
Try it with a Bible of your own: open it to its table of contents, and see which of these shelves it matches.