Catholic vs Protestant Bible: Why Catholics Have 73 Books and Protestants 66

The difference is seven books of the Old Testament. A Catholic Bible has 73 books and a Protestant Bible has 66, with the same 27 in the New Testament. The seven are Tobit, Judith, 1 and 2 Maccabees, Wisdom, Sirach and Baruch, plus longer versions of Esther and Daniel. Catholics call these books deuterocanonical; Protestants call them the Apocrypha.

So most of what a Catholic and a Protestant open on Sunday is the same book: the same Gospels and letters, the same Law, Prophets and Psalms of the Hebrew Scriptures. The quarrel is over the seven, and it is an old one. Even Luther, who set them apart, called them “profitable and good to read.”

How many books are in the Catholic Bible and the Protestant Bible?

The Catechism of the Catholic Church gives the Catholic count: 46 books in the Old Testament “(45 if we count Jeremiah and Lamentations as one) and 27 for the New” (paragraph 120). That makes 73. Protestant Bibles have 39 books in the Old Testament and 27 in the New, which makes 66. The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), a Reformed Protestant statement, lists those 39 Old Testament books by name.

The 39 Protestant books are the books of the Jewish Bible. Jews count the same books as 24, numbered and ordered differently. Catholic Bibles keep all of these and add the seven books and the additions below.

What are the extra books in the Catholic Bible called?

Catholics call them the deuterocanonical books, from the Greek for “second canon.” The term marks books that one church accepts as Scripture and another does not. Protestants call them the Apocrypha, from a Greek word meaning “to hide away.” Encyclopaedia Britannica credits Jerome, who translated the Latin Vulgate, as the first to use “apocrypha” to mean books outside the canon. Some Protestant Bibles that print the Apocrypha also include books that are not in the Catholic Bible, such as the Prayer of Manasseh.

Why do Protestant Bibles have fewer books?

Because the reformers followed the Hebrew Bible, and the Catholic Church kept the longer Old Testament of the Greek and Latin Bibles. Before the time of Christ, Jewish scholars translated the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek. That translation, the Septuagint, included books that were not in the Hebrew Bible. Jerome drew on it for the Latin Vulgate, and although he doubted some of these books, most of them stayed in the Vulgate, which the Western Church read for centuries.

Christian writers disagreed about these books from early on, and some of the greatest teachers of the early Church came down in different places. Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, counted 22 Old Testament books in his Easter letter of 367, including “Jeremiah with Baruch, Lamentations, and the epistle.” He then named other books “not indeed included in the Canon, but appointed by the Fathers to be read,” among them Wisdom, Sirach, Judith, Tobit and Esther, which he left out of the canon. Jerome went further. In his preface to Samuel and Kings he wrote that Wisdom, Sirach, Judith and Tobit “are not in the canon,” and in his preface to the books of Solomon he said that the Church reads Judith, Tobit and Maccabees “but does not admit them among the canonical Scriptures.” Augustine took the other view. In On Christian Doctrine he listed “forty-four books” of the Old Testament, among them Tobit, Judith, the two books of Maccabees, Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus.

The Reformation turned the old disagreement into a division. In his German Bible of 1534, Martin Luther gathered these books into a separate section with the heading “Apocrypha—that is, books which are not held equal to the Holy Scriptures, and yet are profitable and good to read.” On 8 April 1546 the Council of Trent answered with its decree on the canonical Scriptures. It listed every book of the Catholic Bible, including Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch and the two books of Maccabees, and declared anathema anyone who did not receive “the said books entire with all their parts, as they have been used to be read in the Catholic Church.”

Doctrine was part of the dispute. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 1032, grounds the practice of praying for the dead partly in 2 Maccabees, where Judas Maccabeus sends silver to Jerusalem for a sacrifice for his soldiers who had been slain. The Douay-Rheims translation of verse 46 reads: “It is therefore a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead, that they may be loosed from sins.” Most Protestant churches do not pray for the dead, and they do not accept 2 Maccabees as Scripture.

Did Luther remove books from the Bible?

Not at first. Luther kept the books in his Bible, in a section of their own between the Old and New Testaments. According to the German Bible Society, they were a regular part of Lutheran Bibles into the 19th century, and German Lutheran Bibles are printed today both with and without them. English Protestant Bibles did the same. The biblical scholar Bruce M. Metzger noted that every English Bible of the 16th century, and the King James Version of 1611, included the Apocrypha. He also recorded that in 1615 Archbishop George Abbot threatened printers with imprisonment for issuing a Bible without them. That rule lapsed, and Protestant Bibles are now commonly printed without the Apocrypha.

How do the churches regard these books today?

For the Catholic Church they are Scripture, with the same authority as the rest of the Bible. Trent settled the list, and the Catechism repeats it.

Protestant churches differ in how firmly they set the books aside. The Church of England’s Thirty-Nine Articles, in Article VI, list them as books which “the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine.” The Westminster Confession is stricter: “The books commonly called Apocrypha, not being of divine inspiration, are no part of the Canon of the 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” (chapter 1, section 3). Luther’s heading, “profitable and good to read,” stands between the two.

The Orthodox churches accept them too. The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America says that these books, which were in the Septuagint, “remain in the Orthodox Old Testament today,” along with 3 and 4 Maccabees, which the Catholic canon does not include.

Is the text of the shared books different?

Very little in modern translations, because Catholic and Protestant translators now work from the same original languages. A common claim is that Catholic Bibles translate the Old Testament from the Septuagint. That is not true of modern Catholic Bibles. In 1943 Pope Pius XII wrote in Divino Afflante Spiritu that the Council of Trent did not forbid translations “even directly from the original texts themselves.” The New American Bible, sponsored by the U.S. Catholic bishops, abandoned a revision based on the Vulgate after that letter and was translated “from the Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic.” Its preface says its translators sometimes prefer the Septuagint or a Dead Sea Scrolls reading to the Masoretic (standard Hebrew) text at a particular verse, and they record each such choice.

Older Catholic Bibles show real differences. The Douay-Rheims Bible was translated from the Latin Vulgate and follows its numbering of the Psalms, which differs from the Hebrew numbering used in Protestant Bibles. The psalm that the King James Version numbers 23, “The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want” (Psalm 23:1), is Psalm 22 in the Douay-Rheims: “The Lord ruleth me: and I shall want nothing.”

The differences in the Lord’s Prayer come from the manuscripts a translation follows, not from the church that publishes it. The King James Version ends the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew with “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen” (Matthew 6:13), and gives Luke’s shorter version the line “Thy will be done, as in heaven, so in earth” (Luke 11:2). Modern Catholic and Protestant translations both follow manuscripts that lack these words. The Catholic New American Bible and the Protestant English Standard Version both omit “your will be done” from Luke 11:2, and both leave the closing doxology out of Matthew 6:13, where the English Standard Version notes that “some manuscripts add” it.

Is the Catholic Bible different from the Christian Bible?

Catholics are Christians, so a Catholic Bible is a Christian Bible. When people compare a “Catholic Bible” with a “Christian Bible,” the second one is usually a Protestant Bible, and the difference between them is the seven books and the additions to Esther and Daniel.

The same comparison comes up in other languages. In Spanish, the Protestant Reina-Valera descends from Casiodoro de Reina’s translation of 1569 as revised by Cipriano de Valera in 1602. In German, the Lutherbibel is the Protestant Bible, printed with or without the Apocrypha, and the Einheitsübersetzung, revised in 2016, is the official Catholic text. In French, the Traduction œcuménique de la Bible (TOB) of 1975 was the first French translation made jointly by Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox scholars.

How can you tell if a Bible is Catholic?

Look at the list of books. In the Catechism’s list, which Catholic Bibles generally follow, Tobit and Judith come after Nehemiah, 1 and 2 Maccabees after Esther, Wisdom and Sirach after the Song of Songs, and Baruch after Lamentations. A Protestant Bible either leaves these books out or prints them together in a separate section, usually between the Testaments, headed “Apocrypha.” A Catholic edition also prints a note of Church approval at the front. The Council of Trent required approval to appear at the beginning of a book, and canon 825 of the Code of Canon Law states that “books of the sacred scriptures cannot be published unless the Apostolic See or the conference of bishops has approved them.”

Can Catholics read a Protestant Bible?

The Catholic Church’s rule on Bibles, canon 825, governs publishing, not private reading. Its second paragraph allows Catholics, with their bishops’ permission, to publish translations “in collaboration with separated brothers and sisters,” the Church’s term for other Christians, provided the translations carry suitable notes. The TOB is a translation of that kind. A Catholic who reads a Protestant Bible has the full New Testament and most of the Old, but does not have the seven deuterocanonical books or the additions to Esther and Daniel.

A reader who wants every book in one volume can choose a Catholic Bible, which contains all 73, or a Protestant Bible printed with the Apocrypha, such as a Lutherbibel mit Apokryphen.

Which is more accurate, the Catholic or the Protestant Bible?

Accuracy belongs to a translation, not to a church. Modern Catholic and Protestant translations work from the same Hebrew and Greek, and where they differ, the difference can come from the manuscripts they follow, as the Lord’s Prayer examples show. The real disagreement is over which books belong in the Old Testament. Catholics hold that the Old Testament books listed by Trent, 46 in the Catechism’s count, are Scripture. Protestants hold that the 39 books of the Hebrew Bible are, and that the rest, at most, are profitable to read.

For all the argument over the shelf, the two Bibles agree on nearly every page they share, down to the shepherd’s psalm, whatever number it carries: “The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want” (Psalm 23:1).

Related reading

• 7 Missing Bible Books: Why Did Protestants Remove Them from the Bible?
• King James vs Catholic Bible
• How the Bible canon was formed