The 7 Books in Catholic Bibles but Not Protestant Ones, and Why They Were Left Out

Protestant Bibles leave out seven books that Catholic Bibles contain: Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, and 1 and 2 Maccabees, plus parts of Esther and Daniel. The Reformers set them apart because they are not in the Hebrew Bible. Luther moved them to a separate section in 1534, and most Protestant Bibles stopped printing them in the 1800s.

Which seven books are not in Protestant Bibles?

The Catholic name for these books is deuterocanonical, meaning “second canon,” because their place in Scripture was disputed before it was settled. Protestants call them the Apocrypha, from the Greek for “to hide away.” The seven books are:

• Tobit: an Israelite exile in Nineveh who gives alms and buries the dead, and his son Tobias, who travels with the angel Raphael.
• Judith: a widow who saves her town, Bethulia, by killing the Assyrian general Holofernes.
• Wisdom (the Wisdom of Solomon): a book of teaching on wisdom and justice, written in the voice of King Solomon.
• Sirach (Ecclesiasticus): sayings on conduct and the fear of God by “Jesus the son of Sirach of Jerusalem” (Sirach 50:27).
• Baruch: prayers and poems attributed to the scribe of the prophet Jeremiah. Its sixth chapter is the Letter of Jeremiah, a warning against idols.
• 1 Maccabees: the Jewish revolt against the Greek king Antiochus IV, led by Judas Maccabeus and his brothers from 167 BC.
• 2 Maccabees: a second account of the same years, with the deaths of Jewish martyrs and a passage on praying for the dead.

Why did Protestants take these books out of the Bible?

The Reformers gave three main reasons: the books are not in the Hebrew Bible, some of them were used to support Catholic doctrines the Reformers rejected, and the books do not speak with the authority of the prophets.

They are not in the Hebrew Bible

The Jewish Scriptures contain the same books as the Protestant Old Testament, counted and ordered differently. The Reformers held that this was the Old Testament Jesus and the apostles used, and they pointed to Paul’s words about the Jews, “unto them were committed the oracles of God” (Romans 3:2). The Westminster Confession of Faith cites that verse under its statement that the Apocrypha “are no part of the Canon of the Scripture.”

The seven books came into Christian use through the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures made by Jews before the time of Christ. The Septuagint included them, and so did the Latin Vulgate, which drew on it. Jerome, who translated the Vulgate, learned Hebrew and preferred the Hebrew list. The Church of England’s Article VI rests its own position on him: the other books, “as Hierome saith,” the Church reads “for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine.”

They were used to support Catholic doctrine

The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1908 records that at the Leipzig debate of 1519, when Johann Eck cited 2 Maccabees in support of purgatory, Luther answered that the passage had no binding authority because the book was outside the canon. The passage tells how Judas Maccabeus collected silver to send to Jerusalem for a sin offering on behalf of fallen soldiers found with tokens of idols under their coats, and it ends:

For if he had not hoped that they that were slain should have risen again, it had been superfluous and vain to pray for the dead. And also in that he perceived that there was great favour laid up for those that died godly, it was an holy and good thought. Whereupon he made a reconciliation for the dead, that they might be delivered from sin.

2 Maccabees 12:44–45

The Catechism of the Catholic Church still quotes its last sentence, numbered 12:46 in Catholic Bibles, in its teaching on purgatory (paragraph 1032). Tobit and Sirach say that almsgiving takes away sin: “alms doth deliver from death, and shall purge away all sin” (Tobit 12:9), and “alms maketh an atonement for sins” (Sirach 3:30). The biblical scholar Bruce Metzger wrote that the Reformers drew their line because prayers and masses for the dead and “merit acquired through good works” rested largely on texts in the Apocrypha.

The books do not claim a prophet’s authority

1 Maccabees describes its own time as one without prophets: “So was there a great affliction in Israel, the like whereof was not since the time that a prophet was not seen among them” (1 Maccabees 9:27). The writer of 2 Maccabees closes with an apology: “if I have done well, and as is fitting the story, it is that which I desired: but if slenderly and meanly, it is that which I could attain unto” (2 Maccabees 15:38). John Calvin, answering the Council of Trent in 1547, cited that apology and asked, “How very alien this acknowledgment from the majesty of the Holy Spirit!”

The New Testament gives neither side a clear verdict. It never quotes any of the seven books as Scripture, which the Catholic Encyclopedia itself calls “the admitted absence of any explicit citation.” It also never cites Esther, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs, Ezra or Nehemiah, which every church accepts. It does allude to the deuterocanonical books. Hebrews 11:35 recalls the martyrs of 2 Maccabees 6 and 7: “others were tortured, not accepting deliverance; that they might obtain a better resurrection.” But the New Testament also draws on books that no Catholic or Protestant Bible contains, such as the Book of Enoch, which Jude 14 quotes by name.

When were the books removed from Protestant Bibles?

Gradually, over about three hundred years. The Reformers separated the books from the rest of the Old Testament, but Protestant printers kept them for generations.

Metzger names two causes for the final disappearance. One was cost: the Apocrypha is almost as long as the New Testament, so Bibles without it were cheaper to print and bind. The other, and in his judgment the main one, was doctrine. After the Bible Society’s decision, Protestant Bibles in English were printed without the Apocrypha as a rule. German Lutheran Bibles kept Luther’s section longer: the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1908 noted that it was still printed in them.

Did Martin Luther remove seven books from the Bible?

No. Luther translated the books and printed them in his Bible, in their own section, under the heading “Apocrypha—that is, books which are not held equal to the Holy Scriptures, and yet are profitable and good to read.” He denied them the authority of Scripture, which is a different thing from deleting them. The Bibles that grew out of his translation in Swedish (1541), Danish (1550) and Icelandic (1584) kept the Apocrypha with his heading. Luther left out only 1 and 2 Esdras, which the Council of Trent also left out of its list.

Why do Catholic Bibles include these books?

The Catholic Church holds that the books have always belonged to the Church’s Old Testament and that Trent confirmed an existing list. The Catechism says that “it was by the apostolic Tradition that the Church discerned which writings are to be included in the list of the sacred books” (paragraph 120), and it counts 46 Old Testament books.

The earlier evidence supports part of that claim. Augustine, in On Christian Doctrine, counted “forty-four books” in the Old Testament, among them Tobit, Judith, the two books of Maccabees, Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus. The African church’s list of Scripture, passed at councils in Hippo in 393 and Carthage in 397 and reissued at Carthage in 419, names Tobit, Judith, two books of Maccabees and “five books of Solomon,” a count that takes in Wisdom and Sirach. Pope Innocent I sent a similar list to a bishop in Gaul in 405, and a decree issued during the Council of Florence in 1442 gave the same books.

When Trent issued its decree on the canonical Scriptures in 1546, it listed every book 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, and as they are contained in the old Latin vulgate edition.” Metzger notes that the decree came only after prolonged debate, and that a line of Catholic scholars since Jerome, among them Cardinal Cajetan, Luther’s opponent, had kept the distinction between the Hebrew canon and the other books.

Did the early Church accept these books?

Some Church Fathers did and some did not, which is why the question stayed open until the 16th century. Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, listed the Old Testament in his Easter letter of 367 and then named other books “not indeed included in the Canon, but appointed by the Fathers to be read by those who newly join us”: Wisdom, Sirach, Esther, Judith and Tobit. He did count Baruch and the Letter of Jeremiah with Jeremiah. Origen, as Eusebius reports him, gave the 22 books of the Hebrew canon and added, “besides these there are the Maccabees.”

Jerome drew the sharpest line. In his preface to Samuel and Kings he wrote that Wisdom, Sirach, Judith and Tobit “are not in the canon.” In his preface to the books of Solomon he said that the Church reads Judith, Tobit and the books of Maccabees “but does not admit them among the canonical Scriptures.”

Why is the book of Judith not in the Bible?

Judith is in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles. It is missing from Protestant Bibles because it is not in the Hebrew Bible. Jerome wrote in his preface to Judith that “among the Jews, the book of Judith is considered among the apocrypha,” and that he translated it only because “the Nicene Council is considered to have counted this book among the number of sacred Scriptures.” He gave it, in his words, “a single night’s work.” His preface to Tobit is similar: the Hebrews “exclude” Tobit from their Scriptures, but Jerome translated it anyway at the request of two bishops. Both translations entered the Vulgate.

Why was Maccabees removed from the Bible?

1 and 2 Maccabees are not in the Hebrew Bible, 2 Maccabees 12 was the passage cited for prayer for the dead, 1 Maccabees describes its own time as one without prophets, and 2 Maccabees ends with its writer’s apology.

Both books also tell how Hanukkah began. 1 Maccabees records that Judas and his brothers ordained that “the days of the dedication of the altar should be kept in their season from year to year by the space of eight days, from the five and twentieth day of the month Casleu” (1 Maccabees 4:59). That rededication of the Temple in 164 BC is the origin of Hanukkah. John’s Gospel places Jesus in the temple at the same feast: “And it was at Jerusalem the feast of the dedication, and it was winter” (John 10:22).

How do the churches regard these books today?

For Catholics they are Scripture, with the same authority as the rest of the Old Testament. For the Orthodox they are Scripture too, along with a few more books. Protestant churches differ in how firmly they set them aside. The Church of England’s Article VI says the Church reads them for “example of life and instruction of manners” but does not base doctrine on them. The Westminster Confession says they are to be used no differently “than other human writings.” Luther’s heading gave a third wording: not equal to Scripture, “and yet profitable and good to read.”

Related reading

• Catholic vs Protestant Bible: why Catholics have 73 books and Protestants 66
• How the Bible canon was formed
• King James vs Catholic Bible