Catholic and Protestant Bibles

The Protestant Old Testament omits several books and parts of two other books. To explain how this happened, we need to go back to the ancient Jewish Scriptures. The Hebrew Bible contained only the Old Testament and from it, it excluded seven entire books-Tobias, Judith, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, First and Second Machabees, and parts of Esther and Daniel. Catholics refer to these 7 books taken out of the Bible as the deutercanonical books.

These books missing in the Jewish Bible came to the Catholic Church with the Septuagint, a pre-Christian Greek translation of the Old Testament.The additional books in the Septuagint were in opposition to the Jews because some of these books were written in Greek ( the language of paganism). Also they were in opposition because the early Christians used the Septuagint in their arguments with the Jews.

The Protestants of the sixteenth century objected to the additional books because of the doctrinal teachings of these books. The Second Book of Machabees, for example, contains the doctrine of purgatory, of prayers and sacrifices for the dead (12:39-46). The book of Tobias teaches the importance of good works. The Protestants could not reject some without excluding all of the books. So they went back to the first collection of Biblical books of the Palestinian Jews. They removed the additional books, which had been in the Bible up till 1517 and placed them at the end of the Bible in a special appendix.They labled them the "aprocryphal" ( uninspired) which seemed to make them less important to Prostestant readers.

The current canon of Scripture for the early Church was affirmed at the Council of Rome in 382 under Pope Damasus which included all and only the 73 books that Catholics honor today. This canon was repeated at Hippo in 393 and at Carthage in 397.

One of the reasons Martin Luther rejected the canonicity of the deutercanonical books was that some groups of Jews had rejected the Septuagint ( with its deutercanonical books) at the council of Jamnia. This council was a council of a non-Christian religion. Do they have the authority to define the Christian faith? In the fourth cintury, three Church councils ruled on the matter. In opposition, one Jewish council ruled on the matter.

The Catholic Church has consistently declared the deutercanonicals to be divinely inspired from her earliest councils. These books have been part of the Bible for 2,000 years. At the time of the Reformation, the Protestant groups rejected these portions of scripture that for 1,500 years had been part of the Christian Bible.