The Canon of Scripture

The Bible is not one book but a library, and every library has a catalogue. The list of books the Church recognises as inspired Scripture is called the canon, from a Greek word for a measuring rod or rule. Catholic Bibles contain 73 books. Many Protestant Bibles contain 66. This page explains where the list came from, why it differs, and why this library quotes the translation it does.

Seventy-three books

The Catholic canon has 46 books in the Old Testament and 27 in the New (CCC 120). The Catechism lists them all. The New Testament is the same in Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant Bibles. The differences are all in the Old Testament.

The Church teaches that it was by the apostolic Tradition that she discerned which writings belong in the list (CCC 120). The Church did not make these books inspired; they were inspired when they were written. The Church recognised them, much as a family recognises its own members.

How the list was recognised

The early Christians inherited the Scriptures of Israel. Jesus himself spoke of the law of Moses, the prophets and the psalms (cf. Luke 24:44). Over the following centuries the apostles' own writings were read alongside them in the liturgy, and the Church slowly reached agreement on which writings were apostolic and inspired. Most were accepted everywhere early. A few, such as Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, Jude and Revelation, were questioned in some places for longer.

Some landmarks:

• AD 367: St Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, lists exactly the 27 books of our New Testament in an Easter letter to his churches.
• 382: a council at Rome under Pope Damasus is traditionally credited with a list of the books of Scripture. (Scholars debate how much of the list that survives goes back to this council.)
• 393 and 397: regional councils in North Africa, at Hippo and at Carthage, set out a full list of Old and New Testament books that matches today's Catholic canon in substance. St Augustine took part in them.
• 1442: the Council of Florence repeats the same list.
• 1546: the Council of Trent, responding to the questions raised in the Reformation, defines the canon solemnly as the Church's teaching.

So Trent did not invent the list. It confirmed, with full authority, the list the Church had long used.

The deuterocanonical books

Seven books of the Catholic Old Testament are called deuterocanonical, meaning "of the second canon". The name refers to the fact that their place was discussed for longer, not to any lesser authority. They are:

• Tobit
• Judith
• 1 and 2 Maccabees
• Wisdom
• Sirach (also called Ecclesiasticus)
• Baruch

The Catholic canon also includes longer forms of Esther and Daniel. Daniel, for example, includes the prayer and song of the three young men in the furnace and the stories of Susanna and of Bel and the dragon.

The Septuagint

Why were these books in the early Church's Bible? Many Jews in the centuries before Christ lived outside the Holy Land and spoke Greek. For them the Scriptures were translated into Greek at Alexandria, beginning in the third century BC. This translation is called the Septuagint, from the Latin for "seventy", after an ancient story of its seventy-two translators. The Septuagint as Christians received it included these seven books and the longer Esther and Daniel. Some were written in Greek; others survive in part in Hebrew or Aramaic.

The Septuagint was the Bible of the Greek-speaking Church. The New Testament writers often quote the Old Testament in a form close to it. Over time, Jewish communities settled on a shorter collection of Hebrew books, and that is the Old Testament of the Hebrew Bible today.

Why some Bibles have fewer books

At the Reformation in the sixteenth century, Martin Luther and other Reformers preferred the shorter Hebrew canon for the Old Testament. They had a respected precedent: St Jerome, translating the Bible into Latin around AD 400, had favoured the Hebrew books, though he still translated several of the others. Luther's German Bible printed the deuterocanonical books in a separate section between the Testaments, as books worth reading but not equal to Scripture. Many Protestant Bibles, including the King James Version of 1611, long did the same, calling them the Apocrypha. Later printings often left them out altogether.

So the difference is real, but it is narrower than it can sound. Catholics, Orthodox and Protestants share the same New Testament and the books of the Hebrew Bible. Protestant Christians who do not count the deuterocanonical books as Scripture often still value them, and Orthodox Christians include a few books beyond the Catholic list. Christians disagree here in good faith, and it is worth knowing why, rather than assuming the other side simply added or removed books.

A note on translations

The Church has never tied God's word to a single translation. For a thousand years the Latin Church read St Jerome's Latin version, the Vulgate. Today Catholics read Scripture in many approved translations, and the readings at Mass use different approved versions in different countries.

This library quotes the Revised Standard Version (RSV) in its Catholic Edition. It is a careful, fairly literal translation that stays close to the wording of the original languages, it is widely used for Catholic study, and the Scripture quotations in the English edition of the Catechism are adapted from it and from its revision, the New Revised Standard Version. Any good Catholic edition will serve you well; the best Bible is the one you read.

Going deeper

• How Catholics read the Bible: the Church's way of reading Scripture.
• Scripture and Tradition: how the word of God is handed on.
• The councils: the great gatherings that shaped Church teaching.
• Read next in the Catechism: CCC 101–141, especially CCC 120–123.