Catholic and Protestant Bibles

The difference between Catholic and Protestant Bibles goes back to before Christianity, to the way Jewish scripture circulated in two languages. From the 3rd century BCE, Jews in Alexandria and elsewhere translated their scriptures into Greek. This translation, known as the Septuagint after a legend of seventy-two translators, came to include books written or preserved in Greek, such as the Wisdom of Solomon and 2 Maccabees, alongside the books written in Hebrew. Among Jews, meanwhile, the Hebrew collection settled over time into the 24 books of the Tanakh, which Christians count as 39.

The first Christians were mostly Greek-speaking, and they read the Septuagint as their Old Testament. Church writers quoted the extra books, though some, especially in the East, noted that they were not in the Hebrew list. In the West, councils at Hippo in 393 and Carthage in 397 listed them as Scripture. Jerome, who made the Latin translation later called the Vulgate, worked from the Hebrew and called the books outside it “apocrypha”, but the Latin Church kept reading them, and they remained in the medieval Bible.

The question returned in the Reformation. Protestant reformers wanted every doctrine grounded in Scripture alone, which made it urgent to know exactly what Scripture was. Following Jerome and the Hebrew canon, Martin Luther placed the disputed books in a separate section of his 1534 German Bible, between the Old and New Testaments, under a heading that called them useful and good to read but not equal to Holy Scripture. In response, the Council of Trent issued a decree on 8 April 1546 listing the full canon, disputed books included, and declaring all of it sacred.

The books at issue are seven: Tobit, Judith, 1 and 2 Maccabees, Wisdom, Sirach (also called Ecclesiasticus) and Baruch, which includes the Letter of Jeremiah. Catholic Bibles also include longer forms of Esther and Daniel, with prayers, letters and stories found only in Greek, such as the Song of the Three Young Men, Susanna, and Bel and the Dragon. Catholics call these books deuterocanonical, a term coined in the 16th century to describe books whose place in the canon was recognised later. Protestants usually call them the Apocrypha, from a Greek word for hidden.

Protestant churches did not all treat the Apocrypha the same way. The Church of England’s Thirty-Nine Articles say the Church reads them “for example of life and instruction of manners” but does not use them to establish doctrine, and passages from them still appear in Anglican lectionaries. Lutheran Bibles long printed them. The Reformed Westminster Confession of 1646 went further, giving them no more authority than other human writings.

The difference has some doctrinal weight. A passage in 2 Maccabees, in which Judas Maccabeus has a sacrifice offered for fallen soldiers, has long been cited in Catholic teaching in support of prayer for the dead, and Protestants who do not accept the book as Scripture do not accept the argument from it. For most teaching, though, the disputed books play a modest role. Their influence on Christian culture is broader than on doctrine: the story of Judith beheading Holofernes, Susanna and the elders, and Tobias travelling with the angel Raphael were favourite subjects of painters, and lines from Sirach and Wisdom entered prayers and hymns of many churches.

There is also a question of text. The Septuagint sometimes differs from the Hebrew Masoretic Text, the standard Hebrew version copied with great care by scribes called Masoretes in the 7th–10th centuries CE. The Dead Sea Scrolls showed that both textual traditions go back to ancient Hebrew forms, and they include fragments of Tobit and Sirach in Hebrew or Aramaic. Today Catholic and Protestant scholars alike translate the Old Testament mainly from the Masoretic Text, checked against the Septuagint and the scrolls, so the books both sides share read much the same in their translations. The numbering of some Psalms still differs between older Catholic Bibles, which follow the Greek and Latin, and those following the Hebrew.

Catholic Bibles, such as the Jerusalem Bible or the New American Bible, print the deuterocanonical books in their places among the historical, wisdom and prophetic books. Most Protestant Bibles, such as the New International Version, leave them out entirely. This was not always so: the King James Bible of 1611 included the Apocrypha, and they disappeared from most English Protestant Bibles only after the British and Foreign Bible Society decided in the 1820s not to fund editions that contained them.

The picture is wider than Catholics and Protestants. Orthodox churches accept the deuterocanonical books and a few more, such as 1 Esdras, 3 Maccabees, the Prayer of Manasseh and Psalm 151, and they often regard the Septuagint itself as their authoritative Old Testament. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church has the broadest canon of all, including 1 Enoch and Jubilees. In the New Testament, by contrast, almost all churches share the same 27 books, a list first given exactly by Athanasius of Alexandria in 367.

In recent decades the difference has become less a matter of dispute than of shared study. Ecumenical translations, such as editions of the Revised Standard Version and the New Revised Standard Version, are published with the Apocrypha or deuterocanonical books, often in a section marking which churches accept which book. Scholars of every tradition read these books as precious witnesses to Jewish life and thought in the centuries before Jesus.