Transcription
Hey visual learners. Today we'll explore the different Bibles used in Christianity and how they came to be. We'll also look at six interesting facts most people don't know. The last one might shock you.
Most people think there is one Bible and they are the same everywhere. But right now across the world four major Christian traditions are reading four different Bibles. The Protestant Bible has 66 books. The Catholic Bible has 73 books. The Eastern Orthodox Bible has 76 books. And the Ethiopian Bible has 81 books. So who decided what goes in and why are some books left out?
Part one. The foundation.
The word Bible comes from the Greek word biblia. It doesn't mean book. It means books. Plural. The Bible was never written as one single text. It is a collection. Dozens of individual texts written across more than a thousand years by many different authors. So the big question was which texts belong in the collection? That process is called canonization, from the Greek word canon meaning a measuring rod or rule. And it was not a quick decision. It was messy. It was political. It took centuries. And different communities reached different conclusions. There was no single council, no single pope, no single moment where every Christian in the world agreed on a list. Different traditions formed in different places. Ethiopia, Rome, Constantinople and later Protestant, and each kept their own version. Let's go through each Bible, where it came from, who decided it and what makes it unique.
Interesting fact. One. Many people believe the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD decided which books go in the Bible. This is one of the most repeated myths in history, popularized by The Da Vinci Code. The Council of Nicaea was actually called to settle a debate about the nature of Jesus Christ, not the biblical canon.
Part two. The Protestant Bible. 66 books.
This is the Bible most people in the English-speaking world grew up with. It is used by Baptists, Anglicans, Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, Evangelicals, Pentecostals, the majority of Protestant denominations worldwide. And it is in one crucial sense the newest of the four. It was shaped by one man in one extraordinary moment in history. In October 1517, a German monk named Martin Luther nailed the 95 Theses to the door of a church in Wittenberg. A list of arguments against the Catholic Church's practices, such as selling indulgences. Essentially selling forgiveness for sins. What followed was one of the most consequential chain reactions in human history. Luther's challenge to the church was not just about indulgences. It went to the root question of authority. Who decides what is true? The Pope and the church or the Bible? Luther's answer was the Bible. Scripture alone. In Latin, sola scriptura. And that raised a question. Which Bible? Luther went back to the Hebrew scriptures. The texts that Jewish scholars themselves recognized as authoritative. And those texts did not include the Deuterocanonical books. So Luther moved those seven books out of the Old Testament. He placed them in a separate section between the Old and New Testaments with a note saying they were edifying to read but not to be used for establishing doctrine. Later Protestant traditions removed them entirely. Luther also had doubts about parts of the New Testament. He privately called the Book of James an Epistle of straw because it emphasized good works alongside faith, which conflicted with his doctrine of salvation by faith alone. He was also skeptical of Hebrews, Jude and the Book of Revelation. He did not remove them. But in his German Bible translation, he placed them at the back with a note expressing his reservations. The result. A Protestant Old Testament of 39 books and a New Testament of 27, for a total of 66. This became the standard across the vast majority of Protestant churches worldwide.
Interesting fact two. Luther's protest might have faded quickly like others. But one thing changed everything. The printing press. Invented by Johannes Gutenberg around 1440, it let Luther's ideas spread faster than the church could react. Within two weeks his theses were across Germany. Within two months they reached all of Europe. The Reformation became the first viral media event in history.
Part three. The Catholic Bible. 73 books.
The Catholic Bible contains 73 books. Seven more than the Protestant one. Those seven books are called the Deuterocanon, a word that means second canon in Greek. Protestants sometimes call them the Apocrypha, which means hidden things. Catholics prefer Deuterocanon because they consider these books fully canonical, not hidden or secondary. The seven books are Tobit, Judith, First Maccabees, Second Maccabees, the Book of Wisdom, Sirach, also called Ecclesiasticus, and Baruch. Three other texts also have extra sections not found in Protestant Bibles. Esther has additional chapters and Daniel contains two extra stories: Susanna and Bel and the Dragon. So why do Protestants not have them? We will get to that. But first. How did the Catholic canon get officially decided? For the first four centuries of Christianity, there was no single agreed list. Different churches used different texts. Different bishops had different opinions. In 382 AD, Pope Damasus commissioned a scholar named Jerome to produce a single authoritative Latin translation of the Bible. Jerome was one of the greatest biblical scholars of his age. He learned Hebrew specifically for this project and went to live in Bethlehem for 30 years to finish it. His translation became known as the Vulgate, from the Latin word for common, meaning the common people's Bible. The Council of Trent, officially convened on December 13th, 1545, is the decisive moment for the Catholic canon. It met from 1545 to 1563 in the Italian city of Trent. And it was called in large part as a response to Martin Luther's challenges. The Council of Trent responded definitively. It issued a list of 73 books and declared for the first time with full formal authority that these and only these were the canonical scriptures of the Catholic Church. Anyone who disagreed was, in the language of the council, anathema, meaning formally cut off from the church.
Interesting fact. Three. The King James Bible, published in 1611, originally included the Apocrypha between the Old and New Testaments. In 1826, the British and Foreign Bible Society stopped funding editions with it, and most Protestant Bibles began leaving those books out. If you own a King James Bible published before the 19th century, it likely contains books modern Protestant Bibles don't.
Part four. The Eastern Orthodox Bible. 76 to 79 books.
300 million people belong to Eastern Orthodox churches. They are the third largest Christian grouping in the world after Catholics and Protestants. And most people in the West have almost no idea what their Bible looks like. The Eastern Orthodox tradition traces its roots to the earliest Christian communities in Greece, Syria, Egypt and what is now Turkey. For a thousand years, the Christian world had one church centered in Rome. Then in 1054 AD, something happened that would permanently divide Christianity. The Orthodox Bible is based on the Septuagint, the same Greek translation that influenced the Catholic Bible. This means it also includes books that Protestants removed. But it goes slightly further than the Catholic Bible. Most Orthodox churches include Third Maccabees, Psalm 151, a Psalm not found in the Hebrew Bible, and the Prayer of Manasseh. Some Orthodox traditions include Fourth Maccabees and First Esdras as well. This is part of why the Orthodox canon is listed as 76 to 79 books. It varies slightly between the Greek, Russian, Serbian, Romanian and other Orthodox traditions. Who decided the Orthodox canon? Unlike the Catholic Church, which had the Council of Trent as a formal defining moment, the Orthodox world has historically worked through regional councils and consensus among patriarchs. The closest thing to an authoritative decision was the Quinisext Council of 692 AD, also called the Council in Trullo, which affirmed the use of the Septuagint-based canon. But even today, there is no single binding list universally agreed upon by every Orthodox church. This is considered a feature, not a bug. It reflects the Orthodox understanding that the church is a living community, not a top-down institution.
Interesting fact. Four. The split between the Catholic Church in Rome and the Eastern Orthodox Church in Constantinople built up over centuries. They disagreed on theology, including a word added to the Nicene Creed, and on authority, whether it belonged to the Pope or multiple patriarchs. In 1054, both sides excommunicated each other, marking the Great Schism. If you want the full story, check out my video, How Christianity Split.
Part five, the Ethiopian Bible, 81 books.
Most people have never heard of the Ethiopian Bible. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church has one of the oldest continuous Christian traditions in the world. Christianity arrived in Ethiopia in the 4th century, around 330 AD, when a Syrian scholar named Frumentius converted the Ethiopian king Ezana and became the first bishop of the Ethiopian Church. Over centuries, Ethiopian scholars assembled their own canon, their own official list of sacred texts. They wrote and preserved these texts in Ge'ez, an ancient Semitic language that is no longer spoken as a native tongue, but is still used in Ethiopian church worship today. In the same way, Latin was used in the Catholic Mass for centuries. Their Bible contains 81 books. That is 15 more books than the Protestant Bible. Eight more than the Catholic one. Some of these books are extraordinary and virtually unknown outside of Ethiopia. The Book of Enoch, the Book of Jubilees, The Shepherd of Hermas, 1 to 3 Maccabian. These are not footnotes, not apocryphal legends. For Ethiopian Christians, they are scripture, sacred, authoritative, part of the word of God. The Ethiopian canon was not assembled carelessly. It was the product of centuries of scholarship, councils, and debate within the Ethiopian Church. It reflects a community that was geographically isolated from Rome and Constantinople and therefore developed its own theological tradition, largely uninfluenced by the political disputes that shaped the Western Church.
Interesting fact five. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church claims its spiritual roots go even further, back to the Acts of the Apostles, chapter eight. That passage describes Philip the Apostle baptizing an Ethiopian eunuch who was treasurer to the queen of Ethiopia. If that story is historical, Ethiopia had a Christian convert before most of Europe had ever heard the name of Jesus.
Part six, what this all means.
By now you might be wondering if all these different communities made different decisions, was there ever any agreement at all? Yes and no. All four traditions share the same New Testament, 27 books: Gospels, letters of Paul, Acts, Revelation. That much is consistent across all four. The differences are all in the Old Testament. And the reason for that goes back to a tension that has existed since the very beginning of Christianity. Which version of the Jewish scriptures should Christians use? The Hebrew Bible, used in the Jewish community of Palestine, or the Septuagint, the Greek translation that included more books, used by Jews throughout the wider Greek-speaking world. Every one of these Bibles is sacred to millions of people, and each one tells us something different about how our ancestors understood God.
Interesting fact six. In the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC, a large Jewish community lived in Alexandria, Egypt, and many of them spoke Greek, not Hebrew. So Jewish scholars produced a Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures. This translation is called the Septuagint, named from the Latin word for 70, because tradition said it was translated by 72 scholars. Many Old Testament quotes in the New Testament match the Greek Septuagint and not the Hebrew text. This strongly suggests that the earliest Christians, including the apostles, were using the Greek version of scripture.
Hope you enjoyed this overview. I'll be doing a deep dive into each Bible tradition where I go into more detail on the history, the specific books, and more. Let me know in the comments which Bible are you using? Will you switch and why? Like and subscribe and click on the notification bell so you won't miss the deep dives videos.