Transcription
Did the Protestants take books out of the Bible? Did the Roman Catholics put them in? Should there be 66 books in your Bible or 73? Let's talk about that.
So, just off the bat, let me outline that if you open up a Protestant Bible, you're going to find 39 books in your Old Testament. If you open up a Catholic Bible, you're going to see 46. Roman Catholics then have seven more books, as well as some additions to books like Daniel and Esther.
It also might be useful to mention that the Hebrew Bible, that is, the Bible that modern Jews read today, has the same books as the Protestant Bible, but they group them in a different order.
But backing up to the Protestant and Catholic issue, these books not found in the Protestant canon are sometimes called the Apocrypha, while Roman Catholics more commonly refer to them as the Deutero-canon. Using this term, which literally means "second canon," does not mean "second" as in authority, but rather "second" as in acceptance time-wise.
In order to properly address this question, I need to address a couple of straw men that we need to move out of the way. The idea that Protestants somehow removed agreed-upon books out of the Bible during the Reformation is completely inaccurate. In a similar vein, though, the idea that Roman Catholics wholesale just added these books as a response to the Reformers is also a little bit too simplistic.
The history of the biblical canon is a long one, and one that, in some ways, is more simple than you'd think, and in others, far more complicated than you might imagine. Part of the problem may come from our use of the word "Bible." The word "Bible" that we use today comes from the Greek word "biblos," which means "books." It's plural. The Bible isn't one book as much as a collection of books, an anthology.
The early Christians were prolific in their production of books. The wholesale discussion of the recognition and the dust settling on the biblical canon is one that I have multiple videos talking about, so you can find a longer explanation of that topic on my channel.
Nonetheless, it's clear that there have been Christians since its earliest inception who did consider a lot of what would eventually be labeled the Deuterocanonical books as scripture. At the same time, let me pause because there was very little doubt extremely early on concerning the 66 books agreed upon by modern Protestants and Catholics. Those were always considered scripture.
The discussion then is about the other books. While it's not unanimous that these other books held the authority of scripture, I think we can clearly see that these books were nonetheless being copied and read as valuable Christian documents. The Jews in this ancient period likewise considered these writings as valuable, but they did not consider them as scriptural.
Arguments were made by those like Melito of Sardis, Origen, Athanasius, and many others that Paul's statement in Romans chapter 3, verse 2, that the Jews were entrusted with the oracles of God, was reason to omit almost all of the Deuterocanonical books as divinely inspired scripture. They weren't heretical or wrong to read; some of them were and are edifying and can provide good context to the time leading up to Jesus.
However, many early Christian and church writers did not include them in their canon lists. To be fair, though, others did. In the Latin West, many were less concerned whether a book was part of the Jewish canon and more concerned with whether early Christians were reading and receiving a book as authoritative. Both Augustine and Innocent I took this particular stance. Jerome and Rufinus stood on the other side of Augustine and Innocent, though, promoting the narrower Jewish canon and placing the Deuterocanonical books in a secondary list of books that were useful but not on the grounds of standing for faith, doctrine, and practice of the church.
Once again, while the 66 books of the Jewish Old and New Testament canons were not under dispute, these other books were and remained in dispute from the early church right up until the Reformation. Although it is true that the Council of Florence around 1445 published a list of Old Testament books that incorporated the Deuterocanonical books, the church still did not see this publication as dogmatically binding. There was still an open discussion, and there were many key players throughout church history, including academics and even popes, who both affirmed and denied that the other books had grounding to be considered scripture.
In fact, there were key individuals fighting strongly against Luther in the early days of the Reformation, such as Erasmus, Cardinal Humanise, and Cardinal Cayetan, who, if pressed, would have agreed with Luther on the narrower Old Testament canon.
During the Counter-Reformation and the Council of Trent in 1546, we see the agreement with the Council of Florence's list and a publication of that list without any qualification or true explanation. Nonetheless, many Roman Catholic writers at this time still did not seem to consider this as an end to the long-standing debate.
In 1566, Sixtus of Siena coined the term "Deuterocanonical," but did so not to communicate that these books were secondary in their authority, but merely in their reception. Protestants continued to call them the Apocrypha, derived from the Greek word meaning "hidden," marking the historically held distinction between books that were canon in scripture and ones that were not.
Nonetheless, traditions that the papacy held to as doctrine, like that of purgatory, worship of the saints, and prayer for the dead, could be proof-texted out of many of the Deuterocanonical books, and this was defended as scripture vigorously by Catholic apologists following Trent.
On a lot of these grounds, Luther, Calvin, and many other Protestant Reformers noted that none of these doctrines could be found within the canon of scripture, and therefore Rome must include them to justify their own traditions.
Clearly, these differences make a difference, as the word "canon" means authority and therefore stands as the basis for doctrine, practice, and teaching within the church. I, as a Protestant, side with the Reformers, but not out of some blind allegiance. I believe the Apocryphal books to be useful but thoroughly uninspired.
The ancient Jews did not consider them God's word, and neither do I.
Let me end with two important points, though. First, just because I deny that these other books are scripture, that doesn't mean I think they're useless or heretical. These are important books that give us a lot of insight into the time frame leading up to the time of Jesus and what the Jews would have been reading in his day.
Secondly, when we actually evaluate the history of the discussion throughout church history, it's clearly not a case of Protestants removing books. The Protestant tradition, as it pertains and agrees with the Hebrew canon, is the stance that had more ancient precedence.
It's important to understand the history of this topic in order to avoid unhelpful characterizations that create straw men and inaccurate portrayals of what is a much more thorough-going discussion.
If you want to hear more about answers to questions concerning what's going on in the Bible, the Christian worldview, and answers to a lot of other really big questions, why don't you go ahead and hit that subscribe button and check out some of the other videos and content on my channel?
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