The Canon of Scripture

Open a Catholic Bible and a Protestant Bible side by side and count the books. The Catholic has forty-six in the Old Testament. The Protestant has thirty-nine. The seven books that make the difference — Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, and 1 and 2 Maccabees, along with additions to Esther and Daniel — are called the deuterocanonical books by Catholics and the apocrypha by Protestants. The difference is older than most people realize, and more unsettled.

This is not a minor bookkeeping dispute. The canon question sits beneath sola scriptura itself: if the two traditions do not agree on what Scripture is, they cannot appeal to it as a shared final authority in quite the way either side often assumes.

The Common Caricatures

Protestants have often been taught that the Catholic Church added the deuterocanonical books at the Council of Trent in 1546 as a defensive reaction against the Reformers, inventing scripture where none had existed.

Catholics have often been taught that Luther himself removed books from the Bible on his own authority, cutting out inspired Scripture because it conflicted with his theology.

Neither is quite right. The disputed books were in widespread Christian use for centuries, included in the Septuagint (the Greek Old Testament used by the apostles), debated by several Fathers, and treated with varying status in medieval manuscripts. Luther did not remove them from his translation — he moved them to a separate section called Apocrypha between the Testaments, marked as edifying but not scriptural. Trent did not invent their canonicity but formally defined what had been common Catholic practice.

The Catholic Teaching, in Full

The Council of Trent was explicit:

If any one receive not, as sacred and canonical, the said books entire with all their parts, as they have been used to be read in the Catholic Church, and as they are contained in the old Latin vulgate edition, and knowingly and deliberately contemn the traditions aforesaid, let him be anathema. Council of Trent, Session IV (1546)

The Catholic case rests on three claims. First, the Septuagint — which contains these books — was the Bible of the apostles, quoted overwhelmingly in the New Testament. Second, the earliest complete Christian Bibles (Codex Vaticanus, Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Alexandrinus, 4th–5th centuries) all contain the deuterocanonical books mixed among the others without distinction. Third, regional councils in the fourth and fifth centuries — Rome (382), Hippo (393), Carthage (397, 419) — affirmed the full canon that Trent would later formally define.

The Church's position is not that Trent invented the canon but that Trent formally defined what had been the consistent Western practice for over a thousand years. The formal definition was needed because the Reformation had raised the question.

The Protestant Teaching, in Full

The Reformers' case rests on several arguments. First, the Hebrew Bible — the Scripture of Israel, of Jesus, and of the earliest Jewish Christian community — did not include the disputed books. Second, several Fathers (notably Jerome, the Vulgate's own translator) distinguished them as a secondary category. Third, New Testament citation of the deuterocanonicals is disputed — the Reformers held that none of them is quoted as Scripture in the New Testament, though this is debated.

The Thirty-Nine Articles give a measured statement of the classical Anglican and broadly Protestant position:

The other Books (as Jerome saith) the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine. Thirty-Nine Articles, Article VI

The Westminster Confession is more restrictive: The books commonly called Apocrypha, not being of divine inspiration, are no part of the canon of the Scripture, and therefore are of no authority in the Church of God, nor to be any otherwise approved or made use of than other human writings (I.3).

Most Protestant traditions today follow the Westminster position, and the disputed books have been dropped from most printed Protestant Bibles. This was a late development, however — many early Protestant Bibles, including the original 1611 King James, included the Apocrypha as a separate section.

The Early Church Fathers

The patristic record on the canon is uneven. Some Fathers affirm the broader canon; others express reservations about particular deuterocanonical books; none treats the question with the clarity the later dispute would demand.

Jerome, the Catholic Church's greatest biblical scholar and translator of the Vulgate, is often cited by Protestants. He preferred the Hebrew canon and called the disputed books ecclesiastical rather than canonical — useful for the Church but of lesser standing. Yet Jerome also translated them and included them in the Vulgate that became the standard Catholic Bible.

Augustine, writing slightly later, defended the broader canon decisively, and the African councils at Hippo and Carthage followed his lead. Athanasius in the East produced a famous festal letter in 367 that listed the present Protestant canon, plus Baruch — a middle position that fits neither modern tradition exactly.

What the Fathers show is that the canon was not a bright line in the early centuries. There was a core consensus and disputed edges, and the East and West resolved the edges differently over time.

Where They Actually Agree

Both traditions agree on sixty-six books as Scripture: the thirty-nine book Hebrew canon plus the twenty-seven book New Testament. On these there is no dispute. Both read, teach, and preach from them as the Word of God.

Both traditions historically granted the disputed books some Christian value. Even the Westminster Confession, the most restrictive major Protestant statement, was written at a time when the disputed books were still printed between the Testaments in English Bibles. Anglican tradition continues to read the Apocrypha in lectionary services while not deriving doctrine from it.

Both traditions acknowledge that the process of canon recognition was ecclesial — neither the Hebrew canon nor the New Testament canon fell from the sky fully formed. The Church, under the Spirit's guidance, came to recognize what was apostolic. The disagreement is about whether that process produced forty-six books or thirty-nine in the Old Testament.

Where They Genuinely Differ

Beyond the seven-book difference itself, the deeper disagreement is about authority over the canon. For Catholics, the Church's formal definition at Trent settled the question — the canon is what the Magisterium has defined it to be. For Protestants, the canon is what it is because of the books' intrinsic authority as the Word of God, which the Church recognized but did not confer.

This plays out in specific doctrinal questions. 2 Maccabees 12:42–45 describes prayer and sacrifice for the dead, which is one of the key biblical texts Catholics cite in support of purgatory and related practices. Protestants who do not accept 2 Maccabees as Scripture do not weight this passage the same way. Several other distinctively Catholic teachings draw some support from deuterocanonical material that Protestants simply do not have in their Bibles.

It is worth noting that on a few issues — the historical context of the intertestamental period, the development of Jewish theology between Malachi and Matthew, the cultural setting of the New Testament — even Protestants who reject the canonicity of the deuterocanonicals often acknowledge their historical value for understanding the world into which Christ was born.

Why They Need Each Other

The Protestant instinct on the canon — that Scripture's authority is intrinsic rather than conferred by the Church — guards against the idea that the Church stands above its own sacred texts. It takes seriously the apostolic priority of the Hebrew Bible and the witness of Jerome's scholarly scruples. It refuses to treat the canon as a matter of institutional decree.

The Catholic instinct on the canon — that the Church's Spirit-led recognition of Scripture over centuries matters — guards against the idea that individual believers can decide for themselves what is and is not Scripture. It takes seriously the Septuagint's apostolic usage, the earliest Christian Bibles, and the ecclesial consensus that produced the New Testament canon no less than the Old.

A Christianity that forgets the first can drift toward treating the Bible as merely the Church's book. A Christianity that forgets the second can drift toward the fiction that the Bible simply assembled itself. The honest admission — that the canon is both divinely authored and ecclesially recognized — is something both traditions can affirm together even where they continue to disagree about the disputed seven.