Why the Catholic Bible has More Books.

The Catholic bible has 73 books, the Protestant only 66. Why is that? Were those 7 books removed by the Protestants, or added by the Catholics? Most importantly, do they belong in the Bible? We’ll take a look at that today. For starters, let’s all get on the same page. The following list is the 7 books that the Catholics include that the Protestants do not. Tobit Judith Wisdom (also called.

The King James and Martin Luther’s Bibles included these books. It was only upon further study and scholarship that Protestant teachers began to advise reverting back to only including the Jewish canon for the Old Testament. It was not until the eighteenth century that the Apocrypha was excluded from the Protesant Old Testaments.

Today the word apocrypha is synonymous with the fourteen or fifteen books of doubtful authenticity and authority. These writings are not found in the Hebrew Old Testament, but they are contained in some manuscripts of the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament, which was completed around 250 b.c. in Alexandria, Egypt.

The disputed books, included in one canon but not in others, are often called the Biblical apocrypha, a term that is sometimes used specifically to describe the books in the Catholic and Orthodox canons that are absent from the Jewish Masoretic Text and most modern Protestant Bibles.

Some Christians, particularly in the Protestant tradition, do not consider these books to be part of the biblical canon--that is, they don't consider them to be equal in authority to the other books of the Bible. Because of this, the deuterocanonical books do not appear in most Protestant Bibles.

His Protestant contemporaries, most notably John Calvin, did likewise. The Protestants acknowledge 39 Old Testament books and refer to the extra seven Catholic books as “Apocrypha,” which means hidden. While some Protestant bibles do include the Apocrypha, they treat the additional texts as an unequal addendum to the God-inspired texts.

The Protestant Bible, of which the NIV is one version, is seven books shorter than the Bible used by Roman Catholics. But Protestants didn't just take out books; they used a different standard of.

And the Latin Vulgate became the official sanctioned Catholic Bible, and remained for around 1200 years. It should be noted that the Apocrypha was not made a part of the Catholic Bible, until the Council of Trent, in response to the Protestant Reformation.

After all, for either solo Scriptura or sola Scriptura, you must first agree on which Bible. If no Early Church Father read the Bible used today by Protestants, none of their quotes praising the reading of Scripture are applicable to proving a “Protestant Bible only” position. So I decided to go to the source.

The deuterocanonical books (what you call apocrypha) were around unquestioned for almost 1500 years. Luther relegated them the back of the book, and eventually they dropped from the protestant bibles altogether. Even the original protestant bibles, however, still had them.