Bible FAQ's

HISTORY BEHIND WHY CATHOLIC AND PROTESTANT BIBLES HAVE DIFFERENT NUMBER OF OLD TESTAMENT BOOKS

Why do Catholic and Protestant Bibles have a different number of books in the OT?

The Protestant OT is based on the Palestinian (or Hebrew) canon used by Hebrew-speaking Jews in Palestine. The Catholic OT is based on the Alexandrian (or Greek) canon used by the Greekspeaking Jews throughout the Mediterranean, including Palestine. The city of Alexandria in Egypt possessed the greatest library in the ancient world and during the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus (285-246 BC), a translation of the entire Hebrew Bible into Greek was begun by 70 or 72 Jewish scholars-according to tradition-six from each of the twelve tribes. From this Alexandrian translation (completed between 250-125 BC) we get the term "Septuagint," Latin for 70 (LXX), the number of translators. popular because Greek was the common language of the entire Mediterranean world by the time of Christ. Hebrew was a dying language (Jews in Palestine usually spoke Aramaic), and so it is not surprising that the Septuagint was the translation used by Jesus and the New Testament writer. In fact, 300 quotations from the OT found in the New Testament are from the Septuagint.
Remember also that the entire New Testament was written in Greek. The Septuagint contains 46 books. The Hebrew canon contains only 39.

Why are there seven fewer books in the Hebrew canon?

The Hebrew canon was established by Jewish rabbis at Jamnia, in Palestine about the year 100 A.D., perhaps in reaction to the Christian Church, which was using the Alexandrian canon. The Jews at Jamnia rejected seven books from the Hebrew canon found in the Septuagint-Wisdom, Sirach, Judith, Baruch, Tobit, and 1 and 2 Maccabees (as well as portions of Daniel and Esther)-chiefly on the grounds that they could not find any Hebrew versions of these books which the Septuagint supposedly translated into Greek. The Council of Jamnia used four criteria to determine their canon. They accepted only those books which were: (I) written in Hebrew; (2) in conformity with the Torah; (3) older than the time of Ezra (c. 400 B.C.); and (4) written in Palestine

The Christian Church continued to use the Septuagint. When the Church officially decided which books comprise the canon of the Bible (Councils of Hippo, 393 A.D., and Carthage, 397 A.D.), it approved the 46 books of the Alexandrian canon as the canon for the OT. For sixteen centuries the Alexandrian canon was a matter of uncontested faith. Each of the seven rejected books is quoted by the early Church Fathers  as "Scripture" or as "inspired," right along with the undisputed books. Some of the Fathers include Polycarp, Irenaeus, Clement, and Cyprian.

In 1529 Martin Luther proposed the Palestinian canon of 39 books in Hebrew as the OT canon. Luther found justification for removing the seven books from the Bible in the old concerns of St.Jerome and the Council of Jamnia that the Greek books had no Hebrew counterparts. However, research into the Dead Sea Scrolls found at Qumran has discovered ancient Hebrew copies of some of the disputed books.