Pick up a Catholic Bible and a Protestant Bible and count the books. One has 73, the other 66. The difference is not a matter of translation. It is a question of which books each tradition holds as Scripture, and each answer has a history. This post describes the positions as their own documents state them, and takes no side.
AccelaStudy® AI Bible is coming soon, with two tracks: the King James Version and the Douay-Rheims. Each track will teach its own canon, and the lessons on the text will describe what each tradition holds and why.
The books in question
Catholic Bibles include these books and parts of books beyond the Protestant canon:
- Tobit
- Judith
- Wisdom
- Sirach
- Baruch
- 1 and 2 Maccabees
- The Greek portions of Esther and Daniel
The Catholic Church holds these as Scripture. A Protestant Old Testament contains the books of the Hebrew Bible, the Scriptures of Jewish readers, arranged in a different order.
What the Council of Trent defined
In 1546 the Council of Trent issued a decree listing the books of the Old and New Testaments it received as sacred and canonical, including the books above. That decree defined the Catholic canon.
What the Church of England and the Westminster Confession say
The Church of England’s Thirty-Nine Articles name these books in Article VI, along with 1 and 2 Esdras and the Prayer of Manasses, and say the Church reads them “for example of life and instruction of manners,” but does not use them to establish any doctrine. The Westminster Confession of Faith, in its first chapter, section 3, takes a stricter line: it says the books are not part of the canon of Scripture, and so carry no authority in the church beyond other human writings.
Those two documents are not identical, and the difference is worth keeping. One commends the books for reading while denying them authority in doctrine; the other gives them no more standing than other human writings.
What the 1611 King James Bible did
The 1611 King James Bible printed these books too, in a section between the Old and New Testaments called the Apocrypha. We plan an optional elective for the King James track, The Apocrypha of the 1611 King James Bible, that teaches those books as history and literature and labels them as such.
How we plan to handle it
Each track will teach its own canon. The King James track will read the 66-book Protestant canon, and the Catholic track will read the 73-book Catholic canon, with the books named above in their places. Lessons on the text will be shared, and where Christians read a passage differently, the lesson will name the readings and take no side. Both tracks will describe other Christians, and Jewish readers of the Hebrew Bible, accurately and charitably.
All of this is planned, and the product is coming soon. If you would like to hear when it opens, join the waitlist on the home page.