Why a Catholic Bible has seven more books than a Protestant one
Open a Catholic Bible and you will count 73 books; most Protestant Bibles have 66, while the Ethiopian Church recognises 81. The difference lies largely in seven Old Testament books, such as Tobit, Judith and the two Maccabees, that Catholics accept as scripture and most Protestants set aside.
The Catholic canon has 46 Old Testament books and 27 in the New. Its Old Testament includes seven deuterocanonical books, among them Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach and Baruch, plus extra deuterocanonical passages in Esther and Daniel. Protestants generally regard these as non-canonical, though many older Protestant Bibles, such as the King James Version with Apocrypha, printed them in a separate section. Eastern Orthodox churches, which treat the ancient Greek Septuagint as the apostolic Bible, accept between 76 and 79 books.
The list has a long pedigree. A work written between 519 and 553 claims a canon was set at the Council of Rome in 382, and the Church affirmed its list at the Synod of Hippo in 393, councils at Carthage in 397 and 419, the Council of Florence and finally the Council of Trent between 1545 and 1563. Trent also made the Latin Vulgate the Church's official translation without banning versions from the original languages. Ronald Knox, who produced his own English Bible, said that for him translating the Bible meant translating the Vulgate. Today official Latin documents use a revision, the Nova Vulgata.
The label also has a legal sense. Under canon law, scripture may be published only with approval from the Holy See or a bishops' conference, and vernacular translations need suitable notes; approval is usually marked by an imprimatur. Pope Pius XII's encyclical Divino afflante Spiritu urged translators to master the original languages and apply textual criticism to ancient manuscripts, since Catholics hold the inspired original to outweigh any translation.
Liturgy adds its own quirks. Readings at Mass often skip verses, and a 2008 Vatican letter forbids printing or speaking the divine name Yahweh in worship, although the Jerusalem Bible of 1966 used it throughout the Old Testament. By 2025 the Global Bible Catalogue listed over 1,200 Bibles with deuterocanonical books in 191 languages.
Source: Catholic Bible
