Why is it that the Catholic bible has more books than the Protestant?
That's a great question. In fact, let me shamelessly plug Shameless Popery,
my new podcast. Episode one of the podcast answers that question at a much greater
length than I'm going to right here. So the shorter answer is that there are seven
books that you'll find in a Catholic Bible that you won't find in a Protestant Bible.
And the reason is because at the time of Jesus, there was some dispute among the Jews about which
books did and didn't belong in the Bible. And you had a Greek version of the Bible called the
Septuagint that is usually the version of the Bible quoted from by Jesus and the Apostles in
the New Testament. But then you had shorter Hebrew versions, and that Greek version had
these seven books that are, you know, from the 400 years leading up to the birth of Christ.
The Hebrew version stops about 400, 450 years before the time of Christ. So the early Christians
used the Greek version. They used the longer version we find the Book of Tobit, Sirach, Judith,
the longer forms of Esther and Daniel, the Book of Wisdom, and the Book of Sirach being quoted by the
early Christians. And we also find some of those books used by rabbinical authorities as well.
So, for instance, in the Jewish Talmud, Sirach is quoted as Scripture on multiple occasions,
although it is eventually concluded by later rabbis not to be part of
the Bible. So eventually the Jewish leaders, the descendants of the Pharisees, the rabbis,
push out these other seven books and say we don't consider them canonical,
even though many of their predecessors had considered them canonical.
They were never universally agreed upon. And so they go with the shorter canon. And so the
early Christians very clearly knew that their Old Testament was longer than the Old Testament
of their Jewish neighbors. Origen talks about this in around the year 200. And we find really
widespread acceptance of this longer Bible. So Catholics continue to use a longer Bible used
by the early Christians that is inherited from the Greek-speaking Jews of the time of Christ,
who are using the Septuagint that Jesus and the apostles use, and the movement to have
the shorter books of the Bible without any of the Greek books and without the New Testament,
that is a push against what's called Hellenization and against Christianity from a few centuries
after the time of Christ. And so we don't accept that kind of move in later rabbinical Judaism,
whereas Protestants use that Old Testament. And so the real question is why do they reject the
consensus or virtual consensus of 1500 years of Christianity? And so another way to put
that is if someone came along today and said, hey, everybody got the wrong Bible, here are the books
you ought to have, I think you would recognize that and say, that doesn't seem reliable,
because if God is the one in control and he's leading his people into the truth, why would he
lead the entire church into the wrong Bible for 2000 years? We can say the same thing.
Why would he lead the entire church into the wrong Bible for 1500 years? And so
that's the general reason that because we trust the consensus of the early Christians,
because we trust that the same God who inspired the Scriptures also sent the
Holy Spirit to ensure we didn't lose them and didn't misunderstand them,
because Jesus, at the last Supper promises to send the Spirit of truth to lead the church into
all truth, for those reasons, we trust the longer form of the Bible that the early Christians used.