Why does the Catholic Bible contain 73 books while the Protestant Bible has only 66?

Question

Why does the Catholic Bible contain 73 books while the Protestant Bible has only 66? With both claiming to have the complete Word of God, which one should be believed and why?

Answer 1

because the bible is mythical nonsense.

you can add and subtract from it at will.

it's silly nonsense. get over it already!

Answer 2

The New Testament canon of the Catholic Bible and the Protestant Bible are the same.

The difference in the Old Testaments actually goes back to the time before and during Christ’s life. At this time, there was no official Jewish canon of scripture.

The Jews in Egypt translated their choices of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek in the second century before Christ. This translation, called the Septuagint, had wide use in the Roman world because most Jews lived far from Palestine in Greek cities. Many of these Jews spoke only Greek.

The early Christian Church was born into this world. The Church, with its bilingual Jews and more and more Greek-speaking Gentiles, used the books of the Septuagint as its Bible. Remember the early Christians were just writing the documents what would become the New Testament.

After the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, with increasing persecution from the Romans and competition from the fledgling Christian Church, the Jewish leaders came together and declared its official canon of Scripture, eliminating seven books from the Septuagint.

The Christian Church did not follow suit but kept all the books in the Septuagint.

1500 years later, Protestants decided to change its Old Testament from the Catholic canon to the Jewish canon. The books they dropped are sometimes called the Apocrypha.

With love in Christ.

Answer 3

Back in the 4th century the Church put together the Bible based on the following theses.

1. The Old Testament had to be the canon approved by the best Jewish scholars of the age. In the Jews of Alexandria they found just such a group and incorporated the books those holy men accepted and promulgated as the word of the Living God.
2. The books chosen for the New Testament HAD to be reliably written by, or at least dictated by, an APOSTLE, one of the original 12, (minus Judas), or Paul. It had to have a provenance reliably datable to the first century after Christ. NO LATER. That let out pretty much all of the Gnostic writings that are getting so much attention these days. Most of them were written more than 150 years after Christ's resurrection.

What they ended up with were 73 books. 27 in the NT and 46 in the Old.

But when Martin Luther was agitating against the abuses current in the Church, he decided to set out his own view of what constituted Scripture. He went back to an earlier age and chose a canon of the Old Testament that predated Alexander the Great's conquest of the east. Naturally, several books had not yet been written in that era, so Martin Luther arbitrarily decided that they could not possibly be inspired and he dumped them like hot rocks. Coincidentally, these also happened to be A) the books MOST at odds with his own bright idea of Christianity and B) those books from which Jesus was most fond of quoting. (That was a deciding factor for the early Church, btw. If it was good enough for Jesus, it was good enough for the Church. It just wasn't good enough for Martin Luther.)

He would dearly have loved to dumped James' Epistle to the Hebrews as well as it flatly contradicted one of his most basic tenets: Faith alone saves you. James said that faith without works is dead. Luther just HATED that! But he didn't dare dump it. It WAS the writing of one of the major Apostles and his followers would have decamped. His best friend Melanchthon threatened to do just that if Martin dumped Hebrews. So Protestants got to keep it; the one book that if they would but read it, might make them start to question Luther's other bright ideas. But until very recently, most Protestant ministers pretty much ignored Hebrews when it came to sermonizing and teaching Scripture. That policy seems to be changing today. HALLELUJAH!

Hope this helped.

Answer 4

You would have to ask the Protestants who took some out.

Catholics do not claim that the bible is the "Complete Word of God" we do not hold to Scripture Alone, although none of our beliefs go against the Bible.

We believe in the Holy Catholic Apolostic Church that was set up by Jesus himself 300 years before the bible was compiled.

Peace!

Answer 5

Excellent question! I will try to explain why the Protestant Bible with its 66 books is the correct version.

The fourteen "missing" books that are not in the Protestant Bible are called the Apocrypha. The Roman church canonized these at the Council of Trent in 1546, in opposition to the Reformation. When we investigate the reason these books are not included in the Protestant Bible, we must first look to Jesus. In Luke 24:44, Jesus says this: "These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you-that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms had to be fulfilled."

Notice that Jesus discussed the law, the prophets, and the psalms. In the Hebrew Bible (which Jesus would have used), there are twenty-two books, which are broken into those three sections. Another ancient witness to this fact is the first century Jewish historian, Flavius Josephus. In his writings, he speaks of the Hebrew Scriptures as having twenty-two books with the same three divisions as well. If you compared the Hebrew Scriptures to our Protestant Old Testament, you would see that the twenty-two books of the Hebrew Scriptures are equivalent to the thirty-nine books in the Protestant Old Testament. The difference is in the breakdown. For example, in the Hebrew Scriptures, I and II Samuel are considered one book.

Nine of these books are called writings, four are called the latter prophets, four are called the former prophets, and five are called the Law of Moses, for a total of twenty-two books. Therefore, none of the Apocryphal books are considered Scripture in the Hebrew Bible. Our Protestant Bible follows this same pattern.

The last proof that the Apocrypha is not considered Scripture, also comes from Jesus' own mouth. In Luke 11:51, Jesus says, "...from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who died between the altar and the sanctuary. Yes, I tell you, it will be charged against this generation!"

Jesus had been speaking to the religious leaders of His day, and called them into account for all of the righteous blood shed from Abel to Zechariah. Abel's blood was the first to be shed (in Genesis) and Zechariah's blood was shed in Chronicles (the last book of the Hebrew Scriptures). Although Zechariah's blood is not the last to be shed chronologically, it is when you look at it in the order of the books of the Hebrew Scriptures. Therefore, Jesus was speaking of the first and the last blood being shed according to the order they appear in the Hebrew Scriptures. In effect, Jesus was calling the Old Testament complete (without the Apocrypha).

I hope that helps!

Answer 6

When the Protestants "protested" and left the Catholic church, they removed the books from the bible that they felt did not adher to their new way of thinking. The Catholic bible is the more complete bible.

Answer 7

The reason the Roman Catholic Church added the extra books in their Bible is because they were trying to have some kind of basis to justify some of their unscriptual beliefs and practices that were being attacked in the Reformation that was going on at in the 1500's. For example praying to the dead or for the dead is not scriptual but some vauge reference in the added books is used but actually those books don't really justify their traditions.

Answer 8

the Catholic Bible has more Chapters because these chapters were removed by the Protestants who were not satisfied with the Catholic Church. therefore to make their split complete they decided to remove certain Chapters which remained in the Catholic Bible.

Answer 9

Luther didn't like 'em. There were a few others he didn't like, but his contemporaries urged him to keep at least them.

What's that mentioned in Rev about adding to or taking away from what is written?

Peace,

MoP