Biblical Canons at a Glance
How Different Traditions Organize and Include the Books of Scripture
“Your word is a lamp for my feet and a light on my path.”
— Psalm 119:105 (CSB)
After everything we have learned about manuscripts, ancient translations, and the gradual development of the canon, it should not surprise us that every Jewish and Christian tradition did not end up with exactly the same collection of books.
Still, the differences are sometimes presented in a way that makes them sound much larger—or much simpler—than they really are.
Christians share a very large body of Scripture. The differences are found mainly in the Old Testament and in a smaller number of books preserved by some ancient Christian traditions. Most Christians today share the same twenty-seven-book New Testament, although the Ethiopian Orthodox tradition preserves a broader collection.
This appendix is simply meant to show those differences clearly, without deciding which tradition is right or wrong. As we have said throughout this series, words such as added and removed can sometimes hide a much longer history. It is often more useful to ask where a book was used, who preserved it, and whether it was widely or only regionally treated as Scripture.
The numbers can be helpful, but they do not tell the whole story. Books were sometimes divided differently, combined together, or arranged in another order, so two traditions can use different book counts while sharing much of the same material.
The Jewish Tanakh
The Jewish Bible is usually called the Tanakh, a name formed from the Hebrew words for its three major sections: the Torah or Law, the Nevi'im or Prophets, and the Ketuvim or Writings.
The traditional Jewish count is twenty-four books, but those books contain essentially the same material as the thirty-nine books of the Protestant Old Testament. The difference comes mainly from the way books are divided and grouped. For example, Samuel is counted as one book in the Jewish tradition rather than 1 and 2 Samuel, and the Twelve Minor Prophets are counted together as one book.
The order is also different. The Tanakh ends with Chronicles rather than Malachi.
That is a good example of why the number of books alone can be misleading. A twenty-four-book Jewish Bible and a thirty-nine-book Protestant Old Testament contain essentially the same collection arranged differently.
The Protestant Old Testament
Protestant Bibles normally contain thirty-nine Old Testament books and twenty-seven New Testament books, for a total of sixty-six.
The Old Testament collection corresponds closely to the books of the Jewish Tanakh, although the books are divided and arranged differently. Protestant Bibles generally place the historical books together, followed by poetry and wisdom, then the Major and Minor Prophets.
During the Reformation, Protestant leaders increasingly gave preference to the Hebrew Jewish collection when defining the Old Testament canon.
That did not mean other ancient Jewish writings immediately disappeared from Protestant Bibles. Early Protestant Bibles often printed books such as Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, and Maccabees in a separate section called the Apocrypha. Even the original 1611 King James Version included such a section.
Over time, many Protestant publishers stopped printing those books altogether.
The Roman Catholic Bible
Roman Catholic Bibles contain the same twenty-seven New Testament books used by most other Christians, but their Old Testament is broader than the Protestant Old Testament.
Catholics include books such as Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, 1 Maccabees, and 2 Maccabees, along with additional passages in Esther and Daniel.
Catholics usually call these books Deuterocanonical, while Protestants often call them part of the Apocrypha.
The difference in names reflects different understandings of their canonical status, but the writings themselves are ancient. They were known and used in early Jewish and Christian communities and were preserved within Greek and Latin Christian traditions.
So it would be misleading to imagine that these books simply appeared for the first time in a Catholic Bible many centuries later.
Their history is much older.
Eastern Orthodox Bibles
Eastern Orthodox churches generally preserve an Old Testament collection that is broader than the Protestant collection and often somewhat broader than the Roman Catholic one.
Because Orthodox Christianity developed strongly within the Greek-speaking Christian world, the Septuagint has played an especially important role in its Old Testament tradition.
Depending on the particular Orthodox church and edition, additional writings may include books or passages such as 1 Esdras, 3 Maccabees, Psalm 151, and others.
There is some variation, so it is best not to speak of one perfectly identical Orthodox Old Testament used everywhere.
That variation is itself part of the history we have been studying.
Ancient Christian traditions did not always inherit the same collection in exactly the same form.
The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Bible
The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo tradition preserves one of the broadest ancient Christian biblical collections.
Its Old Testament includes 1 Enoch and Jubilees, two ancient Jewish writings we discussed earlier. These books disappeared from the canon of most other Christian traditions but continued to be copied, read, and treated as Scripture in Ethiopia.
The Ethiopian tradition also preserves additional writings beyond those found in Protestant, Catholic, and most Eastern Orthodox Bibles. Its New Testament tradition is broader as well.
The exact counting can become complicated because Ethiopian collections can be described in different ways depending on how books are grouped. For our purposes, the important point is simpler: Ethiopian Christianity preserved an ancient canon tradition that did not develop along exactly the same path as Western Christianity.
That gives us a valuable reminder.
A book being absent from most modern Bibles does not necessarily mean nobody in ancient Christianity considered it Scripture.
What Most Christian Bibles Share
With all these differences, it would be easy to lose sight of how much these traditions have in common.
Protestant, Catholic, and most Orthodox Christians share the same twenty-seven-book New Testament. They read the same four Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. They share Acts, Paul’s letters, the other major apostolic writings, and Revelation.
Their Old Testaments also share a large common body of Scripture: the Torah, the historical writings of Israel, Psalms, Proverbs, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, the Twelve Prophets, and many other books.
The differences are real, and they deserve to be understood.
But the common ground is much larger than the disagreements sometimes make it appear.
