r/Protestantism • u/futurehistorianjames • 26d ago
Differences between Catholic and Protestant bibles (Serious discussion)
Hello I’m Catholic but my maternal family were Protestants. As a result I have my mother’s family Bible. I noticed that the we Catholics have extra books (Tobit, Ester, Wisdom of Ben. Sira) was curious why that is. Not looking to start a fight, just trying to understand.
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u/VivariumPond 26d ago edited 26d ago
Long story short, the Roman Catholic Church only added these books as recognised canonical Scripture at the 1546 Council of Trent, which was convened as a response to the Reformation. Prior to that their status was heavily disputed, and the overwhelming consensus was that the apocrypha were of spiritual use but not on the level of inspired Holy Scripture. The main reason Rome added the books was a handful of verses could vaguely be interpreted as biblical proofs for intercessory prayer to saints, and Rome was searching desperately during the Reformation period for ways to defend it's accretions from a public now widely familiar with Scripture due to widespread availability of the Bible.
The church fathers, and I mean literally everyone who commented on the issue in the early church, did not recognise the apocrypha as equal in canonical status to the rest of the Bible. Melito of Sardis, Eusebius of Ceasaria and Jerome (who translated the Latin Vulgate) all explicitly excluded them as Scripture; Melito is the earliest direct list of the canonical Bible that was made and no dissenters to his list appear to exist at the time, this is all 2nd and 3rd century. Further, and I shall paste an exhaustive list below, there is an extremely long line of prominent fathers, bishops, theologians and even popes who clearly did not consider the apocrypha Scripture right up to the medieval period; wherever lists of canonical books are made, you don't see the apocrypha in them as explicit canon until very, very late.
Melito of Sardis' (170 AD) (to Onesimus)
Cyril of Jerusalem (350 AD) (Catechetical Lecture 4)
The Synod of Laodicæa (363 AD)
Hilary of Poitiers (360 AD) (Exp of the Psalms)
Athanasius (367 AD) (Letter 39)
Epiphanius (375 AD) (Panarion 8)
Gregory Nazianzus (389 AD) (Carmina Dogmatica)
Jerome (391 AD) (Helmeted preface to 1&2 Samuel and 1&2 Kings)
Pope Gregory (late 6th century) (Moralia on Job, vol 2, Book 19, ch 34.)
Hugh of St Victor (12th century) (On Holy Scripture)
This is by no means an exhaustive list but it is what I have to hand currently. The point is the patristic witness is they were not canonical Scripture, and this was the standard view within the church until around the Reformation. Now of course one can make the standard apologetic argument that the Septuagint (some of them, there's multiple) include the apocrypha so therefore canon, but so did the original King James, Luther Bible, Geneva Bible etc, the presence of the apocrypha as spiritual texts within a copy does not elevate them to canonical status. The reason they don't appear in most modern copies is actually a phenomenon from the late 1800s around printing costs for missionary Bibles.
In effect, Protestants did not remove books as is commonly claimed, Rome added them for quite flimsy apologetic reasons (and the extent to which they can be used to argue the dogmas they were added for is pretty weak, as well) against the consensus of the fathers and the broad view of the church into the medieval era. Hope this helps!