The Rabbis, Luther, and the Books They Cut
Catholic Bibles are longer than Protestant Bibles for a reason, and it is probably not the reason you were told. The Catholic Church did not sneak seven books into the Old Testament in the dark ages. She received the Scriptures the Apostles already preached from. Two later communities — rabbinic Judaism after the fall of the Temple in AD 70, and Protestantism after the Leipzig Disputation of AD 1519 — shortened that collection. They are not the same movement. They did not share the same century, the same motive, or the same wounds. They did end up with the same shorter Old Testament, and they have spent the last five hundred years quoting each other as if that coincidence were a divine argument. It is not.
The seven Old Testament books in question are…
- Tobit,
- Judith,
- Wisdom,
- Sirach,
- Baruch,
- First Maccabees, and…
- Second Maccabees, along with chapter additions to Esther and Daniel.
The New Testament is identical for Catholics and Protestants: twenty-seven books, Matthew through Revelation. This has been agreed among all Christians since AD 397, and it was at that same time, in the same place, the Old Testament was agreed to by the same people (North African bishops). Yes, the canon of the Bible (list of Old and New Testament books) originated in North Africa. After that, all of Western Christianity began using the exact same number of books. Today’s fight, however, is over the Old Testament alone, and in particular, that fight is over who has the authority to close it.
There are two words every Christian must be familiar with: Protocanon and Deuterocanon. Protocanon means “first canon” and it is a reference to the books of the Old Testament first penned in Hebrew and Aramaic. The later name for this composition was Tanakh. In fact, Jews still call it that today. Deuterocanon means “second canon” and it is a reference to the official Greek translations of those Hebrew/Aramaic books, and additional books written in Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic, all of which were translated into Greek for broader distribution in the Greek-speaking world of that time. The original name for this composition was Septuagint, often abbreviated as LXX. Both canons, Protocanon and Deuterocanon, were considered the inspired and inerrant word of God by the Apostles and Jews of the early to middle first century.
The Catholic Church did not invent the Deuterocanon at the Council of Trent (AD 1545-1563), and she did not pick the books at random. She received them. These writings were already in the Old Testament the Apostles used. That Old Testament was the Septuagint (LXX), the Greek Scriptures of the synagogue world in which the Church was born. The New Testament writers quoted the Septuagint far more often than the original Hebrew-Aramaic text (later called the “Tanakh”). They never warned the faithful to stay away from the LXX or the additional books contained therein. The early Church read them in the liturgy for centuries before anyone in Wittenberg decided they were a problem.
That is the Catholic Church’s own reason, and it is the first one that matters. For Christians, the canon is never a rabbinic list assembled after the Temple fell (AD 70). It is the Scripture the Church actually prayed, preached, and handed on. The Council of Florence (AD 1431–1449) said it plainly: one and the same God is the author of both Testaments, because the holy men of both spoke by the same Holy Spirit. The Church judges the canon by her own reception, not by a Hebrew collection fixed after the Jewish break with Christianity.
The lists prove it. Pope Damasus and the Synod of Rome in AD 382 named these additional Deuterocanonical books. The Synod of Hippo did the same in AD 393. And the Synod of Carthage repeated the list in AD 397 and again in AD 419. Pope Innocent I sent the same catalogue to Toulouse in AD 405. The Council of Florence listed them again in AD 1442, in an ecumenical decree, with no second tier and no apology. The Council of Trent, in AD 1546, did not add a shelf of new titles. It defined, with an anathema, the books already “accustomed to be read” in the Catholic Church and already contained in the old Latin Vulgate. If Martin Luther, in AD 1519-1521, could object to those books decades before Trent, they were already in the Bible he inherited. You cannot protest a book the Church had not yet “added.”
The Fathers used them as Scripture. Clement of Rome, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Cyprian, and Augustine cited them that way. Augustine put them in his canon in On Christian Doctrine and treated them as authoritative. Jerome preferred the shorter, Hebrew Tanakh for his own scholarly work. That is well known. It is also well known that he still put these books in the Latin Vulgate, because the Church received them. Private hesitation is not the rule of faith. The Church’s use is.
Scholarship does not overturn that reception. It explains it. These writings belong to the Second Temple world, from roughly 300 BC to 70 AD. They circulate in Septuagint manuscripts. They stand in the earliest Christian Bibles. Hebrew fragments of Tobit, Sirach, Judith, Baruch and 1 Maccabees turned up among the Dead Sea Scrolls, which means they were Jewish books before they were Church books. The New Testament alludes to them: Sirach was a precursor to the Lord’s Prayer, Wisdom was behind Pauline language, Second Maccabees described the resurrection of the dead and prayers for the departed (purgatory). Hebrews 11 holds up the Maccabean martyrs as models of faith. “Deuterocanonical” means the Church defined them later against a challenge. It does not mean they are less inspired.
That is why she canonized them. Now the other question: why she did not canonize the extra books the Eastern Orthodox still print — First Esdras, Third Maccabees, Psalm 151, and the Prayer of Manasseh. Fourth Maccabees is usually only an appendix even in the East.
She did not canonize them because they were never on the Western lists. The synods at Rome, Hippo, Carthage, along with the ecumenical councils of Florence, and Trent name the seven Deuterocanonical books and stop. They do not name First Esdras as a separate inspired book. They do not name Third Maccabees. They do not name Psalm 151 or the Prayer of Manasseh. Trent bound Catholics to the books entire, with all their parts, as read in the Catholic Church and as contained in the old Latin Vulgate. That was the measure. The Vulgate tradition already had the seven books and the additions to Daniel and Esther. First Esdras was treated as a parallel revision of Ezra, not another canonical title. Psalm 151 and the Prayer of Manasseh show up in some Greek and Latin collections. They were not part of the received Vulgate canon. The Sixto-Clementine Vulgate of 1592 even parked Third and Fourth Esdras and the Prayer of Manasseh in an appendix “lest they perish.” That is the opposite of a dogmatic listing.
The reception in the West was thinner. Third Maccabees is an Alexandrian court tale about Ptolemy IV. It is not the Maccabean revolt, and the old Catholic reference works said plainly that it never had a real claim in the Latin Church. Psalm 151 is a short extra psalm in some Greek Psalters. The Prayer of Manasseh is a fine penitential text. It traveled as an appendix, not as a book of the canon in ordinary Latin use.
The Septuagint was never one frozen 49-book Old Testament. It was a family of collections. The Latin Church settled on Augustine’s African list and the contents of Jerome’s Vulgate. The Greek churches kept a broader liturgical category (a second tier) — books that are read — without the same closed Western definition. Florence listed the Catholic Deuterocanon even while seeking union with the East. It still did not add Third Maccabees or Psalm 151 to the dogmatic catalogue.
So the line is consistent on Catholic terms. The seven books had centuries of liturgical, patristic, and conciliar reception in the churches in communion with Rome. The extra Orthodox titles had Eastern liturgical use. They did not have that same Western reception. The Catholic Church did not invent a shorter Bible to spite Constantinople. She defined the Bible she had already been reading.
The shorter Old Testament list has two parents, and they should not be collapsed into one. The first is the rabbinic Tanakh. After the destruction of the Temple in AD 70, Pharisaic teachers rebuilt Jewish life around strictly Hebrew texts, the synagogue, and oral law (later compiled into the Babylonian Talmud). They had reasons of their own. Greek was the language of a world that had just crushed Jerusalem. Several of the disputed books existed primarily in Greek. Wisdom reads like a prophecy of Jesus’ Passion. Second Maccabees teaches bodily resurrection and offerings for the dead (purgatory). Those pages were already in Christian hands. A community that had rejected Jesus as Messiah was not going to keep the Scriptures that Christians were using to prove Him. That is history, not insult. Post Second Temple (AD 70 onward), Rabbinic Judaism was defining itself over against Christianity. The later printed Tanakh is the fruit of that long process. There was no single “Council of Jamnia” that slammed the canon shut in AD 90. Heinrich Graetz floated that story in the nineteenth century. Jack P. Lewis, Sid Leiman, and F. F. Bruce tore it apart. What the rabbinical school at Yavneh (in southern Palestine) discussed, if the sources can be trusted at all, was the status of Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs. Sirach kept circulating in Jewish memory for centuries. Ethiopian Jews never adopted the short Palestinian list. First-century Judaism was not one locked bookcase. Sadducees clung to Torah. Pharisees used a wider Hebrew collection. Greek-speaking Jews still used the Septuagint. The Apostles walked into that world and preached from the Greek Scriptures the nations could actually read.
The second parent is Protestantism, and here the circumstances change even when the book list does not. Martin Luther did not wake up one morning to serve the rabbis. He woke up to serve his doctrine. At the Leipzig Disputation in AD 1519, Johann Eck put Second Maccabees 12 on the table: Judas Maccabeus sends silver to Jerusalem for sacrifice on behalf of the fallen, “that they might be delivered from their sin.” Florence had already used the text for purgatory. Luther’s printed answer in 1521 is the whole Reformation method in one paragraph.
The book is not Holy Scripture. Jerome said it is not in Hebrew. It contradicts First Maccabees and contains fables. And even if it were authoritative, one isolated verse cannot found an article of faith.
Summary of Martin Luther’s Argument against 2nd Maccabees
Notice the order? Luther denies the book’s rank, then says the doctrine would fail anyway. He also knew the sense of the passage. Later he admitted the teaching of purgatory is “quite plain” in Second Maccabees, and that he simply denied the book could bind him.
That is not a rabbi talking. That is a German monk who had decided justification by Faith Alone (Sola Fide) was the article by which the Church stands or falls, and who would not let Greek history from the Hasmonean Age stand in the way. In his German Bible he gathered Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, and the Maccabees between the Testaments and labeled them “Apocrypha, that are books which are not considered equal to the Holy Scriptures, but are useful and good to read.” He praised First Maccabees as nearly worthy of the canon because it explains Daniel 11. He treated Judith and Tobit as holy poems. He wanted Second Maccabees thrown out. He omitted First and Second Esdras and said they were inferior to Aesop. He did the same thing to four New Testament books. Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation were shoved to the back of his 1522 September Testament as books “of a different reputation.” James was an “epistle of straw” because it would not preach his version of St. Paul. A man who will demote James because it teaches that a man is justified by works and not by Faith Alone is not following a Jewish council. He is editing the Bible to fit the gospel he has already decided.
He did, however, reach for the Jewish list when it helped. Jerome’s “Hebrew truth” became the scholarly cover. Romans 3:2 became the proof-text: the oracles of God were entrusted to the Jews. The argument sounds pious until you ask which Jews, and when. Paul is speaking of Israel before the Cross, the nation that received the Law and the Prophets. He is not handing the keys of the Christian Old Testament to rabbis who, by Paul’s own lifetime, were already opposing the Gospel. After Pentecost, the Church is the pillar and ground of the truth (1 Timothy 3:15). She does not wait for Yavneh to tell her which scrolls she may read at Mass. If the post-Temple synagogue is the final court of appeal for the Christian canon, then the New Testament itself has no court, because those same teachers rejected the Church.
Luther’s own dealings with the Jewish people expose the instability of the appeal. In 1523 he wrote That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew. He was answering papist slander that he denied the Virgin Birth. He turned the pamphlet into a missionary program. The popes and monks, he said, had treated Jews so badly that a Jew would sooner become a hog than a Christian. The Jews are nearer to Christ according to the flesh than the Gentiles. The Scriptures were committed to them. Deal with them by Christian love, not papal law, and perhaps some will be won. He meant it as strategy. Treat them kindly. Teach them to read the Old Testament as the Church reads it. Convert them to his gospel, not to Rome.
They did not convert. By the late 1530s his hope had curdled. In 1543, he published On the Jews and Their Lies, a long, bitter treatise that revoked the kindness of 1523 and demanded that princes burn synagogues, raze houses, confiscate prayer books and the Talmud, forbid rabbis to teach, and bar Jews from the roads. The same man who had said the oracles were entrusted to the Jews now treated them as a blaspheming pestilence. That later book is indefensible. It is also revealing. Luther wanted a Hebrew Old Testament when it stripped the Church of Second Maccabees. He did not want the people who actually kept that Hebrew Bible unless they became Lutherans. The appeal to “what the Jews accept” was never reverence for Jews. It was a weapon against Rome, discarded when the weapon no longer converted anybody.
So the two shorter canons are ideologically linked and historically distinct. Rabbinic Judaism narrowed its Scriptures in the wreckage of the Temple, in Hebrew, against Christian use of the Greek Septuagint. Protestantism narrowed the Christian Old Testament in the wreckage of medieval Christendom, in German and Latin argument, against purgatory, prayers for the dead, and any book that would not preach Sola Fide. One community was guarding a post-biblical identity. The other was guarding a new dogma. Both pointed at the absence of a Hebrew original. Neither can explain why the Apostles, who were Jews, preached from a Bible that included the books both later cut out. Neither can explain why the Church that wrote the New Testament kept reading Wisdom and Maccabees as Scripture for fifteen hundred years before a professor in Wittenberg rearranged the binding.
The honest question is not why Catholics have more books. The honest question is why anyone thought the Church should submit her Old Testament to a rabbinic settlement she did not attend, or to a reformer who also wanted James out of the New Testament. History is not propaganda. Crack it open. The older Bible is the longer Bible. The shorter Bible is the newer and edited one.
Sources:
- Council of Trent, Session IV, Decree Concerning the Canonical Scriptures (1546)
- Council of Florence, Cantate Domino (1442)
- Synod of Rome under Pope Damasus (382)
- Council of Hippo (393)
- Councils of Carthage (397, 419)
- Pope Innocent I, letter to Exsuperius of Toulouse (405)
- Augustine of Hippo, On Christian Doctrine
- Jerome, Vulgate prefaces / Prologus Galeatus
- Sixto-Clementine Vulgate appendix (1592)
- Martin Luther, Defense and Explanation of All the Articles (1521)
- Martin Luther, Leipzig Disputation replies (1519)
- Martin Luther, That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew (1523)
- Martin Luther, prefaces to the Apocrypha, German Bible (1534/1545)
- Martin Luther, On the Jews and Their Lies (1543)
- Jack P. Lewis, “What Do We Mean by Jabneh?”
- Sid Z. Leiman, studies on the canonization of Hebrew Scripture
- F. F. Bruce, comments on the alleged Council of Jamnia
- James C. VanderKam, work on the formation of the Jewish canon
- World Christian Database / Center for the Study of Global Christianity, Gordon-Conwell, Status of Global Christianity
- Annuarium Statisticum Ecclesiae / Annuario Pontificio
- Catholic Encyclopedia, “Canon of the Holy Scriptures”
- Pontifical Yearbook Catholic population figures
- Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion, “Martin Luther, Jews, and Judaism”
- Jewish Encyclopedia, “Luther, Martin”
- Philip Jenkins, “The Second Canon”
- Catholic Answers, canon Q&A and magazine articles on Trent, Florence, and Jamnia
Shane Schaetzel is an author of Catholic books and he is an Evangelical convert to the Catholic Church. His articles have been featured on LifeSiteNews, The Remnant Newspaper, Forward in Christ, and Catholic Online. You can read Shane’s books at ShaneSchaetzel.Com
