Update: Not to brag about my popularity, but there are now four people who read my blog! Okay, well one more person at least looked at this post. The author I refer to below kindly asked me to remove the extensive quotation I had earlier. So I've made some changes. Feel free to read his book (or the one mentioned in the comments section) for a more detailed, and probably more interesting, explanation :)
We’re gearing up for my brother-in-law’s wedding this weekend (expect fewer posts), and I’m looking forward to reading one of the scripture passages during it. I don’t know yet which passage it will be yet. It might be from 1 Corinthians, or from Genesis, or from Tobit…
Wait a second! Tobit isn’t a book in the Bible! That’s one of those weird extra Catholic books!
Well, I wouldn’t say it’s weird. I don’t know – I haven’t actually read it yet. But one of my goals for this year is to read some of these “extra” books that are present in the Catholic Bible. I’ll let you know if I find anything good. But in the meantime, I was rereading the history of these books in the Bible and wanted to share!
The difference between Catholic and Protestant Bibles is basically that the Catholic Bible has 73 books and the Protestant Bible has 66 books. The Protestant Bible leaves out 7 books (1st and 2nd Maccabees, Baruch, Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, and Sirach, aka Ecclesiasticus, not to be confused with Ecclesiastes) and parts of 2 others (Esther and Daniel). Why this difference between the Old Testaments?
The best explanation I’ve seen is from a book called “Why Do Catholics Do That?” by Kevin Orlin Johnson (pgs 28-35), which is what I'm paraphrasing and pulling the quotes below from (all emphases are mine).
In around 200 BC there were tons of Jewish writings in addition to the Torah. The Greek-speaking Egyptian Pharaoh wanted to set up the library in Alexandria with one copy of every book in the world. But the Jews had so many writings that even they didn't have a standard canon. So he had 70 (maybe 72) of them get together and come up with the official Jewish scripture. Their finalized canon is known as the Septuagint.
Everybody used the Septuagint. "It’s the only scripture that he [Jesus] and the Apostles used (in Hebrew or Aramaic translations, because the original Septuagint was in Greek). When Christ read from prophecy in the synagogue, it was the Septuagint’s Isaiah that he read from (Lk 4:16-21); when he said “search through Scripture” (Jn 5:39), he meant the Septuagint."
In 70 AD, the Temple of Jerusalem was completely destroyed and the Ark of the Covenant was carried off. It just so happens that this occurred right after the last Apostle died. This was a bad time for the Jews. Their temple had been destroyed, they were hemorrhaging Jews to Christianity, and they were fighting between themselves. The next part is a little more subject to debate, but shortly after this a group of rabbis got together in Jamnia, determined to restore their religion.
“They needed to develop a new form of Judaism that would unite all Jews, at least until the Temple could be rebuilt, and to somehow undercut Christian claims of the divinity of Jesus and his identity as the Christ. To do this, they assembled a completely new version of Jewish scripture, omitting some books entirely and rewriting the others. The result, which you call the Jamnian or Palestinian canon, changed Judaism forever.”
The rabbis wanted only Hebrew books, not Greek (which is what their Romans conquerors spoke, as well as most of the Jewish people). This canon was also heavily influence by Sadducees, who, unlike the Pharisees, did not believe in life after death. Perhaps most importantly, they wanted to be able to dismiss all those persky Messianic prophecies that Christians were pointing to, as Jesus had of course fulfilled them. This all culminated in removing those five books and parts of two others. (They made some other slight changes to the remaining books as well. For example, they changed the word parthenos 'virgin' in Isaiah 7:14 to neanis 'young woman' - again in an attempt to undercut claims about Jesus.)
So the Jews changed to using the Palestinian Canon (now just refered to as the Hebrew Bible). However, Christians kept using the Septuagint. After all, it's what Jesus and the Apostles used, and why would a change by the Jews affect them now? So the Septuagint was the Christian OT for some 1500 years.
Then of course the Reformation came around. As Johnson puts it, “If the Reformers wanted to deny the importance of works in the Cycle of Redemption, they’d have to get rid of whole books like Tobit; to deny the existence of Purgatory, they’d have to dispose of Maccabees. And even then, they’d have to rephrase all of the remaining verses that echoed these teachings. That’s why the Jamnian version of Jewish scripture appealed to them – the rabbis of Jamnia had written it, after all, to remove the basis for a lot of the Christian teachings that the Protestants themselves were rejecting." So just like that the Protestants switched out the canon used by Christians for the canon used by non-Christians (Jews). So it's certainly not the case that Catholics added some books - they had all been using these books all along. People such as Luther got rid of them (he also wanted to drop books like James and Hebrews, but that's for a different day).
I had never heard this before reading this book – isn’t it interesting?! Had you heard this before, or something different?
[I really enjoyed this colorful explanation. Please do note that while much of this history is debated, most of the other sources I looked at after this (mostly Wikipedia articles, since I feel they’re among the less biased web sources), no matter their slant on the historical specifics, agree that the so-called Jamnian or Palestinian Canon did have an anti-Christian bias and also that Luther preferred it because it omitted some doctrines he disagreed with.]