A big question that surrounds the Bible - and rightfully so - is this: Why are there 66 specific books included and not more or less?Some other important questions include:
- Who decided which ones would be included and which ones would be left out?
- Why does the Catholic Bible contain books the Protestant Bible does not?
- What is the criteria a book must meet to be included in the Bible?
In the next few posts I hope to answer these questions for you.
First, let's start with the Old Testament.
The OT we use today is comprised of the same books as the Hebrew Bible - the collection of Scriptures used by Jesus and the NT writers. Remember, during Jesus' day they didn't have any of the NT books. When they read the Bible they read the OT - the Hebrew Bible.
Our current Bibles have 39 books in the Old Testament from Genesis to Malachi.
In the Hebrew Bible there are only 24 books, but because of the way they are grouped they are the same as our 39 books. Here's the breakdown of the Hebrew Bible.
- The 5 Books of Moses (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy)
- Joshua
- Judges
- Samuel (1 & 2 combined)
- Kings (combined)
- Isaiah
- Jeremiah
- Ezekiel
- The 12 Minor Prophets combined as one book (Hosea through Malachi)
- Psalms
- Proverbs
- Job
- Song of Solomon
- Ruth
- Lamentations
- Ecclesiastes
- Esther
- Daniel
- Ezra-Nehemiah (combined as one book)
- Chronicles (combined)
So as you can see our present OT has everything in the Hebrew Bible only grouped and ordered differently.
The Hebrew Bible - the Bible Jesus used - does not and has never included the group of books known as the Apocrypha.
These are books written between the time of the last OT book and the time of Jesus. They include 1 & 2 Maccabees, Ecclesiasticus (not to be confused with Ecclesiastes), The Wisdom of Solomon, Baruch, Tobit, Judith, and there are also additions to Daniel and Esther.
The Catholic Church gives these books full biblical authority along with the 66 books used in our Protestant Bible.
And while I love my Catholic brothers and sisters in Christ, I believe the Catholic church is mistaken on this one.
The first reason I believe this is so is because it seems as though Jesus himself did not include these books in what he considered "Scripture."
First off, we never read in the Bible of Jesus quoting any book from the Apocrypha - and Jesus quotes the OT very frequently.
Second Luke records an instance where Jesus revealed to us that he was using the traditional Hebrew Bible we mentioned above. In Luke 11:49-51 Jesus says:
Therefore also, the Wisdom of God said, "I will send them prophets and apostles, some of whom they will kill and persecute," so that the blood of all the prophets, shed from the foundation of the world, may be charged against this generation, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who perished between the alter and the sanctuary. Yes, I tell you, it will be required of this generation.Now how do we get that Jesus used the Hebrew Bible from that?
What Jesus is trying to do here is go from the first to last death in the Bible (for him the Hebrew Bible). He's talking to Jewish Pharisees who are using the same Hebrew Bible he is, and condemning them by saying that the blood of every prophet who has died, from the beginning of Scripture to the end, is on their heads.
So he goes from Abel - whom we know was murdered by his brother Cain in Genesis 4 - to this man named Zechariah who perished between the alter and the sanctuary.
Now this is not the man who wrote the book of Zechariah. This is the son of Jehoiada mentioned in 2 Chronicles 24:20-22.
What's extremely interesting about this is this man is not the last prophet chronologically to be killed in the OT. That would be Uriah from Jeremiah ch. 26.
This is interesting because Jesus, instead of going chronologically from beginning to end like we would expect him to, is going from the beginning of the Hebrew Bible to the end of it - the beginning of Genesis to the end of Chronicles (2 Chronicles for us).
Therefore, Jesus is implicitly saying, Here are the boundaries for the OT. It's the Hebrew Bible and nothing more. It does not include the Apocryphal books.
There are many other reasons why we don't and shouldn't include the Apocrypha in our Bibles. But the most convincing one to me is that it was not a part of the Scriptures according to Jesus himself.
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