The Canon and the Deuterocanonical Books

The canon is the list of the books that the Church recognises as Scripture inspired by God. The Catholic Old Testament numbers forty-six books, seven more than the Protestant Bible, which keeps thirty-nine. These seven books are the deuterocanonicals. To know who recognised these books, and when, touches the very root of faith in Scripture itself.

The canon and the deuterocanonicals

The word “canon” comes from the Greek kanōn (κανών), the rule, the reed used for measuring; it denotes the ruled list of the books held to be inspired. The seven books proper to the Catholic Bible are Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach (or Ecclesiasticus), Baruch, and the two books of Maccabees. To these are added deuterocanonical passages in the book of Daniel and the book of Esther. They are called deuterocanonical, from the Greek deuteros (δεύτερος), “second”: not that they are of second rank, but because their entry into the canon was discussed at certain times, where the others, called protocanonical, never were. They are fully inspired. A trap of vocabulary slips in here: what Catholics call deuterocanonical, Protestants call “apocryphal”; and what Catholics call apocryphal, from the Greek apokryphos (ἀπόκρυφος), “hidden”, the uninspired writings such as the false gospels, Protestants call “pseudepigrapha”. The same word covers two realities according to who utters it.

The Septuagint, Bible of the Church

In the time of Christ, the Jewish Scriptures circulated in two forms: the Hebrew texts, and their Greek translation, the Septuagint, begun at Alexandria three centuries before him. The Septuagint carried the deuterocanonical books. The Church of the apostles, which spoke Greek, received the Septuagint as her Old Testament, and the New Testament quotes it on every page. The Fathers used it, and the councils of the first centuries drew up the complete list, the seven included. For more than a thousand years, the Bible of the Church carried these books. These books bear Christ: the persecuted just man of the book of Wisdom prefigures the Passion, and Wisdom herself, presented as a person, lets the Word be glimpsed; Sirach nourishes to this day the Church's prayer to Mary. The New Testament draws on these pages: “Others were tortured, refusing deliverance, so as to obtain a better resurrection.” Hebrews 11:35 These words regard the seven brother martyrs of the second book of Maccabees. And the feast of the Dedication, which Christ himself keeps in the Gospel, comes from the history these books recount: “At that time the feast of the Dedication was being kept at Jerusalem.” John 10:22

Who cut away, and when

Toward the end of the first century, Judaism settled its own list on the books kept in Hebrew alone, leaving aside the seven. In the fourth century, translating the Bible from the Hebrew, Jerome noted this difference and marked a reservation; but the Church kept the books, following Augustine and the councils, and Jerome translated them himself. They remained in the Christian Bible until the Reformation. In the sixteenth century, the reformers cut the seven from the Old Testament and set them apart, under the name of “Apocrypha”: Luther judged them useful to read, not equal to Scripture. The stakes of doctrine were not foreign to this, for some of these books support truths they rejected, such as prayer for the dead: “He had this sacrifice offered for the dead, that they might be delivered from their sin.” 2 Maccabees 12:46 In response, the Council of Trent, in 1546, solemnly defined the canon of the forty-six books of the Old Testament and the twenty-seven of the New. Later, judging these books uninspired and their printing costly, the Bible societies of the nineteenth century ceased to print them, so as to circulate only the writings held to be Scripture; there remained but thirty-nine books.

The canon or canons of the Orthodox

The Churches of the East have kept the Septuagint, and their canon is broader than the Catholic canon. Besides the seven books, Orthodoxy receives still the first book of Esdras (a Greek form of Ezra, distinct from the canonical book), the Prayer of Manasseh, Psalm 151 and the third book of Maccabees; the fourth book of Maccabees often stands in an appendix. It calls these read books the anagignoskomena (ἀναγινωσκόμενα), “those that are read”. The Greek tradition and the Slavonic tradition vary slightly, the latter carrying in addition one more Esdras, of apocalyptic character. The East has never fixed its list with the closed rigour of Trent: its synods received these books without settling the count in so clear-cut a way. Further still, the Oriental Orthodox Churches extend the canon: the Ethiopian Church holds the broadest of all Christendom, going so far as to receive Enoch and Jubilees, that book of Enoch which even the letter of Jude cites. The Catholic Church does not receive these supernumerary books: in the Latin Bible, the third and fourth Esdras and the Prayer of Manasseh were relegated to an appendix, kept without being held inspired. The lists nest thus: the thirty-nine Protestant books fit within the forty-six Catholic ones, which fit within the Orthodox canon, itself contained within the Ethiopian canon.

The canon comes from the Church

The disagreement over the canon uncovers a point that the principle “Scripture alone” cannot resolve. Sola scriptura, in Latin “Scripture alone”, is the rule laid down by the Reformation: Scripture alone would be the warrant. Now no book of the Bible contains the list of the books of the Bible; this list is read on no inspired page. To know which writings are the word of God, one must receive it from elsewhere, and that elsewhere is the Church, which under the Spirit discerned and proclaimed the canon. The principle that sets aside the authority of the Church therefore rests on a list that Scripture alone cannot furnish. The very Bible the reformers held had been handed to them by the Church that had fixed its contents. “the Church of the living God, pillar and support of the truth.” 1 Timothy 3:15

Why the Catholic canon

It remains to know why this canon, and not another, neither shorter nor longer. The criterion is not the language of a book nor its presence in some manuscript, but its reception: a book is canonical because the Church received it as inspired and holds it as such without interruption. Now the seven books were read from the apostolic age, in the Septuagint, and the councils of the first centuries, at Rome, at Hippo, at Carthage, drew up the list, exactly that of the Catholic Bible, received thus without interruption for fifteen hundred years.

Facing the Protestants, the argument is clear. The same Church that discerned the twenty-seven books of the New Testament discerned the seven of the Old, by one and the same act, in the same councils. Now the Protestants receive this New Testament in full: they hold the Gospel according to Matthew to be inspired and the gospel of Thomas to be false, on the sole authority of the Church that judged it. To receive from this hand the twenty-seven and to refuse it the seven is to trust its discernment and to reject it by the same gesture; one does not keep the table of contents while dismissing the one who drew it up. As for the Hebrew list they invoke, it was settled by a Judaism later than Christ and which had rejected him: the Church does not receive from the synagogue the count of her Scriptures.

Facing the Orthodox, the question shifts. The East cut nothing away; it kept, beyond the seven, other writings of the Septuagint: a Greek Esdras, the Prayer of Manasseh, Psalm 151, the third book of Maccabees. But the presence of a text in a Greek manuscript does not suffice to make it inspired, and the Septuagint itself marks this: its Psalm 151 bears a Greek note rendered by “outside the number”, exōthen tou arithmou (ἔξωθεν τοῦ ἀριθμοῦ), outside the hundred and fifty psalms received. These writings were read and esteemed, without the councils that fixed the list ever inscribing them in it. The Catholic Church therefore discerned, within the Septuagint itself, what had been received as inspired, without holding for Scripture all that the Greek copies carried.

More deeply, the East has never closed its canon. Its lists vary from one tradition to another, the Greek and the Slavonic not counting the same books, and no council received by the whole East has settled the question with the firmness of a definition; these writings often float there at a second rank, read in church without being made the rule of faith. This indeterminacy is no detail: it shows that a canon is closed only where an authority can close it for the whole Church. The Catholic Church, by the authority received from Peter, did so: at the Council of Trent, she fixed the list once for all, binding on all. The Catholic canon is thus the one that universal Tradition constantly received, neither cut down as among the Protestants, nor left open as in the East, but settled definitively by the one who had the power to do it.