Which Bible, Exactly?

The surprisingly complicated question of what counts as scripture , and who decided.

A friend pulled me up recently on something I said in passing. I mentioned, almost offhandedly, that there is more than one Bible. He looked at me the way people look when they suspect they are being told something that ought not to be true.

He is not alone. Most people who grew up in a broadly Christian culture absorb the assumption (never quite stated, never examined) that the Bible is a fixed object. A book. The book. Its contents settled, its boundaries agreed upon, its authority universal across the tradition that produced it.

None of that is accurate.

Setting aside the question of translation (which is its own enormous subject), the canon of Christian scripture, meaning the list of books considered authoritative and included in the Bible, varies significantly depending on which branch of the faith you belong to. We are not talking about minor differences at the margins. Some of these canons diverge by dozens of books. What one tradition reads as the word of God, another treats as useful but non-authoritative reading material, and a third ignores entirely.

This is worth understanding. Not to undermine faith, but because the question of which Bible immediately raises the question of who decided — and the answer to that question is one of the most revealing stories in religious history.

Start with the Jewish Bible

Any account of the Christian canon has to begin with the Hebrew scriptures, because the earliest Christians were Jews, and the texts they treated as authoritative were the texts of Judaism.

The Hebrew Bible, known in Jewish tradition as the Tanakh (an acronym for its three divisions: Torah, the Law; Nevi'im, the Prophets; and Ketuvim, the Writings), contains 24 books by the traditional Jewish count. If that number seems low, it is because the Jewish counting method groups texts that Protestant Christians later split apart: Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles each count as one book rather than two, and the twelve minor prophets are counted as a single scroll. When you separate them out into the Protestant convention, you arrive at the familiar 39 books of the Old Testament.

The Jewish canon was not fixed by a single council or decree. It emerged gradually, through use, through consensus, and through the particular pressures of the period following the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, when the rabbinical tradition that survived that catastrophe undertook the enormous work of consolidating and preserving Jewish religious identity. By roughly the end of the first century CE, the broad outlines of the Hebrew canon were established, though debates about individual texts (including the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes) continued for some time.

Crucially, this Hebrew canon (the Masoretic Text, the version preserved and transmitted by Jewish scribes) excluded a significant body of religious literature that had been in wide circulation in the Jewish world, particularly among Greek-speaking Jewish communities. Those excluded texts would become the central point of contention in the later Christian debates about canon.

The Septuagint and the books that didn't make the Hebrew cut

Several centuries before the Christian era, the Hebrew scriptures were translated into Greek. This translation, known as the Septuagint (from the Latin for seventy, reflecting a tradition that seventy or seventy-two scholars had produced it), became the Bible of the Greek-speaking Jewish diaspora and subsequently the Bible of the early church.

The Septuagint included texts that did not make it into the final Hebrew canon. Books like Tobit, Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach (also called Ecclesiasticus), Baruch, and First and Second Maccabees circulated widely and were read in synagogues and early Christian communities alike. Extended versions of Daniel and Esther, containing passages not found in the Hebrew texts, were also included.

Because the earliest Christians read the Septuagint, these additional books were simply part of their Bible. No one initially flagged them as a separate category. The question of their status only became urgent later, as the church developed more systematic thinking about canon and as Jewish scholars, working from the Hebrew tradition, began to define their own canon more precisely.

Constantine, the councils, and the slow making of a canon

It is tempting to reach for a single dramatic moment when the Christian biblical canon was settled, and the name that most often gets attached to that moment is Constantine. This is partly justified and largely misleading, and the distinction matters.

Constantine became the first Roman emperor to embrace Christianity, issuing the Edict of Milan in 313 CE, which ended the persecution of Christians across the empire. In 325 CE he convened the Council of Nicaea, the first great ecumenical council of the church, bringing together bishops from across the Christian world. It is sometimes claimed, particularly in popular accounts, that Nicaea decided which books would go into the Bible. It did not. The council's primary business was the Arian controversy: the question of whether Christ was fully divine or a created being subordinate to the Father. The canon was not on the formal agenda.

What Constantine did do, however, was give the process of canon formation institutional momentum it had never previously possessed. When he commissioned the scholar Eusebius of Caesarea to produce fifty copies of the scriptures for distribution to churches in his new capital, Eusebius had to make practical decisions about what to include. In his own historical writings, Eusebius had already categorised the books circulating in the church: some universally accepted, some disputed, some he considered spurious. The act of producing fifty physical Bibles forced those categories into something more concrete.

The councils that followed in the latter part of the fourth century brought the question of canon into sharper focus. The Council of Laodicea, held around 363 CE, produced one of the earliest surviving canonical lists, which notably excluded Revelation from the New Testament. The Council of Hippo in 393 CE produced a canon that included the deuterocanonical books of the Old Testament (those found in the Septuagint but not the Hebrew Bible) and the full 27-book New Testament. The Council of Carthage in 397 CE confirmed that same list, with Augustine of Hippo among its most influential voices. Pope Innocent I wrote to the bishop of Toulouse in 405 CE affirming what had by then become the received canon of the Western church.

None of these councils, it is worth noting, claimed to be creating the canon. Each claimed to be recognising and confirming what the church had always believed. That distinction mattered enormously to those involved. It matters rather less to the historian who observes that the lists were not always the same, the debates were real, and the outcomes were shaped by theological, political, and practical pressures that had little to do with divine dictation.

The Catholic Bible

The Catholic canon as formally defined includes 73 books: 46 in the Old Testament and 27 in the New. The additional Old Testament books are referred to as the deuterocanonical books (meaning "second canon", not because they are considered less authoritative, but because their canonical status was confirmed later than the rest).

These books carry doctrinal weight. Second Maccabees contains passages that Catholic theology has cited in support of the doctrine of purgatory and prayers for the dead. When the Protestant reformers challenged those doctrines, they also challenged the scriptural basis for them, which partly explains why the question of which books belong in the Bible became so heated during the Reformation.

The Council of Trent, convened between 1545 and 1563 in direct response to the Protestant challenge, formally and definitively closed the Catholic canon. It was the clearest statement the Catholic Church had ever made on the subject, and its timing was not coincidental. The canon was being contested, and Trent was the institutional answer.

The Protestant Bible and the curious case of the original King James

The Protestant Reformation, led by figures including Martin Luther, rejected the deuterocanonical books on the grounds that they were not part of the Hebrew canon. Luther argued, drawing on what he understood to be the Jewish scriptures, that only those texts preserved in the Hebrew tradition should be considered authoritative. The deuterocanonicals he called the Apocrypha: worth reading for edification, but not for establishing doctrine.

The result was the Protestant Old Testament of 39 books, aligned with the Hebrew canon. Combined with the 27 books of the New Testament (on which Catholic and Protestant traditions agree), this gives the Protestant Bible its familiar 66 books.

Here is something that surprises many people: the original King James Bible, published in 1611, included the Apocrypha. It sat between the Old and New Testaments in a section clearly marked as distinct, but it was there. It was only in later editions (particularly from the nineteenth century onward, when organisations such as the British and Foreign Bible Society began distributing Bibles without the Apocrypha) that it disappeared from Protestant editions. The 66-book Protestant Bible that most English-speaking Christians today regard as simply the Bible is a relatively recent standardisation.

The Orthodox Bible and why there is more than one version of it

Eastern Orthodox Christianity uses a canon derived from the Septuagint, and it is broader than the Catholic canon. Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, and other Orthodox churches accept the deuterocanonical books, but they also include additional texts that Catholics do not: First Esdras (a Greek version of Ezra with additional material), the Prayer of Manasseh, Psalm 151 (which appears in the Septuagint but not in the Hebrew Bible), and Third Maccabees. Fourth Maccabees appears as an appendix in some Greek Orthodox editions.

It is worth noting, though, that the Orthodox churches do not all have identical canons. The Greek Orthodox and Russian Orthodox traditions differ in some details. The Slavonic Bible, used in Russian and some other Slavic Orthodox traditions, includes Second Esdras, which Greek Orthodox Bibles generally do not. The question of canonical boundaries is treated somewhat differently in the Orthodox world than in the Catholic, where the Council of Trent established a definitive list. Orthodox canon is defined more by liturgical use and tradition than by formal conciliar decree, which means the edges are somewhat more flexible.

The Ethiopian Bible and the broadest canon of all

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church holds what is, by a considerable margin, the most expansive biblical canon of any major Christian tradition. The Ethiopian Bible contains 81 books.

This is not a recent development or an outlier position within Ethiopian Christianity. The Ethiopian church is one of the oldest in the world, tracing its origins to the fourth century and maintaining traditions that predate many of the canonical decisions made in Rome or Constantinople. Its broader canon reflects a different set of historical contacts and textual inheritances.

Among the books unique to the Ethiopian canon is the Book of Enoch, an ancient Jewish text that is actually quoted in the New Testament letter of Jude. There is also the Book of Jubilees, a retelling of Genesis and part of Exodus with a distinctive theological framework. The Ethiopian New Testament includes additional texts: the Sinodos (a collection of church laws), the Book of the Covenant, and the Didascalia, among others. The Ethiopian books called Meqabyan are sometimes loosely described as Maccabees, but they are entirely different texts with no real relation to the Greek Maccabean literature.

Enoch was widely read in early Judaism and early Christianity, and considered authoritative by some significant communities. The Western churches, in combination with the fixing of the Hebrew canon, progressively pushed it out. The Ethiopians simply never agreed to that decision.

The Ethiopian canon poses a quiet challenge to anyone who holds that the contents of the Bible are self-evidently correct. Here is a major, ancient, historically continuous Christian church reading books that the rest of Christendom has either never encountered or deliberately excluded. The difference is not trivial. It is a matter of which books count as the word of God.

A note on the Syriac tradition

The Syriac-speaking churches of the Middle East (including the Assyrian Church of the East and the Syriac Orthodox Church) present yet another variation, this time in the New Testament rather than the Old. The Peshitta, the traditional Syriac Bible, originally contained only 22 of the 27 books that Western Christianity includes in the New Testament. The five absent books (Second Peter, Second and Third John, Jude, and Revelation) were missing from the earliest Syriac canon, and the Assyrian Church of the East still formally uses the 22-book New Testament today.

This is a striking reminder that the 27-book New Testament, which Protestant, Catholic, and most Orthodox Christians treat as fixed and obvious, was not universally accepted. Revelation in particular had a difficult journey toward canonical acceptance, with significant voices in the early church questioning its authority well into the fourth century.

So, to answer the question

The idea that there is a single Bible with agreed contents is a convenient fiction: convenient because it simplifies the picture considerably, and a fiction because the historical and living reality is considerably messier.

There are at least five meaningfully distinct canonical traditions in Christianity: Protestant (66 books), Catholic (73 books), Greek Orthodox (approximately 76 to 78 books), Ethiopian Orthodox (81 books), and Syriac (with a shorter New Testament of 22 books). Within some of those traditions, there are further variations.

The decisions that produced these different canons were not made in a vacuum. They were made by human beings, in specific historical circumstances, responding to specific theological pressures, political situations, and institutional needs. Constantine did not invent the Christian Bible, but the institutional machinery he set in motion created the conditions in which canon formation became an urgent practical question. The councils that followed (Laodicea, Hippo, Carthage, and ultimately Trent) each claimed to be recognising received truth. What they were actually doing, when examined closely, was negotiating it.

The Protestant reformers excluded the deuterocanonicals partly because those books supported Catholic doctrines they were rejecting. The Council of Trent defined the Catholic canon precisely because the reformers were attacking it. The Ethiopian church simply inherited a different set of texts through a different set of historical contacts and saw no reason to narrow them.

None of this means the Bible is worthless, or that faith built on it is irrational. It does mean that the claim the Bible says is always, at some level, a claim that deserves a follow-up question.

Which one?

That question is not impertinent. It is the beginning of an honest engagement with what these extraordinary texts actually are, and how they came to be.

James Stewart is the author of The Uncomfortable Bible: What the Text Actually Says and What We Are Supposed to Notice. Available in ebook and paperback.