Why Do Catholics Have Seven More Books?

Before discussing their authority, one must know what is being talked about. These books are not obscure texts: three of them rank among the most-read pages of the Old Testament, and Western art — from Rembrandt to Caravaggio — has abundantly illustrated them.

The exact list: seven books and two complements

The seven whole books are divided between historical, wisdom, and prophetic books of the Old Testament. To these are added Greek sections inserted into two books otherwise common to both canons, Esther and Daniel.

The deuterocanonical complements are: for Esther, the six Greek passages (prayers of Mordecai and Esther, royal edicts) absent from the Hebrew text; for Daniel, the episode of Susanna (Dn 13), that of Bel and the Dragon (Dn 14), and the Song of the Three Young Men in the furnace (Dn 3:24–90)^[4]. These sections are preserved in the Greek Septuagint but do not appear in the Masoretic Hebrew text.

What do they really tell?

Tobit is one of the most beautiful narratives in all of Scripture: a pious old blind man, his son on a journey, and the archangel Raphael — whose name means "God heals" — accompanying them under the appearance of a man. It is the great angelic text of the Old Testament, and the very source of the archangel Raphael's name^[5]. Judith tells how a Jewish widow saves her besieged city by beheading the enemy general Holofernes: a story of courage and faith that has inspired dozens of masterpieces.

The two books of Maccabees recount the revolt of the Jews against the Greek king Antiochus IV Epiphanes (c. 167 BC), who sought to abolish the Jewish religion. There we read of the martyrdom of the seven brothers and their mother, dying rather than transgressing the Law, in the explicit hope of the resurrection of the dead (2 Mc 7). The second book also contains the famous passage in which Judas Maccabeus has a sacrifice offered for the dead (2 Mc 12).

Wisdom and Sirach are wisdom books: the former, written in Greek at Alexandria, meditates on God's Wisdom, the immortality of the soul, and the fate of the persecuted just man; the latter, written in Hebrew around 180 BC by Jesus, son of Sira, gathers practical wisdom for daily life. Baruch, finally, attributed to the secretary of the prophet Jeremiah, is a book of penitence and hope linked to the Babylonian exile^[6].

Why are they called "deuterocanonical"?

The word can mislead. It was coined in 1566 by the Dominican convert from Judaism Sixtus of Siena, in his Bibliotheca Sancta, to distinguish two categories of books: the protocanonical books (from the Greek prôtos, "first"), whose belonging to the canon was never contested — Genesis, the Psalms, the Gospels; and the deuterocanonical books (from deuteros, "second"), whose canonicity was received "at a second time", after a longer period of discussion^[7].

The term therefore does not mean that these books would be inferior, doubtful, or second-rank: it describes a historical fact of reception, not a degree of inspiration. Once recognized as canonical, the deuterocanonical books have exactly the same authority as the others: the Council of Trent would require that they be received "with an equal sentiment of piety"^[8]. That is precisely what the Catechism recalls: the complete list of the 73 books forms a single canon, with no internal hierarchy of authority^[9].

Finally, they must be distinguished from the true Apocrypha — the books never received by any major Church: the Gospel of Thomas, the Book of Enoch, the Apocalypse of Peter. This is a permanent source of confusion, because Protestants use the word "Apocrypha" to designate what Catholics call "deuterocanonical." The debate concerns seven precise books, not the Gnostic writings that all traditions reject^[10].

The common objection assumes that the Roman Church inflated its Bible. History says the opposite. During the first fifteen centuries of Christianity, the Christian Bible — in Greek then in Latin — contained these seven books. They were not added in the sixteenth century: they were removed in the sixteenth century by the Reformers. The Council of Trent invented nothing; it reaffirmed what the Church had been reading since the apostolic age, in the face of a recent amputation^[11].

To understand why, one must go back to a decisive and too often ignored fact: the Bible of the Apostles was not the Hebrew Bible that the Protestants took as their reference.

Two Jewish traditions, two extents

At the time of Jesus, Judaism had no closed and universally fixed canon. Two great traditions coexisted. The Palestinian tradition, centered on the books in Hebrew, tended toward a more restricted collection. The Alexandrian tradition, that of the Greek-speaking Jews of the diaspora, read the Bible in the Greek translation called the Septuagint (in Latin Septuaginta, "seventy," from the legendary number of its translators), which included the seven deuterocanonical books^[12]. This is no Christian invention: it was Jews who, from the second century before Jesus Christ, composed and transmitted these books as Scripture.

Now the first Christians, preaching throughout the Empire in Greek, adopted the Septuagint as their Old Testament. It is this broader Bible that the communities founded by the Apostles received. See the Septuagint for the detail of this translation and its role.

The New Testament quotes the Septuagint

The fact is massive and verifiable: out of more than 300 quotations of the Old Testament in the New, the great majority reproduce the Greek text of the Septuagint, not the Hebrew. The most famous example is Isaiah 7:14, quoted in Matthew 1:23: where the Hebrew has almah ("young woman"), the Septuagint translates parthenos, "virgin" — and it is this Greek version that the evangelist retains to proclaim the virginal birth^[13]. The Apostles therefore did not work from the short Hebrew canon: they quoted the Greek Bible, the very one that contained the deuterocanonical books.

The New Testament breathes the deuterocanonical books

The Apostles did not merely use the Septuagint: their writings are steeped in the deuterocanonical books. The clearest case is the Epistle to the Hebrews, which evokes martyrs "tortured, refusing the deliverance offered to them, so as to obtain a better resurrection" (Heb 11:35): this episode is found only in the Second Book of Maccabees, chapter 7 — the martyrdom of the seven brothers^[14]. The inspired author thus counts 2 Maccabees among the figures of Old Testament faith.

"Tortured, they refused the deliverance offered to them, so as to obtain a better resurrection." — Epistle to the Hebrews 11:35, referring to the martyrdom of the seven Maccabee brothers (2 Mac 7)^[15]

The Book of Wisdom is even more present. Wisdom 2:17-20 describes the plot of the wicked against the just man: "Let us condemn him to a shameful death… if he is truly the son of God, God will rescue him." The scene is so close to the Passion of Christ — the mockery at the foot of the cross in Matthew 27:41-43 — that the Fathers saw in it a direct prophecy^[16]. Likewise, Saint Paul's indictment of idolatry in Romans 1:19-25 follows step by step the argument of Wisdom 13-14, and Christ's formula "reflection of God's glory" in Hebrews 1:3 takes up Wisdom 7:26^[17]. The Epistle of Saint James, finally, echoes several sayings of Sirach.

None of these passages quotes the deuterocanonical books with the formula "it is written" — that is the classic Protestant objection, examined below. But the atmosphere of the New Testament is saturated with these books: the Apostles read them, meditated on them, and used them as one uses a familiar Scripture^[18].

The seemingly strongest Protestant argument runs as follows: "the Jews themselves fixed their canon without these books, at the Council of Jamnia, around the year 90; the Church is only following the decision of the people to whom the Scriptures were entrusted." This argument long seemed decisive. It has collapsed.

The idea of a "Council of Jamnia" (or Yavneh) that supposedly closed the Hebrew canon around AD 90 was launched by the historian Heinrich Graetz in 1871. For a century, it passed for established fact. But in 1964, the biblical scholar Jack P. Lewis demonstrated, in an article that has become a classic, that this reconstruction rested on no source whatsoever: the rabbis gathered at Yavneh debated the status of Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs, but nothing indicates that they promulgated a closed canonical list^[19]. Since then, scholarship has recognized that the closing of the Hebrew canon was a slow and late process, not the work of a single council.

"The term 'Council of Jamnia' is a convenient hypothesis that has been abused. Evidence for a binding decision on the extent of the canon there is simply lacking." — summary of modern scholarship following Jack P. Lewis, Journal of Bible and Religion, 1964^[20]

Two consequences follow. First, Christians can no longer be confronted with an "official Jewish decision" that never took place. Second, insofar as rabbinic Judaism did effectively narrow its canon around the Hebrew text, this happened after the birth of the Church and partly in reaction to Christianity, which relied on the Septuagint. A Catholic may therefore ask the reverse question: why should Christians model their Old Testament on a post-Christian rabbinic canon, rather than on the Greek Bible actually received by the Apostles^[21]?

Far from being marginal, the deuterocanonical books were quoted as Holy Scripture by the Fathers and fixed by councils long before the Reformation.

The Church Fathers Quote Them as Scripture

From the 1st century on, Saint Clement of Rome quotes Wisdom and Sirach; in the 2nd century, these books appear in liturgical lists and in the writings of Saint Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Saint Cyprian. For most of the Fathers, the distinction between proto- and deuterocanonical books does not even exist in practice: they quote Tobit, Wisdom, or Maccabees with the same authority as the Psalms^[22].

Saint Jerome and the hebraica veritas

There is, however, one famous dissenting voice: that of Saint Jerome (c. 347-420), the greatest Hebraist of Christian antiquity. Convinced that one had to return to the "Hebrew truth" (hebraica veritas), he held that only the books preserved in Hebrew fully belonged to the canon, and classed the others among "ecclesiastical" writings — good to read for edification, but not for establishing doctrine. In his famous Helmeted Prologue (Prologus Galeatus), he writes that these books "are not in the canon"^[23].

"Everything outside these books must be reckoned among the Apocrypha. The Church reads Tobit, Judith, and Maccabees, but does not receive them among the canonical Scriptures." — Saint Jerome, Prologus Galeatus and preface to the books of Solomon, c. 391-404^[24]

Protestants readily invoke Jerome. But his position calls for three decisive qualifications. First, Jerome welcomed these books into his Vulgate — he himself translated only Tobit and Judith (from the Aramaic), along with the Greek additions to Esther and Daniel, the others (Wisdom, Sirach, 1 and 2 Maccabees, Baruch) remaining there in their Old Latin (Vetus Latina) — and he sometimes quoted them as Scripture in his own letters: his practice bent away from his theory. Second, he ended by submitting to the judgment of the Church: when questioned about Judith, he notes that the Council of Nicaea reportedly counted it among the Scriptures. Finally and above all, the opinion of one Father, however learned, does not make the canon: it is the judgment of the Church gathered in council that decides, and the Church followed Augustine, not Jerome's scholarly reservation^[25].

Saint Augustine and the African Councils

Opposite Jerome stands the authority of Saint Augustine. In his treatise On Christian Doctrine (c. 397), he draws up the list of the Old Testament books, including Tobit, Judith, Maccabees, Wisdom, and Sirach^[26]. His immense prestige closed the debate in the West. It was the African councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397, then 419), where Augustine was the soul of the discussions, that fixed identical lists including the seven books — lists confirmed by Rome.

The Canon Was Already Fixed Before Luther

This point is crucial in answering the objection that "Trent supposedly invented the canon to counter the Reformation." A century before Luther, the Council of Florence, in the bull of union Cantate Domino of 4 February 1442, already enumerated the complete canon, deuterocanonical books included, as a received truth^[27]. The Catholic canon is therefore not an improvised riposte of the 16th century: it is the constant tradition of the Church, which Trent merely solemnly defined when it was challenged.

If these books had been received for fifteen centuries, why did the Reformers set them aside? Two reasons combine: a humanist principle and a doctrinal stake.

The Return to the "Hebrew Canon"

The first reason is consistent with the spirit of the Renaissance: the return to the sources (ad fontes) and to Hebrew. Taking up Jerome's argument, the Reformers decided to model their Old Testament on the shorter rabbinic Hebrew canon, setting aside everything preserved only in Greek^[28]. This is consistent with the principle of sola scriptura — Scripture alone — but it immediately raises a formidable difficulty: if Scripture alone is the rule, who decides which books make up Scripture? The New Testament nowhere contains the list of its own books. To know that the Gospel of Mark is inspired and that the Gospel of Thomas is not, an authority outside Scripture is needed: precisely the Tradition and the councils of the Church that the Reformation otherwise rejected^[29].

The Doctrinal Stakes: Purgatory and Prayer for the Dead

The second reason is doctrinal, and it is not a malicious suspicion: the Reformers themselves acknowledged it. The Second Book of Maccabees contains the most explicit scriptural foundation for prayer for the dead — and hence for purgatory. After a battle, Judas Maccabeus has a sacrifice of expiation offered for the fallen soldiers:

"That is why he had this expiatory sacrifice offered for the dead, so that they might be delivered from their sin." — Second Book of Maccabees 12:46^[30]

This verse, which presupposes an intermediate state in which the departed can still be purified through the prayer of the living, flatly contradicted the Protestant theology of salvation by faith alone. Removing 2 Maccabees from the canon deprived purgatory of its most direct anchor^[31]. The same logic led Luther to manhandle, in the New Testament this time, the Epistle of Saint James — which he called an "epistle of straw" because it affirms that "faith without works is dead" — and to voice doubts about Hebrews, Jude, and Revelation^[32]. The criterion became, by the Reformers' own admission, conformity with their doctrine.

Luther 1534: Relegating Rather Than Deleting

Luther did not burn these books: he moved them. His German Bible of 1534 groups them in a section inserted between the Old and the New Testament, under an unambiguous title:

“Apocrypha: these are books which are not held to be equal to the Holy Scriptures, and which are nevertheless useful and good to read.” — title page of the Apocrypha section, Luther Bible, Wittenberg, 1534^[33]

This relegation — neither in the canon, nor entirely excluded — long persisted: until the 19th century, many Protestant Bibles, including the King James of 1611, printed the Apocrypha in a separate section. Only later did the Bible societies, for economy and on principle, cease to include them^[34].

Westminster 1647: the definitive exclusion

The break was completed in the following century. The Westminster Confession of Faith (1647), the reference text of English-speaking Reformed Protestantism, excludes the Apocrypha from the canon with a new sharpness:

“The books commonly called Apocrypha, not being of divine inspiration, are no part of the canon of the Scripture; and therefore are of no authority in the Church of God, nor to be any otherwise approved, or made use of, than other human writings.” — Westminster Confession of Faith, 1647, chapter I, article 3^[35]

From “useful and good to read” in Luther, the seven books become mere “human writings.” The 66-book Protestant Bible was fixed.

Faced with this amputation, the Church responded with a dogmatic definition. The Council of Trent, in its Session IV, on 8 April 1546, promulgated the decree Sacrosancta (De canonicis Scripturis), which lists by name the 73 books and declares that they must all be received with equal reverence:

“If anyone does not receive as sacred and canonical these books in their entirety, with all their parts, as they are customarily read in the Catholic Church and are contained in the old Latin edition of the Vulgate… let him be anathema.” — Council of Trent, Session IV, decree on the canonical Scriptures, 8 April 1546^[36]

The council receives these books “with an equal affection of piety and reverence” (pari pietatis affectu) — a formula that forbids any hierarchy between proto- and deuterocanonical books^[37]. Three things must be stressed. Trent did not create the canon: it defined it because it was denied, as the Council of Trent did for other contested truths. It relied on constant tradition (Rome 382, Carthage 397, Florence 1442). And it decided where sola scriptura proved incapable of grounding its own list: only a living Magisterium could say with authority which books make up the Word of God. The constitution Dei Verbum of Vatican II would take up this canon unchanged^[38].

Honest apologetics requires presenting the best objections in their strongest form before answering them. Here are five.

Objection — “The Jews themselves rejected these books”

Strong form of the objection: the Scriptures of the Old Testament were entrusted to the Jewish people (Rom 3:2); yet rabbinic Judaism did not retain the deuterocanonical books in its Hebrew Bible; Christians should therefore follow the canon of the original custodians.

Answer: the argument assumes a closed and unanimous Jewish canon at the time of Jesus, which is false — the “council of Jamnia” is a historiographical myth. In the 1st century, several canons coexisted, and the broad Greek Septuagint was the Bible of millions of Jews of the diaspora and of the first Christians. The short rabbinic canon imposed itself after the break with the Church, partly against a Christendom that relied on the Septuagint. To follow that canon would be to let post-Christian rabbis define the Bible of the Church in place of the Apostles and the councils^[39].

Objection — “Jesus and the Apostles never quote them with ‘it is written’”

Strong form: no quotation from the deuterocanonical books introduced by the solemn formula “it is written” is found in the New Testament; the Apostles therefore did not hold them to be Scripture.

Answer: the criterion is arbitrary and turns against those who use it. Several protocanonical books — Esther, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs, Ezra, Nehemiah, Obadiah, Nahum — are likewise never quoted by the New Testament. If absence of quotation excluded a book from the canon, those books which Protestants retain would also have to be removed. Conversely, the New Testament quotes sources that no one holds to be canonical (the poet Aratus in Acts 17:28, the prophet Enoch in Jude 14). Quotation is therefore neither necessary nor sufficient. And in fact, the Epistle to the Hebrews refers to 2 Maccabees 7, while the Passion echoes Wisdom 2^[40].

Objection — “St Jerome himself rejected them”

Strong form: the greatest biblical scholar of antiquity, translator of the Vulgate, refused to hold these books as canonical. His authority is well worth that of Augustine.

Answer: the private opinion of one Father, however eminent, does not constitute the canon — it is the judgment of the Church that decides. Yet Jerome himself welcomed them into his Vulgate — himself translating only Tobit and Judith —, quoted them as Scripture in his correspondence, and declared that he submitted to the judgment of the Church. The canon is not decided by a vote among scholars: it is received from living Tradition, and that Tradition, from Rome 382 to Florence 1442, followed the constant practice of the liturgy, not Jerome’s scholarly reservation^[41].

Objection — “They contain historical errors”

Strong form: the book of Judith places Nebuchadnezzar at Nineveh (whereas he reigned at Babylon), and Tobit contains geographical improbabilities; an inspired book cannot contain such errors.

Answer: the objection imposes on these texts a literary genre that is not theirs. Tobit and Judith are not historical chronicles in the modern sense, but edifying narratives (close to parable or theological romance), in which the historical setting is deliberately stylized to convey spiritual teaching. The Church, since Divino Afflante Spiritu (Pius XII, 1943), reads each book according to its proper genre: inerrancy concerns the truth that God willed to teach for our salvation, not textbook accuracy in geography^[42]. The same principle — judging each text according to its proper literary genre — applies to the whole Old Testament, including the books Protestants retain.

Objection — “They teach false doctrines”

Strong form: 2 Maccabees 12 founds prayer for the dead; Tobit 12:9 and Sirach 3:30 seem to teach that “almsgiving delivers from death” — hence a justification by works. These are precisely the doctrines the Reformation rejects.

Answer: the argument is circular. It presupposes that Protestant theology is true in order to exclude books that contradict it — in other words, it makes doctrine the criterion of the canon, whereas the canon should ground doctrine. Yet prayer for the dead and the salvific value of charity are not inventions of these books: they are confirmed by the New Testament itself (1 Cor 3:15 on salvation “as through fire”; Mt 12:32 on forgiveness “in the age to come”; the whole doctrine of charity). Far from teaching error, these books agree with the full Revelation which the Reformation had, on these points, abandoned^[43].

Beyond the controversy, these books are no negligible appendix: they carry treasures of doctrine and spirituality that the Protestant Bible has lost.

Prayer for the dead and purgatory

The passage of 2 Maccabees 12 establishes that, two centuries before Christ, devout Jews already prayed for their dead in the hope of their purification. The Christian practice of suffrages for souls is therefore neither a medieval invention nor a late superstition: it receives and fulfills an authentic Old Testament tradition^[44].

The intercession of the saints

The same book shows, in a vision given to Judas Maccabeus, the deceased high priest Onias and the prophet Jeremiah — long dead — “praying for the whole Jewish people” (2 Macc 15:12–14). It is one of the clearest scriptural foundations of the intercession of the blessed in Heaven for the living^[45].

A theology of Wisdom that prepares Christ

The book of Wisdom offers, with its persecuted just man who calls himself a “son of God” and whom his enemies condemn “to a shameful death” (Wis 2:17–20), one of the most striking prefigurations of the Passion in the whole Old Testament. Its meditation on Wisdom as “a reflection of eternal light” (Wis 7:26) would nourish the Christology of the New Testament and of the Fathers^[46].

Providence, fidelity, and almsgiving

Tobit teaches trust in providence, the value of prayer and almsgiving, the holiness of marriage; Judith, the courage of faith in the face of brute force; Sirach, a concrete wisdom of the fear of God that nourished the liturgy and catechesis of the Church for centuries. To cut out these books impoverishes not only the canon, but the very prayer of the Church^[47].

One last fact illuminates the debate: the Orthodox Churches also receive the seven deuterocanonical books — and even more. Following the Synod of Jerusalem (1672), which fixed a canon close to that of Trent, Greek Orthodoxy additionally recognizes 3 Maccabees, Psalm 151, the Prayer of Manasseh, and 1 Esdras, which it calls anagignoskomena, “books good to read”^[48]. Far from being a Roman peculiarity, the broad canon is thus the common position of the two oldest Christian traditions, Catholic and Orthodox: it is the 66-book Protestant canon that constitutes, on the scale of history, the late exception.

The answer to the initial question is therefore reversed. Catholics do not have “seven extra books”: they have kept the Bible of the Apostles and of the undivided Church. It was the Reformers who, in the 16th century, cut seven out of it, for reasons both philological and doctrinal. Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, and the Maccabees are no addition: they are pages of Scripture that the Church has never ceased to read, to pray, and to love.

• The Bible — the composition of the 73 books, the inspiration and transmission of the sacred text.
• The Canon of the Old Testament — the complete history of the formation of the Old Testament canon.
• The Septuagint — the Greek translation that was the Bible of the Apostles.
• The Vulgate — the great Latin Bible of St Jerome.
• The Council of Trent — the dogmatic definition of the canon in response to the Reformation.
• Sola Scriptura — why “Scripture alone” cannot ground its own list.
• Answers to Protestantism — the systematic Catholic refutation of the five solae.
• Martin Luther — the reformer and his relation to the biblical canon.
• The Qumran Manuscripts — what the Dead Sea reveals about ancient Jewish texts.