How Many Books?

According to some of my Protestant friends, the fact that the book of the prophet Isaiah has 66 chapters and the Bible has 66 books hints at the idea that every chapter of Isaiah maps in some way to the book in the Bible in the same sequence order. (So Genesis would map to Isaiah 1 and Revelation would map to Isaiah 66.)

If that helps them study the Bible more carefully and draw new insights from it by trying to make that connection, I have no issue with their using that paradigm to deepen their understanding - though I consider it somewhat arbitrary.

However, it no longer works for me, because my Catholic Bibles have 73 books. Not only that, but there's extra stuff in the books of Esther and Daniel.

Now, before I start digging into these bonus books, let me put my Protestant readers at a bit of ease with these important facts:

1) There are no books missing - i.e. every book in a Protestant version of the Bible can be found in Catholic (and Orthodox) Bibles.
2) The New Testament canon (i.e. official list of books) is identical across Christianity - Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox.

That said, the first thing you may notice in the above facts is the mention of Orthodox Christianity, which split from the Roman Catholic Church around the beginning of the last millennium. That allows them to disclaim the conflicts that led to the Protestant Reformation, though there are theological differences between all three major branches of the faith.

In any case, here's the interesting thing: just like the Protestant canon of the Bible is a perfect subset of the Catholic canon, so the Catholic canon of the Bible is a perfect subset of the Eastern Orthodox canons (i.e. there are no books in the Catholic Bible that are absent from Eastern Orthodox Bibles) though there's some alternation between Catholic and Oriental Orthodox canons. A good review of these details can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_canon.

Now, if there's one principle I found operating in my experience of Protestant Christianity more than other parts of the faith, I'd say it's simplicity. Which would suggest that the idea of there being more than one set of books in the Bible is probably a very uncomfortable idea for most Protestants.

Well, this one blog/chapter isn't going to make you comfortable with that idea. If you do get comfortable with it, it will likely be because you've studied those additional books, read commentaries on them, gotten to know the history of them, prayed about it, and/or discussed it with scholarly people who can help your understanding and comfort level with this oddity of Christian history.

The good news is: everything in the Protestant canon of scripture is accepted by every other part of Christianity. And that includes the Good News.

(Copyright (c) 2011, Reg Harbeck, all rights reserved)