How Many Books Are in the Bible?

A Protestant Bible has 66 books: 39 in the Old Testament and 27 in the New. A Catholic Bible has 73: the same 27 in the New Testament, and 46 in the Old. Eastern Orthodox Bibles have a longer Old Testament still, and the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church counts 81 books in all.

The Protestant Old Testament holds the same books as the Jewish Bible, which counts them as 24 because it treats some pairs and groups as single books: the twelve Minor Prophets, for example, are one book. Whether a Bible has 66 or 73 books, Christians of every tradition read the same four Gospels and the same letters of the apostles.

The difference goes back to two forms of the Old Testament. The Hebrew Scriptures of the Jewish people contain the books Protestants have today. But because Greek was the common language of the Mediterranean world, Jewish scholars translated the Scriptures into Greek between the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC. That translation, the Septuagint, included several books that are not in the Hebrew Bible, among them the seven above.

Early church leaders weighed these books differently. Jerome, who translated the Bible into Latin, preferred the Hebrew canon and gave these books a secondary place, although most of them were still included in his Latin Bible, the Vulgate. Augustine accepted them. Through the Middle Ages their status stayed unsettled.

At the Reformation the question came to a head. Martin Luther kept these books in his German Bible but placed them in a separate section as Apocrypha, worth reading but not equal to Scripture. The Church of England's Article VI says the Church reads them “for example of life and instruction of manners” but does not use them “to establish any doctrine”. The Westminster Confession, a Presbyterian standard, calls them “no part of the canon of the Scripture” (1.3). Older printings of the King James Version itself, such as the Oxford edition of 1769, still placed “The Books called Apocrypha” between the Testaments, but by the 1800s many English Protestant Bibles left them out entirely.

The Catholic Church gave its answer at the Council of Trent. On April 8, 1546, the council declared these books canonical, Scripture in the full sense. Eastern Orthodox Christians also accept them, as part of what they call the longer canon.

Each side has reasons it finds weighty. Protestants point out that these books were not in the Hebrew Scriptures that the Jewish people kept, which the Reformers believed were also the Bible of Jesus and the apostles. Catholics and Orthodox point out that the church read these books from its early centuries and received them as Scripture. Knowing the history will not settle the debate, but it can help Christians on each side understand the other. For how the Bible was handed down, see is the Bible reliable?

Yes. Eastern Orthodox churches read the Old Testament in the tradition of the Greek Septuagint. The Orthodox Church in America, for example, counts Tobit, Judith, the longer Esther and Daniel, the books of Maccabees, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch and the Prayer of Manasseh as fully part of the Old Testament. Orthodox sources do not all give the same list, so there is no single Orthodox total.

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church has a larger Bible still. The church says its canon has 46 Old Testament books and 35 New Testament books, 81 in all, including Enoch and Jubilees, which are not in Catholic, Protestant or Eastern Orthodox Bibles.

In Faithero you can read all 66 books in the King James Version or the Douay-Rheims and have any chapter read aloud. The app's Douay-Rheims has the 66 books it shares with the King James Version, so Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch and 1 and 2 Maccabees are not in the app; for those you will need a printed Catholic Bible or another source.

Here are the 66 books in the order of a Protestant Bible, grouped the way they are often taught. To see when the events in these books happened, follow our Bible timeline, and for the major and minor prophets, see prophets in the Bible.