All wisdom comes from the Lord,
and is with Him forever.
Short answer
Catholic Bibles include seven Old Testament books — Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch and 1–2 Maccabees — plus longer forms of Esther and Daniel, because they follow the longer collection of the Greek Old Testament, which the early Church largely used. Most Protestant Bibles follow the shorter Hebrew canon.
The books in question
A Catholic Bible has 73 books; most Protestant Bibles have 66. The New Testament is the same in both (27 books). The difference is in the Old Testament, where Catholic Bibles include:
- Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach (also called Ecclesiasticus), Baruch, 1 Maccabees and 2 Maccabees
- longer forms of Esther and Daniel (for example, the Prayer of Azariah in Daniel 3, and Susanna and Bel and the Dragon as Daniel 13–14)
Catholics call these books deuterocanonical (“of the second canon”) — a name that reflects when their status was debated, not lesser authority. Protestants often call them the Apocrypha.
Where they come from
In the centuries before Christ, Greek-speaking Jews used a Greek translation of the Scriptures known as the Septuagint, which included these books. The New Testament writers frequently quote the Old Testament in its Septuagint form, and the early Church largely adopted that collection.
Within Judaism, the collection that became the Hebrew Bible did not include them. Some early Christian writers — notably Jerome, who translated the Vulgate — distinguished between the books found in Hebrew and the others, while still translating several of them.
The Reformation
In the sixteenth century, Martin Luther and other reformers followed the Hebrew canon for the Old Testament. Luther’s 1534 Bible printed the disputed books in a separate section, describing them as useful to read but not equal to Scripture. The Council of Trent (1546) affirmed the longer canon for the Catholic Church, as earlier regional councils of the fourth and fifth centuries had listed it.
Other traditions
Eastern Orthodox Bibles include these books and several more (such as 1 Esdras, 3 Maccabees and Psalm 151), with some variation between churches. Anglican and Lutheran traditions have historically read some of them in worship without using them to establish doctrine.
On this site
This site uses the World English Bible, Catholic Edition, which contains all 73 books. Deuterocanonical books are marked in the Bible reader. When a topic page quotes them — for example Wisdom 3:1–3 on the grief page — it says so, so readers from every tradition know where a passage comes from.