The main reason biblical canons become a bit complicated is that no less than

four different religious groups are involved in the discussion about the Bible.

Start with Judaism: Judaism has a Bible that they usually call the TaNaK (an

acronym for Torah, Prophets, and Writings) or sometimes the Hebrew Bible.

All three Christian groups — Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestants — adopted

the Hebrew Bible as the first part of their Bible, and then all three added a

New Testament composed of selected early Christian writings.

This is where things get a bit complicated. The three main Christian bodies all

adopted the same New Testament (which is an impressive achievement, given

everything they disagree on). However, they did not adopt the same version of

the Old Testament. It’s a fascinating story that’s fairly straightforward:

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 The Roman Catholic Church adopted the Hebrew Bible but added a few

later Jewish writings commonly known as The Apocrypha or Deutero-

Canonical Books. We discuss these books in Chapter 4.

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 The Protestant churches, beginning with Martin Luther and John Calvin

in the 16th century, excluded the Deutero-Canonical Books and decided

to adopt the same list of books as the Jews. So, the Protestant Old

Testament is the same list of books as the Hebrew Bible (but usually

arranged in a different order).

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 The various Orthodox churches (Russian, Greek, Ethiopic, and so on)

added even a few more Jewish writings to their Old Testament, in addi-

tion to the Apocryphal books added by the Catholic Church