What is the difference between Catholic Bibles and protestant Bibles?
The Catholics include the Apocrypha in their Bible, while Protestant Christians don't.
The Apocrypha are some other books that are included in the Old Testament of the Catholic Bible. Protestant Christians don't except these books as authoritative. The Protestant and Catholic New Testament are identical though.
See the related link at the bottom of this answer to read more on this subject.
Both Protestant and Catholic Bibles have the same number of books in the New Testament: 27.
However, Catholic Bibles have 7 extra books, and here's why:
Around 2200 years ago (so obviously before Jesus' time), Jewish scholars put together all of the Jewish Scriptures - what we call the Old Testament. There were 46 books, called the Septuagint, that were accepted until about 100 A.D. At that time, the Jewish leaders decided to get rid of the non-Hebrew books, of which there were seven.
This change was after Jesus' life, however. So He would have known all 46. And those 46 + 27 New Testament books=73.
So these 73 were accepted as the Bible for almost 1500 years, when Martin Luther began the Protestant Reformation. Because there were not Hebrew manuscripts known at the time, he changed the Bible from 46 to 39 books...and that's why there's 7 less books there today.
Catholic Answer One of the big problems especially in regards discussions among and between Catholics and protestants is that they use the same words but mean completely different things. This is the case here. The Bible used by Jesus and the apostles was the Septuagint which contained all the books of the Old Testament both the proto-canon and the deuterocanon. When a Catholic uses the word "apocrypha" they are referring to a well-defined class of literature with scriptural pretensions including hte Book of Henock; Assumption of Moses,: Fourth Book of Esdras, Apocalypse of Abraham, Protoevangelium Jacobi, or Infancy Gospel of James; Gospel of the Pseudo-Matthew; Gospel of Philip, Acts of Peter; Acts of John, and many others. The Deuterocanon has been accepted by the Church since the very beginning as it was accepted by Our Blessed Lord; it wasn't until after His death and resurrection that the Jews rejected the Septuagint as it supported Christian teachings. Fifteen hundred years later, at the beginning of the protestant revolt, the leaders of that movement reached back into history to take the Jewish canon formed after the establishment of the Church to form their "Bible".
The Bible used by Jesus was called the Septuagint. This is the Bible that He read and quoted from. Of course, it was only what we call the Old Testament, and the New Testament wasn't written until after His death. There was a council of rabbis in the first century A.D. which closed the Jewish canon. When they did this they rejected a number of books on various grounds, mostly because they could not find a written version in Hebrew. There were seven books not accepted by this council. We actually aren't really all that sure about whether such a council ever existed, but the resultant canon (list of books contained in Scripture) is the one still used by Jews to this day. When Martin Luther objected to various doctrines of the Church, one of the things he did was to refer to the Jewish canon, with the result that the seven books - which had been accepted and used by Jesus, and be accepted and used by the Christian church for fifteen centuries - were rejected by him. All Protestant Bibles are published today without these books. This is a highly questionable move on his part as the later first century Jews have no authority over what books should be in the Christian Bible, certainly they should not trump Jesus Himself, and fifteen centuries of Christian usage. Especially as their motives for removing the books was to disprove Christianity!
The "reformers", the heretics who brought about the protestant revolt, removed the Deuterocanonial books of the Bible due to the clear teaching in them supporting beliefs which the "reformers" did not like. This was the same reason the Jews rejected them 15 centuries earlier - because they clearly supported Christian belief:
from A Catholic Dictionary, edited by Donald Attwater, Second edition, revised 1957
Apocrypha
Books erroneously held to be inspired and to be included in the canon of Scripture, but rejected as such by the Church, such as III and IV Esdras, III and IV Maccabees, Prayer of Manasses, 3rd Epistle to the Corinthians, and the Gospel of James. Books style "apocrypha" in Protestant editions of the Bible are not necessarily such in the eyes of the Catholic Church.
Deutero-Canonical books
Those books of the O.T. whose place in the canon was not admitted till after that of the other books. They are Tobias, Judith, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, 1 and 2 Machabees, ver. 4 of chapt. X to the end of Esther, and Daniel, ver. 24 of chap. Iii to ver 3 of chap 8v and chaps. Xiii and xiv. Their authority is equal with that of the other books of the bible and is so admitted by all the Eastern dissident churches, except that Greek and Russian Orthodox theologians have now for some time been questioning it. Protestants have always rejected them because they are not included in the Hebrew Bible of the Jews.
Canon of Scripture
Is the list of inspire books of the Old and New Testaments. Inclusion in the canon does not confer anything to the internal character of a book, but is only the Church's teaching of the fact of its antecedent inspiration. The N.T. canon is the same as that at present commonly received among non-Catholic Christians; the O.T. canon contains in addition the deutero-canonical books (see above). These books and fragments are usually called Deuterocanoica, or of the second canon, not because their inspiration is in any way different from that of the others, but because the inspiration of the books at present in the Jewish Bible was definitely proclaimed by the Jewish authorities previous to Christ, whereas the inspiration of the Deuterocanonica, tentatively held but later rejected by the Jews, was definitely proclaimed in the Christian dispensation. The Protestant reformers, denying the infallibility of The Church, returned to the Jewish canon; the Council of Trent reaffirmed acceptance of the Christian one. Doubts expressed by individuals in certain places and periods about the canonical status of Hebrews, Apocalypse (Revelation) and some canonical epistles in the N.T. and the Deuterocanonica in the O.T., were thus declared incompatible with Catholic faith.
from Catholicism and Fundamentalism - The Attack on "Romanism" by "Bible Christians" by Karl Keating,Ignatius Press, 1988
William G. Most discussing comments made in 1910 by Gerald Birney Smith, professor at the University of Chicago and speaker at that year's Baptist Congress...
Most notes that "what Professor Smith demonstrates is that for a Protestant there simply is no way to know which books are inspired. That means, in practice, that a Protestant, if he is logical should not appeal to Scripture to prove anything; he ha no sure mans of knowing which books are part of Scripture (William G. Most, Free from All Error, Libertyville, Ill.: Franciscan Marytown Press, 1985, 9-11)
One consequence of this inability to ascertain the canon has been that the Protestant Bible is an incomplete Bible, Missing are the books of Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, and the two books of Maccabees, as well as sections of Ester and Daniel. These are known to Catholics as the deutero-canonical works. They are just as much a part of the Bible as the rest of the Old Testament, the proto-canonical books. ...
However easy it may have been for the Reformers to say that some books are inspired and thus in the canon, while others are not, they in fact had no solid grounds for making such determinations. Ultimately, an infallible authority is needed if we are to know what belongs in the Bible and what does not. Without such an authority, we are left to our own prejudices, and we cannot tell if our prejudices lead us in the right direction.
The advantages of the Catholic approach to proving inspiration are two. First, the inspiration is really proved, not just "felt". Second, the main fact behind the proof - the fact of an infallible, teaching Church - leads one naturally to an answer to the problem that troubled the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8:31): How is one to know what interpretations are right? The same Church that authenticates the Bible, that establishes its inspiration, is the authority set up by Christ to interpret his word.from A Biblical Defense of Catholicism by Dave Armstrong; Sophia Institute Press, 2003 For further related reading, see the author's website (listed below)
They were included in the Septuagint, which was the "Bible" of the Apostles. They usually quoted the Old Testament Scriptures (in the text of the New Testament) from the Septuagint.
Almost all of the Church Fathers regarded the Septuagint as the standard form of the Old Testament. The deuterocanonical books were in no way differentiated from the other books in the Septuagint, and were generally regarded as canonical. St. Augustine thought the Septuagint was apostolically sanctioned and inspired, and this was the consensus in the early Church.
Many Church Fathers (such as St. Irenaeus, St. Cyprian, and Tertullian) cite these books as Scripture without distinction. Others, mostly from the East (for example, St. Athanasius, St. Cyril of Jerusalem, and St. Gregory Nazianzen) recognized some distinction, but nevertheless still customarily cited the deuterocanonical books as Scripture. St. Jerome, who translated the Hebrew Bible into Latin (the Vulgate, early fifth century), was an exception to the rule (the Church has never held that individual Fathers are infallible).
The Church councils at Hippo (393) and Carthage (397, 419), influenced heavily by St. Augustine, listed the deuterocanonical books as Scripture, which was simply an endorsement of what had become the general consensus of the Church in the West and most of the East. Thus, the Council of Trent merely reiterated in stronger terms what had already been decided eleven and a half centuries earlier, and which had never been seriously challenged until the onset of Protestantism.
Since these councils also finalized the sixty-six canonical books that all Christians accept, it is quit arbitrary for Protestants selectively to delete seven books from this authoritative Canon. This is all the more curious when the complicated, controversial history of the New Testament is understood.
Pope Innocent I concurred with and sanctioned the canonical ruling of the above councils (Letter to Exsuperius, Bishop of Toulouse) in 405.
The earliest Greek manuscripts of the Old Testament, such as Codex Sinaiticus (fourth century) andCodex Alexandrinus ©. 450) include all of the deuterocanonical books mixed in with the others and not separated.
The practice of collecting the deuterocanonical books into a separate unit dates back no further than 1520 (in other words, it was a novel innovation of Protestantism). This is admitted by, for example, the Protestant New English Bible in its "Introduction to the Apocrypha".
Protestants, following Martin Luther, removed the deuterocanonical books from their Bibles, due to their clear teaching of doctrines that had been recently repudiated by Protestants, such as prayers for the dead (Tob. 12:12; 2 Mac. 12:39-45; cf. 1 Cor. 15:29), the intercession of dead saints (2 Mac. 15:14; cf. Rev. 6:9-10), and the intermediary intercession of angels (Tob. 12:12, 15; cf. Rev. 5: 8, 8:3-4). We know this form plain statements of Luther and other reformers.
The seven disputed books are: Tobit, Judith, 1 and 2 Maccabees, Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiasticus (or Sirach), and Baruch. Catholic Bibles also include an additional six chapters (107 verses) in Esther and three chapters (174 verses) in Daniel.
According to major Protestant scholars and historians, in the first four centuries Church leaders (e.g. St. Justin Martyr, Tertullian, St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, St. Cyprian, St. Irenaeus) generally recognized these seven books as canonical and scriptural, following the Septuagint Greek translation of the Old Testament, following the Council of Rome (382), and general consensus, finalized the New Testament canon while also including the deutercanon, in lists that were identical to that of the Council of Trent (1545-1563).
There's a scholarly consensus that this canon was pretty much accepted from the fourth century to the sixteenth, and indeed, the earliest Greek manuscripts of the Old Testament: the Codes Sinaiticus (fourth century) and Codex Alexandrinus (c. 450) include the (unseparated) deuterocanonical books. The Dead Sea Scrolls found at Qumran did not contain Esther, but did contain Tobit.
According to Douglas and Geisler, Jamnia (first century Jewish council) was not an authoritative council, but simply a gathering of scholars, and similar events occurred afterward. In fact, at Jamnia the canonicity of books such as Ester, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon was also disputed. Since both Protestants and Catholics accept these books today, this shows that Jamnia did not "settle" anything. The Jews were still arguing about the canonicity of the books mentioned earlier and also Proverbs into the early second century.
And St. Jerome's sometimes critical views on these books are not a clear-cut as Protestants often make them out to be. In his Apology Against Rufinus (402) for example, he wrote:
When I repeat what the Jews say against the story of Susanna and the the Hymn of the Three Children, and the fables of Bel and the Dragon, which are not contained in the Hebrew Bible, the man who makes this a charge against me proves himself to be a fool and a slanderer; for I explained not what I thought but what they commonly say against us (Apology Against Rufinus, book II, 33)
Significantly, St. Jerome included the deuterocanonical books in the Vulgate, his Latin translation of the Bible, (And he defended the inspiration of Judith in a preface to it.) All in all, there is no clear evidence that St. Jerome rejected these seven books, and much to suggest that he accepted them as inspired Scripture, as the Catholic Church does today. But St. Jerome (like any Church father) does not have the final authority in the Church. He's not infallible.
The historical evidence, all things considered, strongly supports the Catholic belief that these books are inspired and thus indeed part of Holy Scripture from The One-Minute Apologist by Dave Armstrong; Manchester, NH: Sophia Institute Press, 2007 The main differences between the Catholic Bible and Protestant Bibles are in the Old Testament.
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