The Catholic Bible — Sacred Scripture, Canon, and Tradition

An introduction to the 73 books Catholics receive as Sacred Scripture, their place in the life of the Church, and the English Catholic Bible tradition.

Read the Douay-Rheims Bible History of the Douay-Rheims

What Catholics Mean by “The Bible”

For Catholics, “the Bible” is not the name of one particular English translation. It is the collection of sacred books received by the Church as Sacred Scripture: 46 books in the Old Testament and 27 in the New Testament, conventionally counted as 73 books. The Catechism teaches that the Church discerned the canon through apostolic Tradition and receives the books of both Testaments as inspired by the Holy Spirit. Catholic Christianity therefore approaches the Bible as the written Word of God entrusted to the Church, proclaimed in worship, studied in theology, prayed devotionally, and read within the living faith of the Christian community.

46Old Testament books
27New Testament books
73Books in the Catholic canon

The 27 New Testament books are shared by Catholic and Protestant Bibles. The familiar difference is in the Old Testament: most Protestant editions contain 39 books, while Catholic editions contain 46 and also preserve additional passages in Esther and Daniel. Those seven books and the associated additions are commonly called deuterocanonical in Catholic usage.

Scripture, Tradition, and the Teaching Office of the Church

Catholic teaching does not set Scripture against Tradition. The Second Vatican Council's Dei Verbum teaches that Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition belong to the one deposit of the Word of God entrusted to the Church. The Church's teaching office, or Magisterium, is not understood as being above that Word; its task is to serve it—listening to it, guarding it, and faithfully explaining what has been handed on.

This framework also explains why the canon matters. The biblical books did not arrive as one bound volume with an inspired table of contents. Individual writings were composed, copied, circulated, proclaimed, and received across the life of Israel and the early Church. The Church's recognition of the canon was therefore an act of discernment: identifying which writings belonged to the authoritative Scriptures already functioning within the worship and faith of God's people.

Inspiration and Human Authors

Catholic teaching confesses God as the author of Sacred Scripture while also affirming the genuine authorship of the human writers. Dei Verbum states that God worked through human authors who used their own faculties and abilities. Consequently, responsible interpretation asks what the sacred writers intended to communicate through real human languages, literary forms, historical settings, and cultures.

This is why Catholic biblical study is not opposed to history, archaeology, philology, manuscript study, or literary analysis. Those disciplines can help readers understand the human words through which divine revelation is communicated. Catholic interpretation at its best therefore combines reverence for inspiration with serious attention to language, genre, context, the unity of Scripture, and the faith of the Church.

The Old Testament, the Septuagint, and the Deuterocanonical Books

The early Christian Church inherited Scripture from Judaism in a world where Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek all mattered. Greek-speaking Jews had produced the ancient Greek translation traditionally called the Septuagint. New Testament writers frequently used Greek forms of Old Testament passages, and the Septuagint became enormously important in early Christianity. Vatican II notes that the Church accepted this ancient Greek Old Testament from the beginning and continued to honor other ancient versions, especially the Latin Vulgate in the West.

The Catholic Old Testament includes Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, 1 Maccabees, and 2 Maccabees, as well as Greek material incorporated into Esther and Daniel. These books are not treated by Catholics as an appendix of useful but non-inspired literature. They are received as Scripture and printed within the Old Testament itself.

Deuterocanonical does not mean “second-class Scripture.” The term distinguishes books whose canonical reception was disputed in some places from books whose status was more universally uncontested. In Catholic teaching, the deuterocanonical books are inspired Scripture.

Deuterocanonical Books and Additions

These existing Living Word Bibles pages provide direct access to the books and passages that most visibly distinguish a Catholic Old Testament from a standard Protestant edition:

Why 73 Books Does Not Mean “66 Plus Nine”

The standard modern Catholic count is 73 books because the Old Testament contains 46 books and the New Testament 27. The Greek portions of Esther and Daniel are not normally counted as two additional independent books. They are incorporated into those biblical books. That is why a Catholic Bible can contain seven additional Old Testament books plus additional passages in two more books and still be described as a 73-book Bible, rather than a 75-book Bible.

Book ordering can also differ between editions. Catholic Bibles ordinarily place the deuterocanonical books within the Old Testament according to literary and historical groupings instead of collecting them in a separate appendix. Older Douay-Rheims editions may additionally use Vulgate-derived book names and numbering. These differences in title, sequence, or numbering do not create a different Catholic canon; they reflect different inherited editorial traditions.

How the Canon Was Received and Affirmed

The Catholic canon developed through centuries of Christian worship, teaching, manuscript circulation, and ecclesiastical discernment. Not every biblical book was equally uncontested in every place. Early Christians debated the status of some Old Testament books, while several New Testament writings—including Hebrews, James, Jude, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, and Revelation—also faced questions in parts of the ancient Church.

By the late fourth and early fifth centuries, important Western lists closely matched the Catholic canon recognized today. The Synod of Hippo in 393 and councils at Carthage in 397 and 419 are among the frequently cited witnesses, and Pope Innocent I supplied a comparable list in 405. These local decisions did not manufacture Scripture; they document the Church's growing consensus about the books to be read as sacred.

The Council of Trent, meeting during the Reformation, solemnly enumerated the canonical books in 1546. Trent's decree was therefore a definitive Catholic response in an age when the extent and authority of the Old Testament canon had become a major point of controversy. It is historically misleading to say that Trent simply “added seven books” to the Bible in the sixteenth century. The disputed books had already been used in Catholic Scripture, worship, theology, and earlier canonical lists for many centuries.

Ancient Christian Use Before a Printed “Table of Contents”

It is easy to imagine the early Bible as though Christians possessed a single standardized bound volume from the apostolic age. In reality, biblical books circulated as individual scrolls and codices, collections of Gospels, apostolic letters, Psalters, prophetic books, and Old Testament collections. The canon emerged within that manuscript and liturgical world. Recognition could therefore be strong and widespread before every region possessed an identical physical Bible or before every disputed book had ceased to be discussed.

The fourth- and fifth-century canonical lists are important because they show that the Church's discernment had become increasingly explicit. Augustine and the North African councils are especially significant witnesses in the Latin West. The lists associated with Hippo and Carthage contain the books later enumerated at Trent. At the same time, historical accuracy requires acknowledging that individual Fathers sometimes expressed different judgments about particular books. The Catholic claim is not that no Christian ever questioned a deuterocanonical book, but that the Church ultimately received a definite canon through her apostolic and ecclesial tradition.

Jerome, the Latin Vulgate, and the Western Church

No history of the Catholic Bible can ignore the Latin Vulgate. Beginning in late antiquity, the Latin biblical tradition associated especially with St. Jerome became the dominant Bible of Western Christianity. For centuries it shaped Catholic liturgy, theology, preaching, monastic prayer, art, and education. Medieval Western Christians encountered Scripture overwhelmingly through the Vulgate or through translations and explanations rooted in it.

Trent declared the old Latin Vulgate authentic for public reading, disputation, preaching, and exposition in the Church. That decree is sometimes misunderstood as a rejection of Hebrew and Greek. Catholic teaching later made the distinction explicit. Pope Pius XII's Divino Afflante Spiritu explained in 1943 that the Vulgate's ecclesiastical authority did not prevent recourse to the original texts and that Catholic translations could be made directly from them.

From the Douay-Rheims to Modern Catholic Translations

The Douay-Rheims Bible belongs inside this larger Catholic story. English Catholic scholars in exile produced its New Testament at Reims in 1582 and its Old Testament at Douai in 1609–1610. It translated the Latin Vulgate closely into English and provided extensive Catholic annotations. Bishop Richard Challoner's revisions in 1749–1752 produced the form most often encountered today. The Douay-Rheims consequently represents a classic Vulgate-based English Catholic tradition, but it is not synonymous with “the Catholic Bible” itself.

Modern Catholic translation increasingly works directly with the biblical languages and the best available textual witnesses. Pius XII encouraged this work in 1943, and Vatican II went further by urging suitable and accurate translations “especially from the original texts.” In the United States, the history leading from the Confraternity Bible to the New American Bible and later the New American Bible Revised Edition (NABRE) illustrates the shift. The NABRE's Old Testament translators worked with Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Septuagint, and other textual evidence according to the requirements of individual books.

The Catholic Biblical Renewal of the Twentieth Century

The twentieth century brought an important renewal in Catholic biblical scholarship. Better access to ancient manuscripts, the recovery of biblical Hebrew and Greek as normal tools of Catholic scholarship, archaeological discoveries, advances in linguistics, and the emergence of modern textual criticism changed the environment in which translations were produced. The discovery and publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls added especially important evidence for the textual history of the Old Testament.

Divino Afflante Spiritu encouraged Catholic exegetes to use the ancient languages and the methods of textual criticism in seeking the meaning of the sacred books. The later Constitution Dei Verbum placed this work inside a broader theology of revelation and explicitly called for accurate translations from the original texts. The transition from older Vulgate-based English revisions toward translations such as the NAB and NABRE is therefore part of a wider Catholic recovery of the Bible's Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek textual foundations.

There Is More Than One Catholic English Translation

A Catholic Bible is identified principally by its canon and ecclesiastical approval, not by one mandatory English wording. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops currently lists multiple translations approved for private use and study, including the NABRE, the New Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition, and the NRSVue Catholic Edition, alongside other approved texts and partial translations.

Older Catholic translations that received proper ecclesiastical approval remain part of Catholic biblical history as well. Different translations may emphasize formal correspondence, literary readability, public proclamation, study, or devotional use. What makes an edition Catholic is not that every phrase must sound like the Douay-Rheims, but that it contains the Catholic canon and is presented in a form approved for Catholic use where ecclesiastical approval is required.

Ecclesiastical Approval and Catholic Editions

Modern Catholic editions commonly identify the ecclesiastical approval under which they are published. In the Latin Church, canon law gives the Apostolic See and episcopal conferences authority to approve translations of Sacred Scripture; earlier translations could also be approved by competent local ecclesiastical authority. The USCCB's current list of approved translations reflects that canonical structure in the United States.

Terms such as nihil obstat and imprimatur may also appear in Catholic books. They concern ecclesiastical review and permission to publish; they should not be confused with the doctrine of biblical inspiration itself. Nor does approval mean that every approved Catholic translation must make identical stylistic or textual decisions. It means that the edition has been judged suitable for the Catholic use for which the approval was granted.

The Bible in the Catholic Liturgy

Scripture is woven into Catholic worship. The Mass contains a Liturgy of the Word in which readings from Scripture are proclaimed; on Sundays and solemnities this ordinarily includes an Old Testament reading, a Psalm, a New Testament reading, and a Gospel reading. The homily is rooted in the proclaimed Scriptures and the mystery being celebrated. Catholics therefore encounter the Bible not only as a book for private reading but as a text continually proclaimed within the worship of the Church.

The Lectionary is not a different Bible. It is an arranged selection of biblical passages appointed for liturgical proclamation across the Church year. The translation authorized for liturgical use in a particular country may differ from the translation a Catholic chooses for personal study.

Reading the Catholic Bible as One Story

Catholic interpretation emphasizes the unity of the two Testaments. The Old Testament retains its permanent value as the Word of God and prepares for the coming of Christ; the New Testament centers on Jesus Christ and the apostolic witness to his life, death, resurrection, and saving work. The four Gospels occupy a unique place because they give the principal witness to the incarnate Word.

This does not mean every passage is read as though genre and historical context do not matter. Law, wisdom literature, poetry, prophecy, Gospel, epistle, and apocalypse communicate differently. Catholic reading seeks the literal sense intended by the sacred authors while also reading each text within the unity of Scripture, the living Tradition of the Church, and the coherence of Christian faith.

Prayer, Study, and Lectio Divina

Catholic use of the Bible extends beyond formal liturgy. Vatican II urged clergy, religious, and the faithful to become familiar with Scripture through frequent reading and insisted that prayer should accompany biblical reading so that it becomes a genuine conversation with God. This conviction underlies Catholic practices of meditative Scripture reading, Bible study, the Liturgy of the Hours, family reading, and the ancient discipline commonly called lectio divina.

Lectio divina is not a replacement for historical or theological study. It approaches the inspired text as prayer: reading attentively, meditating on its meaning, responding to God in prayer, and resting in contemplation. The Catholic Bible therefore functions simultaneously as a text for scholarship, proclamation, catechesis, moral formation, and personal encounter with God.

Easy Access to Sacred Scripture

One of Vatican II's clearest biblical principles is that easy access to Sacred Scripture should be provided for all the Christian faithful. That concern belongs to a long history of copying, translating, proclaiming, printing, and now digitally distributing the Bible. Catholic biblical life today includes printed Bibles, lectionaries, audio Scripture, Bible study, lectio divina, online texts, scholarly editions, and translations prepared for different languages and reading contexts.

The purpose is not merely informational. Dei Verbum describes Scripture as nourishment for preaching and the Christian life and speaks of the Father meeting his children in the sacred books. Catholic devotion to Scripture is therefore ultimately directed toward encounter with Christ, the living Word to whom the written Scriptures bear witness.

Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox Old Testaments

Discussions of “the biblical canon” should also recognize that Christianity contains more than two Old Testament arrangements. Catholic and Protestant Christians share the same 27-book New Testament, but their Old Testament canons differ as described above. Eastern Orthodox churches may receive additional books or arrange Old Testament material differently according to their own ecclesial and Septuagint traditions. Thus “Catholic Bible” identifies a specific canon within the larger history of Christian Scripture; it should not be used as a synonym for every Bible that contains books beyond the Protestant 39-book Old Testament.

These differences invite careful historical study rather than caricature. The biblical canon developed within ancient Jewish and Christian communities long before modern denominational labels existed. Comparing the canons is most useful when readers distinguish questions of manuscript history, liturgical reception, ecclesiastical authority, and later confessional decisions instead of assuming that one medieval or Reformation-era event explains the entire story.

Interactive 73-Book Table of Contents

The links below open the Douay-Rheims reader at the beginning of each biblical book. The book names follow common modern Catholic English usage. Older Douay-Rheims editions may use traditional forms such as Josue, Paralipomenon, Ecclesiasticus, Machabees, and Apocalypse.

The Pentateuch

Historical Books

Wisdom & Poetry

Prophets

Gospels & Acts

Pauline Letters

Catholic Letters & Revelation

Open the Catholic Bible Reader

Sources & Further Reading