Biblical Canon

Biblical Canon

The two-volume Pelplin copy of the Gutenberg Bible
Total books	73 in the customary Catholic enumeration
Old Testament	46 books
New Testament	27 books
Canonical status	Inspired, sacred, and normative
Known through	Apostolic Tradition and the Church's discernment
Solemn enumeration	Council of Trent, Session IV, 1546
Old Testament textual inheritance	Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek traditions
Central interpretive unity	Jesus Christ and the one divine economy

The Biblical Canon is the complete collection of inspired books received by the Catholic Church as Sacred Scripture: forty-six books of the Old Testament and twenty-seven books of the New Testament, with all their canonical parts.

Authority level: Dogma

Meaning and dogmatic status

Canon means rule or measured list. The Biblical Canon identifies the writings God inspired and entrusted to the Church as the normative written Word of God. Canonicity concerns the identity of books and all their parts; inspiration concerns their divine authorship through true human authors. In the Catholic faith every canonical book is inspired, and no merely ecclesiastical decision can make an uninspired book inspired.

The Church recognizes rather than creates the canon. Guided by the Holy Spirit, apostolic Tradition, liturgical use, doctrinal coherence, and episcopal judgment enabled a definitive reception of the books already given by God. This discernment is an exercise of authority within revelation's transmission, not a revelation of new books after the apostolic age.

The Catholic collection

The customary Catholic count is seventy-three books: forty-six in the Old Testament and twenty-seven in the New. Counts can vary where books joined in one tradition are divided in another, so identity matters more than arithmetic. The canon includes the complete contents enumerated by the Council of Trent, not merely titles stripped of passages disputed during the Reformation.

The Old Testament comprises the Pentateuch, historical books, wisdom and poetic books, and prophetic books. The New Testament comprises four Gospels, Acts, Pauline letters, Catholic epistles, and Revelation. Liturgical arrangements and printed orders can differ, but moving a book does not alter its canonical rank.

The Old Testament books

The Catholic Old Testament includes Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy; Joshua, Judges, Ruth, First and Second Samuel, First and Second Kings, First and Second Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Tobit, Judith, Esther, First and Second Maccabees; Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Wisdom, Sirach; Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Baruch, Ezekiel, Daniel; and the twelve minor prophets from Hosea through Malachi.

The New Testament books

The New Testament contains Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts; Romans, First and Second Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, First and Second Thessalonians, First and Second Timothy, Titus, Philemon, Hebrews; James, First and Second Peter, First, Second, and Third John, Jude; and Revelation. All twenty-seven possess equal canonical inspiration despite different authors, genres, reception histories, and liturgical frequency.

Deuterocanonical books and parts

Catholics call Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, First and Second Maccabees, and the Greek portions of Esther and Daniel deuterocanonical. The term marks a history of disputed reception in some regions, not secondary inspiration or lesser truth. Eastern and Western Fathers cited these writings, and they entered Catholic worship, theology, art, and moral teaching as Scripture.

Most Protestant Bibles omit them from the Old Testament or print some in an Apocrypha section because Reformers adopted a narrower Old Testament table associated with later rabbinic collections. Catholic usage should not call the deuterocanonical books apocrypha without qualification, because Catholic theology reserves apocryphal for writings outside the canon. Greek additions are canonical parts, not optional appendices to otherwise complete books.

Israel's Scriptures and the Septuagint

The Old Testament reached the Church through plural Jewish textual and linguistic traditions. Hebrew and Aramaic forms, Greek translations commonly called the Septuagint, and other ancient witnesses preserve both shared substance and significant variants. The New Testament often quotes Greek wording and assumes scriptural forms not identical at every point with the later medieval Masoretic Text.

The Septuagint is indispensable to Catholic canon history but no surviving ancient codex functions as a simple first-century Catholic table of contents. Manuscripts vary in arrangement and included works. Catholic reception is therefore not proved by imagining one uniform apostolic volume, nor undermined by textual plurality. Sacred Tradition identifies the canon while textual criticism studies the best attainable form of each inspired book.

Apostolic and patristic reception

The apostles transmitted Christ's Gospel before the New Testament collection was complete. The formation of the Biblical Canon unfolded as apostolic writings circulated among Churches, were read in worship, copied, exchanged, and distinguished from other edifying texts. Connection to apostolic witness, conformity with the received faith, catholic use, and liturgical reception converged over time; no single surviving checklist by itself caused the canon.

Patristic lists sometimes differ at their edges because local access, doubts about authorship, and disciplinary judgments varied. Hebrews, James, Second Peter, Second and Third John, Jude, and Revelation faced questions in some places; other valued writings were read without final canonical reception. Diversity during discernment is evidence of serious judgment, not proof that the later canon is arbitrary.

Liturgy and the rule of faith

Public reading was a powerful sign of reception, but not every text read for edification was thereby canonical. The rule of faith helped the Church recognize apostolic Scripture, while Scripture nourished and articulated that rule. Canon, Creed, episcopal succession, sacramental worship, and Tradition matured together within one Church rather than as competing authorities.

Councils and definitive reception

Synods at Rome, Hippo, and Carthage in the late fourth and early fifth centuries witnessed the Catholic collection and sought confirmation in the wider Church. Their authority and exact terminology should be stated historically, without pretending a local synod was itself an ecumenical definition. Their lists nevertheless refute the claim that the deuterocanonical books first entered Catholic Bibles at Trent.

The ecumenical Council of Florence enumerated the books in the Decree for the Jacobites, and the Council of Trent solemnly received the complete books with all their parts in response to Reformation controversy. Trent's decree did not discover a new Bible; it definitively settled for Catholics a canon long used and authoritatively witnessed. Vatican I and Dei Verbum reaffirmed inspiration and ecclesial reception.

Canon, inspiration, and truth

Canonical status entails that God is author through inspired human authors who used their real faculties, genres, sources, and historical settings. Inspiration is not mechanical dictation, and canonicity is not a guarantee that every sentence is modern scientific or historiographical prose. Sound interpretation asks what the sacred writer truly asserts while holding that Scripture teaches firmly, faithfully, and without error the truth God willed for salvation.

A canon is a collection with internal unity, not seventy-three isolated oracles. The Old and New Testaments illuminate one another in Christ. The literal sense grounds interpretation; typological, moral, and anagogical senses unfold realities signified by the text within the divine economy. Canonical reading does not erase tensions, human voices, historical development, or the need for linguistic study.

Scripture, Tradition, and Magisterium

Sacred Tradition makes the full canon known to the Church. This fact does not place Scripture beneath arbitrary later custom: Scripture and Tradition flow from one divine source and form one deposit, while the Magisterium serves both by listening, guarding, and explaining. A self-authenticating-book theory cannot explain disputed boundaries without smuggling in historical ecclesial judgments.

The Magisterium can define the canon because Christ entrusted revelation to the apostolic Church and promised the Spirit's assistance. It cannot add a newly composed apostolic book, delete an inconvenient inspired passage, or make an error inspired. The closed canon belongs to completed public revelation; later private revelations, papal documents, councils, saints' writings, and liturgical texts can be authoritative or holy without becoming Scripture.

Text, book boundaries, and translations

The canon identifies books and parts, while textual criticism evaluates variant readings among manuscripts. No single surviving manuscript is identical to the canon as an abstract norm in every spelling, sequence, and verse. Catholic scholarship uses Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Latin, Syriac, and other witnesses to establish critical texts without treating manuscript variation as uncertainty about whether Matthew or Isaiah belongs to Scripture.

Translations can faithfully convey the inspired text but are not separately inspired by ecclesiastical approval. The Septuagint and Vulgate possess exceptional authority and historical importance; the Nova Vulgata is a Latin typical edition for current Catholic use. Liturgical translations require approval beyond ordinary publication. A translation's table of contents must preserve the Catholic canon even when notes explain textual differences.

Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant canons

Catholics and Eastern Orthodox share a wider Old Testament inheritance than Protestants, but Orthodox Churches do not all enumerate precisely the same additional books or parts. These differences require article-level accuracy rather than a single Eastern canon asserted for every Church. The twenty-seven-book New Testament is shared broadly among Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Christians.

Protestant communities generally use thirty-nine Old Testament books counted from a Hebrew-style arrangement, producing sixty-six total. A Catholic can cooperate in biblical study and recognize the inspired books present in that collection while stating plainly that it is materially incomplete. Editions containing an Apocrypha can preserve important texts but do not thereby express Catholic canonical status unless they receive them as Scripture.

Use in liturgy, theology, and life

The complete canon nourishes Mass, the Divine Office, sacraments, preaching, catechesis, theology, art, law, and personal prayer. The Roman Lectionary selects an extensive but incomplete set for proclamation; omission from a cycle does not remove a passage from the canon. Lectio divina and sustained study should bring the faithful into books less often heard publicly as well as familiar Gospels and Psalms.

All preaching must be nourished and ruled by Scripture read in living Tradition. Canonical fidelity forbids both selective proof-texting and embarrassment about difficult books. The Church receives genealogies, laws, laments, wisdom, prophecy, narratives, letters, and apocalypse as one inspired library whose center is Christ and whose end is communion with God.