1.2 How Many Books Are in the Bible?

Hello, everyone. Glad you are here as we start to dive in to the new Bible Unthumped podcast. 

This is the first sort-of substantive episode, and these first several episodes of this journey will sort of be about some Bible basics. And, in this episode, we’re going to start with a question about the Bible that seems likes a softball. And that question is: How many books are in the Bible?

And the answer is…it’s all relative. It’s relative to your tradition and its history, because Christianity isn’t just one thing, and neither is the Bible, it turns out. In fact, it is fair to say that the church today does not agree on how many books are in the Bible, and it never has. 

If you grew up in a Protestant tradition, like I did, you probably thought this was an easy question and that the obvious answer was that there are 66 books in the Bible. There are 39 OId Testament books and 27 New Testament books. That’s what my Bible’s table of contents says, anyway. 

When I was a kid in private Christian school, I had to memorize all 66 books in order. And, I can still recite them. It’s kind of a fun party trick of mine. Among my other party tricks, by the way, I can also recite The Lord’s Prayer in Spanish, the Road Not Taken by Robert Frost, and I can sneeze on command. So, how about that?

Well, so why is the answer to how many books are in the Bible not just 66? Well, because only the Protestants think that way. Protestants are one of three major branches of Christianity and account for roughly one third of the world’s Christians, and the other two thirds of the world’s Christians have a different number of books in the Bible. 

Roman Catholics are the largest branch of Christians today, and they have 73 books. Their Old Testament is 7 books longer than the Protestant one. 

And the third major branch of Christianity, the Eastern Orthodox—who live mostly in Greece, the Middle East, and much of Eastern Europe—have several more books even than the Catholics. Interestingly, the final tally varies a bit among Orthodox churches, but it comes in somewhere between 75 and 79.  

And then you have the interesting case of the Ethiopian Church, which is not one of the three Major branches of Christianity, but which does have about 50 million members. For the sake of comparison, that’s about four times the number of today’s Southern Baptists. The Ethiopian bible is the largest in the world with eighty-something total books. It seems that, like the Orthodox, they are not too definite about it. 

So, the answer to this episode’s question, how many books are in the Bible, is somewhere between 66 and 80-something, depending on whom you ask.  

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Now, how did Catholics, and Orthodox, and Protestants all come up with different lists of books? That question has a complicated answer. Maybe in some future episode we’ll talk about it in more detail, but here is the quick version. 

Okay, in the first several centuries after Jesus, there was no such thing as the Bible, per se. No book collection, that is. That’s really important to know. Of course, there were books, though, floating around in the many Christian churches but nobody was really coordinating who read what. Some books were deemed holy and on-message, and they were sometimes collected and put in lists by this or that church leader. 

But, the lists were all quite different from each other. Some books you’ve never heard of showed up on many lists, and several of the books that you take for granted as Bible books were often left off. And the total number was not at all consistent during this earliest period. There was no standard. 

Then, in 4th century, the church undergoes a sort of standardization process thanks in large part to the Roman Emperor Constantine, who insisted that Christians across his empire get on the same page as best they could. In the late AD 300s, a few church councils in North Africa, for the first time, agreed on a list of books that looks pretty much like the 73-book list that the Catholics use today. So, there’s the history for branch one, the Catholics. 

But, this list wasn’t exactly official, and while it did become pretty much standard in the Western churches centered on Rome, the churches in the East, centered on Constantinople, felt free to include some more books they thought qualified as scripture—75+ in total. Today’s Orthodox Christians are the religious descendants of those Eastern churches. So there’s branch two, the Orthodox. 

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So, now let’s talk about branch three, the Protestants and their 66-book version. The Protestants broke away from the Catholics in the 16th century, 500 years ago, after Martin Luther basically rebelled against the corruptions of Catholicism at that time. 

When the Protestants discarded the church hierarchy as having primary authority, they needed a new source of authority and turned to the ancient books of the church. When the Protestants of that time were deciding which books, though, they didn’t just accept the Catholic ones. The did something interesting instead. And, to explain what they did, we need to rewind to around the year AD 200 and talk about the Jews and their Bible.  

At roughly the same time the ancient Christians were coming up with their earliest book lists, the Jews were doing the same thing—developing their canon—but they weren’t exactly collaborating with the Christians on the effort. Ultimately, the Jewish rabbis came up with a list that left out seven Old Testament books that would later make it into those Christian Bible lists. The Jews decided not to include Tobit, Judith, Baruch, the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, and 1st and 2nd Maccabees. 

And, when the Protestants, about 1300s years later, went looking for their book list, the interesting thing they did was go with the ancient Jewish standard for the Old Testament rather than the ancient Christian one. Thus, minus 7. 66 books, not 73. 

By the way, today’s Jewish Bible, which Christians call the Old Testament, has only 24 books in it, not the Protestant 39, even though the content is the same. This is because Jews combine quite a few of the books that you know into larger books. So for example, 1st and 2nd Samuel are simply one book called Samuel, 1st and 2nd Chronicles are just Chronicles, and Ezra and Nehemiah are one combined book. In addition, 12 of the small books we call minor prophets—from Hosea to Malachi—are all put together as a single book referred to as The Twelve. 

Once you make all of these combinations, you come up with 24 total books in the Hebrew Bible. Except, I should say, historically speaking, the Jews didn’t actually combine them. Rather, the Christians separated them from their original combinations. 

And I think we’ll leave it there for this episode. Hope you enjoyed it and learned something. Maybe you can get your hands on some of those quote unquote “extra” books. They are really interesting to read. 

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Less thumping. More understanding. See you next time.