The Complete Bible
The Canon of the Bible
The Complete Bible contains 73 books, ranging in length from a few hundred words to many thousands of words. Together, these books comprise the official canon or list books that makes up the table of contents of the Bible. Of these books, 46 were written before the time of the Incarnation of Christ and are called the books of the Old Testament. The other 27 books were written after the time of the Ascension of Christ and are called the books of the New Testament.
The difference between the Catholic and Protestant Bibles arose in the following manner. The Jewish people living in the few centuries before the Birth of Christ were divided into two groups - the Jews dwelling in Israel/Palestine and spoke Hebrew, and the large number of Jews scattered throughout the Roman Empire and speaking the Greek language, a result of the conquest of Alexander the Great of Greece.
In the centuries before the birth of Christ, the Jews in Israel/Palestine re-examined and eliminated some of the books from the existing collection as, “not in harmony” with the Law of Moses and as of, “doubtful inspiration” in their opinion. The Pharisees placed four criteria which their sacred books had to pass in order to be included in the revised Jewish canon:
(1) They had to be harmony with the Pentateuch (Torah or Law);
(2) They had to have been written before the time of Ezra;
(3) They had to be written in Hebrew;
(4) They had to have been written in Israel/Palestine.
By placing these arbitrary criteria, they eliminated Judith, probably written in Aramaic; Wisdom and 2 Maccabees, written in Greek; Tobit and parts of Daniel and Esther, written in Aramaic and probably outside of Israel/Palestine; Baruch, written outside of Israel/Palestine; and Sirach and 1 Maccabees, written after Ezra. By the 1st Century after Our Lord Jesus Christ, this revised canon was accepted by the Jews was called the “Palestinian Canon.”
The Church Recognizes the Alexandrine Canon. From the earliest times, the Christian Church recognized the Jewish Canon of the Greek-Roman tradition, or Alexandrine Canon, as being the true Bible. The three languages the books of the Bible were originally written in were Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. Aramaic is a branch of the Semitic languages, and was the language used in Israel/Palestine in the time of Our Blessed Lord Jesus Christ, it is the language Our Lord spoke. Hebrew is a Semitic language which originated in Canaan and which was passed on by Abraham and his descendants, reaching its greatest glory in the reigns of King David and his heir King Solomon. It was the language of the Holy Land until about the 3rd Century B.C., when it was supplanted by Aramaic. The Greek language as used in the Bible is not the classical Greek as we know it today, but a dialect spread throughout the known world of the time by conquests of Alexander the Great. Most of the books of the Old Testament were written in Hebrew, while all of the New Testament, excepting Matthew, was written in Greek. The Book of Wisdom and 2 Maccabees were also written in Greek. Portions of the Book of Daniel, Ezra, Jeremiah, and Esther, and all of Tobit, Judith, and the Gospel of St. Matthew were written in Aramaic.
Jesus Himself quoted from this Bible, and it was not until the Protestant Reformation was this canon seriously challenged.
These seven disputed books are called the Deuterocanonical books, while the rest of the books of the Old Testament comprise the Protocanonical books. Deuterocanonical means, “2nd canon” and Protocanonical means “1st canon”
Martin Luther rejected the deuterocanonical books of the Old Testament. At one time he also eliminated Hebrews, James, Jude, and Apocalypse (Revelation) from the New Testament, but later Protestants reinserted them. Today the Catholic and the Protestant New Testament books are identical.
The Bible as originally set down was not divided into chapter and verse as we know it today. Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury in the 13th Century, first divided the Bible text into Chapters. Santes Pagninus divided the Old Testament chapters into verses in 1528, and Robert Etienne, a printer in Paris, did the same for the New Testament in 1551
The Bible is extremely difficult to understand, even by Bible scholars. It was written in languages long dead, and in the manner and idiom of the time. To interpret the Bible, it is not only necessary to understand the languages in which the Bible was written, but to understand the meanings that the words of the Bible had at the time they were written. The Bible, therefore, has to be interpreted to be under-stood, and for Catholics, the Church, guided by the Holy Spirit, is the official guardian and infallible interpreter of the Bible.
All the books of the Bible have the Holy Spirit as their principal author, although He Himself did not write them. The Holy Spirit inspired the human authors of the Bible to write down in their own words, and in the manner and style of the day, what He wanted them to write, and He guided them to the extent that they wrote faithfully what they had been taught. This working together of God and man in the writing of the Bible is called inspiration. This inspiration covers not only matters of faith and morals, but extends as well to the facts of history as related, and to the whole Bible.
Citation Source: Original, Inspiration and History of the Bible - Fireside Catholic Publishing