Canon guide
How the Bible Became One Book
The Bible is a library assembled over centuries. Here is how its contents were sorted, why the lists differ between traditions, and what the early evidence shows.
The word itself gives the game away. “Bible” comes from the Greek ta biblia, “the books” — a plural. What we handle as one volume is a collection written across a very long span, in three languages, in genres ranging from law codes to love poetry to letters.
How that collection took its present shape is a documented historical process, and the documents survive.
Three languages, many centuries
Most of the Hebrew Bible is in Hebrew. Several sections are in Aramaic, including much of Daniel 2–7 and parts of Ezra. The New Testament is in Koine Greek, the common Greek of the eastern Mediterranean.
By the third century BCE the Hebrew scriptures were being translated into Greek in Alexandria, producing the Septuagint — the version many New Testament writers appear to quote.
Why the lists differ
Different traditions count differently, and the differences are old rather than arbitrary. Jewish tradition counts twenty-four books, covering the same material Protestant Bibles divide into thirty-nine.
Catholic Bibles include a further set of books — Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, 1 and 2 Maccabees, and additions to Esther and Daniel — which were part of the Greek collection but not of the Hebrew one. Orthodox canons include more again. Protestant Bibles group these as the Apocrypha or omit them.
- Protestant Bibles: 39 Old Testament books and 27 New Testament books, 66 in total.
- Catholic Bibles: 73 books, a count affirmed at the Council of Trent in 1546.
- The disagreement concerns the Old Testament collection; the 27-book New Testament is common to all these traditions.
The New Testament list
The twenty-seven book New Testament was not decreed into existence at a single meeting. Lists appear over time, and books that were used everywhere and traced to the apostolic generation settled first, while a handful were debated longer.
The Muratorian Fragment, usually dated to the later second century, preserves an early list. The earliest surviving list that matches the twenty-seven exactly is in Athanasius’s festal letter of 367 CE, by which point the collection was largely settled in practice.
Chapters and verses came last
The familiar reference system is medieval and early modern. Chapter divisions in general use are credited to Stephen Langton in the early thirteenth century; Robert Estienne added verse numbers to the Greek New Testament in 1551, and the Geneva Bible of 1560 brought verse-numbered text to English readers.
Every author in the Bible wrote without them. That is worth remembering whenever a verse is quoted on its own.