Is My Bible MISSING Books? Here's What Catholic Saints Say

Is the Bible you're holding right now missing seven books? Somebody probably told you that it is, that Martin Luther ripped them out 500 years ago. Well, in this video, I'm gonna show you exactly why your Bible has 66 books and not 73. I'm gonna use evidence most Christians have never heard of, including testimony from two of the Roman Catholic Church's own saints. And by the end of it, you'll be able to answer one of the hardest questions a skeptic can ever ask you about your Bible. Welcome back to Get Into the Word. My name is Robbie Gallaty. Open a Catholic Bible and you'll count 73 books. How do I know? Because I was raised in a strict Roman Catholic home. When I accepted Christ and was born again, when Jesus became my personal Lord and Savior, I was given a Protestant Bible and I noticed something different early on, that this Bible contained 66 books. Now, the same New Testament books were there, but there were seven extra books in the Old Testament. We call this the intertestamental period. Books like Wisdom, Sirach, Judith, Baruch, Tobit, First and Second Maccabees, plus additions to the books of Daniel and Esther. So which Bible is actually right? The Catholic Bible or the Protestant Bible? So let me steel man the other side first

because this challenge deserves a serious answer. A Catholic apologist by the name of Father Frank Schocken or Schockone puts it this way. Here's what he said. Many non-Catholic Christians claim the Bible is the sole rule of faith. If that's true, they should be able to answer clearly, how do you know for sure what belongs in the Bible? Because here's his point, and it's a fair one, and I agree. The Bible does not come with an inspired table of contents. There's no verse that lists these are the 66 authorized books. And so he argues, Bible-only Christians have no way to answer the question using only the Bible. While Catholics, he says, can answer it. We trust the infallible church established by Jesus Christ. It was the church, he says, that gave us the list so the church stands over the list, in his opinion. Then comes the historical claim. Cowson asserts that Martin Luther removed seven books from the canon after 1,500 years of church tradition. He blames that on the Protestant Reformation. Protestants now call, Protestants are just non-Catholic, non-Church of England. Protestants now call these books the Apocrypha. You may have heard that term. Catholics call them the Deutero-canonical books, the second canon, the second group of authorized books, if you will. Now, to be fair,

there's real history on the side of the ledger. The Hebrew canon never included the Apocrypha, but some early Christian canons or collections of books and manuscripts actually did. Copies of the Septuagint, which is the Greek translation of the Old Testament, included these books. Early church fathers like Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Clement of Alexandria, just to name a few, proposed the Old Testament list of 46 books, which included these seven, and a string of church councils, Hippo in AD 393, the Third Council of Carthage in 397, the Sixth Council of Carthage in 419, and finally, the Council of Trent in 1546 submitted the Apocrypha as canonical or, in a sense, acceptable books of the Bible. So case closed, right? That's what you're thinking. The councils have spoken. Luther rebelled. Protestants are missing seven books in their Bible. Well, not so fast, because when you actually call the witnesses from the early church or the early church fathers to stand up, including men from the Catholic church itself, these are canonized saints. These are people respected in the Catholic faith.

The case starts to unravel. Let me introduce you to these different witnesses. Here's what the Luther remove them story actually leaves out. There was never an overwhelming consensus of the early church fathers to accept these seven books anyway. For every voice that included them, there was a learned bishop or theologian on the opposite side of the aisle who held to the line of 39 books, not 43, 39 books. Witness one was Melito of Sardis. He was around 175 AD, more than 1,000 years before Martin Luther was ever born. Melito produced a list of accepted Old Testament books that mirrored the Jewish canon. Witness number two, you ready for this? Origin of Alexandria, around 230. Now he is a respectable person in the early church. You look him up if you're interested. He believed the same thing. His list mimicked the Jewish canon from the Old Testament Hebrew Bible of 39 books. Let me give you another one. Athanasius, the Bishop of Alexandria in AD 349. See the connection here? These are early church fathers. This is the man who actually stood against the whole world

to defend the deity of Christ. Athanasius listed the books of the Hebrew Bible and regarded books like Judith and Tobit, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, as he said, they were not to be included in the canon of scripture but were appointed by the fathers to be read for instruction and ideas of historical faith. They're not wrong to read, they're just not canon. Do you hear the distinction? Useful for instruction but not the inspired word of God. Let me give you a fourth witness. Eusebius of Caesarea, the great church historian. Eusebius actually quotes the canonical list of Josephus, early church historian, Melito, and Origen. According to the Hebrew canon, he says these are the books we should endorse. And here's what he says. These are canonical scriptures of the Old Testament. They are undisputed among the Hebrew people. Now hang in, because I'm gonna give you the last piece, which I think is the most compelling at the end, but you're getting to where I'm going. In his chronicle, he actually distinctly separates the books of the Maccabeans from the divine scriptures and even flags books like Sirach and Wisdom as disputed books even back then. They were even disputed in those days. Let me give you witness number five. Pay attention to this one. Josephus, the early church historian.

Josephus argued that the only books of the Hebrew Bible stem from the period when the spirit of prophecy inspired the authors. The other books, in his opinion, were written after that period and therefore should not be reckoned or accepted as canonical. Canonical just means authorized or accepted. Now here's why this matters. According to Jewish and, I would say, Protestant belief, tradition says that divine revelation went silent after Malachi and didn't resume until John the Baptist, who is the last, according to Jesus, and greatest prophet, picked up and spoke again, get this, 400 years later. And here's the detail that decides everything. Every single one of the apocryphal works was written during that 400-year period of silence. Every one of them falls inside of that gap. Now, if you're keeping score, you might say, well, the fathers were split. The early church leaders were split on this. Fair enough. So let me bring out two witnesses that end the debate, in my opinion, because both of them are canonized saints of the Catholic church. So let's hear what the saints or leaders that most, if not all Catholics would honor and respect,

let's hear what they have to say. The first is Saint Augustine, arguably one of the most influential theologians in Catholic history. In his famous work, The City of God, Augustine addresses the books attributed to Solomon. He affirms three of those books as canonical, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Songs, or Song of Solomon. But concerning the Book of Wisdom, or Sirach, two of the seven disputed books, he writes that although it has been customary to ascribe these books to Solomon on account of some of the resemblances of style, the most learned theologians have no doubt said they are not his. Now, sit with that for a moment. Augustine, a saint, says the most learned and schooled, educated theologians, scholars, agree that these books were not written by the man they're actually attributed to. And if the attribution fails, then the reliability of the contents within is compromised. What his testimony reveals is that two canons were circulating at that time among the early church fathers. The point is, this was never settled the way the 1,500 years of tradition story actually claims. Even then, they were still debating on which books were included.

Let me give you a second insight here from another Catholic saint, Saint Jerome. Now, he's important. This is a man that the church commissioned herself to produce the Latin Bible, which we call the Latin Vulgate. Vulgate just means vernacular. or language of the common man. That's what it means, Latin Vulgate. And here's the story most people have never heard before. Jerome wanted to include only the 39 books of the Hebrew Bible in his translation. But in his words, he was actually pressured by the clergy and the bishops who loved the Apocrypha, so he compromised, he gave in. He translated the Apocrypha, but if you notice, he separated it from the other 39 books of the Old Testament canon, and he explained his reasoning right in the preface of the Latin Vulgate. So follow the thread. The translator of the Catholic Church's own Bible didn't even believe that the Apocrypha belonged in the canon. Augustine questioned the authorship of two of the prominent books. Athanasius said, read them, but don't canonize them. Don't accept them as God's word. Eusebius said that Maccabeans, or the Book of Maccabeans, was apart from the divine scripture. So when someone tells you that it was Martin Luther

who came along 1,500 years later and removed seven books from unanimous tradition of history, that's simply not what the record shows. That's not what history says. The doubts about these books are as old as the church itself. But we still haven't answered the deciding question, because councils quoted councils, and fathers disagreed with early church fathers. So who actually has the authority to settle the debate? And the answer is actually hiding in plain sight. And it changes how you and I will see and understand the Bible in the canonical scriptures we read so often. And here's the question that settles the debate. Who wrote the Bible? Every book, whether you count 73 or 66, was written by Jews. The Bible, are you ready for this? The Bible was written by Jewish people, to Jewish people, about Jewish people, trained in Jewish customs, following Jewish traditions, living in a Jewish land. That means the authoritative voice on the Old Testament canon is the community God entrusted it to. Paul says the same thing in Romans. The Jews were entrusted with the very oracles or words of God. So how many books, the million dollar question, how many books did the Jewish community itself

accept as canon? 46 that the Catholic Church has said is right, or 39. Believe it or not, brace yourself, 39. Now, they order the books differently. You're probably saying, well, there's only like 20 something. I get that. They conflate some of the, or they compact some of the books together. 1 and 2 Kings together, 1 and 2 Chronicles together. They push these books together. The Hebrew Bible, this is crazy, the Tanakh, that's what they call it, eliminates the Apocrypha completely. Those intertestamental books, they don't even accept. Jews considered the canon, just like we do, closed after Malachi. They viewed those extra books the way Athanasius did. They were ratifying to study, but never to be raised or equated to the level of God's holy word. Even though books like 1 and 2 Maccabees, I've read through them, they contain accurate historical facts that doesn't qualify them as scripture. And as theologian Wayne Grudem says in his scholarship and research, he says the earliest Christian evidence is decidedly against viewing the Apocrypha as scripture. Here's the sentence I want you to remember. The Bible is not Catholic.

I heard my family member tell me this one time. Well, the Catholics wrote the Bible. Actually, no, believe it or not, Jewish people wrote the Bible. Hebrews wrote the Bible. Believe it or not, they didn't even write the Bible. They got the Bible, and through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, 1 Peter tells us, they were led along by the Spirit to write down or pen the words of God given to them. It was the Holy Spirit who is the author of every word in your Bible. And when Jesus said the word church, a structured system of bishops, cardinals, and priests, popes, that was the furthest thing from his mind. The Greek word for church is ekklesia, and what it means is the assembly of the called-out people. Here's the way you think of it. You don't go to church, technically. You and I, as born-again believers, we assemble as the people of God, and that's the church, or the community, or the ekklesia, which raises the final question, and here's the question. If Jerome, and Eusebius, and Augustine, and Athanasius all questioned these books, then why in the world did the Catholic Church move forward and keep them? And the answer is found in what's inside of them. These books contain doctrines that support a system, doctrines that you and I won't find

in the 66 other books of our Bible. Scholar E.J. Young cataloged the problems of this when he said, Judith and Tobit contain historical, chronological, and geographical errors. The books justify deception, according to him, and make salvation dependent upon works and merit. The Wisdom of Solomon teaches creation out of preexistent matter, not ex nihilo, or from nothing like God did with his word. Sirach teaches that giving alms, or doing good works, or giving money to the church, makes atonement for sin. Baruch says that God hears prayers for dead people. Really? Praying for dead people who have gone on? Sounds like Mormon theology, we're baptizing for the dead. Works that atone. Now, I want you to connect the dots. Those are doctrinal foundations beneath the system of purgatory and limbo and the indulgence system that the Catholic Church funded all building projects that a monk named Martin Luther pushed back on by nailing 95 different points of contention, called the 95 Theses, to a church door in Wittenberg, Germany. You gotta remember, Martin Luther never set out to hurt the church. He didn't even wanna start a new church. He wanted to reform the corruption

within the Catholic Church at the time. And here's the timeline that flips the whole accusation on its head. Pacrapha, the intertestamental books, was not affirmatively declared to be canonical until the Council of Trent in 1546, after Luther nailed the 95 Theses. It was the church's response to quell or silence Martin Luther and the Reformation. So who really changed the Bible? That's the question. I wanna have you think about this as we land the plane. Can you read the Apocrypha for yourself? Of course you can. The same way Athanasius commended it as edifying history and good for one's historical understanding. I'd encourage you even to read about the Maccabeans. It talks about what happens as they fought back against Antiochus Epiphanes and took back the temple, all great for history. But when you open your Bible and you see 66 books therein, you can have confidence to know that you're holding the complete inspired Word of God, the same canon that Jesus himself read from, affirmed from, and trusted in as his own words, the oracles of God. Friends, man-made doctrines do not stand over the Word. No matter how long tradition says they should, the Word of God stands above every tradition, every man-made prophecy, every pope,

every priest, every preacher. It's the Word of God that is over all of it. So the next time someone asks you, how do you know those books in your Bible are the right books? You won't have to limp through the answer. Now you'll have one. If this video helped you, let me encourage you to share it with a friend or a family member. And if you haven't subscribed yet to the channel, do us a favor and subscribe. It really helps us out. If you wanna know more about the Bible translation you hold and how we got the different translations and why I choose to preach and teach from the CSB, go ahead and click on this video right here because that'll walk you through all of the translations of the Bible as I write them and show you why they're important.