A Protestant Bible is a Christian Bible whose translation or revision was produced by Protestant Christians. Typically translated into a vernacular language, such Bibles comprise 39 books of the Old Testament (according to the Hebrew Bible canon, known especially to non-Protestant Christians as the protocanonical books) and 27 books of the New Testament, for a total of 66 books.
Some Protestants use Bibles which also include 14 additional books in a section known as the Apocrypha (though these are not considered canonical) bringing the total to 80 books.
This is in contrast with the 73 books of the Catholic Bible, which includes seven deuterocanonical books as a part of the Old Testament The division between protocanonical and deuterocanonical books is not accepted by all Protestants who simply view books as being canonical or not and therefore classify books found in the Deuterocanon, along with other books, as part of the Apocrypha. Sometimes the term “Protestant Bible” is simply used as a shorthand for a bible which contains only the 66 books of the Old and New Testaments.
It was in Luther’s Bible of 1534 that the Apocrypha was first published as a separate intertestamental section. Early modern English bibles also generally contained an Apocrypha section but in the years following the first publication of the King James Bible in 1611, printed English bibles increasingly omitted the Apocrypha. However, Lutheran and Anglican churches have still included the Apocrypha in their lectionaries, holding them to be useful for devotional use.
The practice of including only the Old and New Testament books within printed bibles was standardized among many English-speaking Protestants following a 1825 decision by the British and Foreign Bible Society. More recently, English-language Bibles are again including the Apocrypha, and they may be printed as intertestamental books. In contrast, Evangelicals vary among themselves in their attitude to and interest in the Apocrypha but agree in the view that it is non-canonical.
Early Protestant Bibles
A Protestant Bible is a Christian Bible whose translation or revision was produced by Protestant Christians. Typically translated into a vernacular language, such Bibles comprise 39 books of the Old Testament (according to the Hebrew Bible canon, known especially to non-Protestant Christians as the protocanonical books) and 27 books of the New Testament, for a total of 66 books.
Some Protestants use Bibles which also include 14 additional books in a section known as the Apocrypha (though these are not considered canonical) bringing the total to 80 books. This is in contrast with the 73 books of the Catholic Bible, which includes seven deuterocanonical books as a part of the Old Testament.
The division between protocanonical and deuterocanonical books is not accepted by all Protestants who simply view books as being canonical or not and therefore classify books found in the Deuterocanon, along with other books, as part of the Apocrypha. Sometimes the term “Protestant Bible” is simply used as a shorthand for a bible which contains only the 66 books of the Old and New Testaments.
It was in Luther’s Bible of 1534 that the Apocrypha was first published as a separate intertestamental section. Early modern English bibles also generally contained an Apocrypha section but in the years following the first publication of the King James Bible in 1611, printed English bibles increasingly omitted the Apocrypha. However, Lutheran and Anglican churches have still included the Apocrypha in their lectionaries, holding them to be useful for devotional use.
The practice of including only the Old and New Testament books within printed bibles was standardized among many English-speaking Protestants following a 1825 decision by the British and Foreign Bible Society. More recently, English-language Bibles are again including the Apocrypha, and they may be printed as intertestamental books. In contrast, Evangelicals vary among themselves in their attitude to and interest in the Apocrypha but agree in the view that it is non-canonical.
Early Protestant Bibles
The first proto-Protestant Bible translation was Wycliffe’s Bible, that appeared in the late 14th century in the vernacular Middle English. Wycliffe’s writings greatly influenced the philosophy and teaching of the Czech proto-Reformer Jan Hus (c. 1369–1415). The Hussite Bible was translated into Hungarian by two Hussite priests, Tamás Pécsi and Bálint Újlaki, who studied in Prague and were influenced by Jan Hus. They started writing the Hussite Bible after they returned to Hungary and finalized it around 1416.
One of the central events in the development of the Protestant Bible canon was the publication of Luther’s translation of the Bible into High German (the New Testament was published in 1522; the Old Testament was published in parts and completed in 1534). Following the Protestant Reformation, Protestants Confessions have usually excluded the books which other Christian traditions consider to be deuterocanonical books from the biblical canon (the canon of the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Oriental Orthodox churches differs among themselves as well), most early Protestant Bibles published the Apocrypha along with the Old Testament and New Testament.
The German-language Luther Bible of 1534 did include the Apocrypha. However, unlike in previous Catholic Bibles which interspersed the deuterocanonical books throughout the Old Testament, Martin Luther placed the Apocrypha in a separate section after the Old Testament, setting a precedent for the placement of these books in Protestant Bibles.
The books of the Apocrypha were not listed in the table of contents of Luther’s 1532 Old Testament and, in accordance with Luther’s view of the canon, they were given the title “Apocrypha: These Books Are Not Held Equal to the Scriptures, but Are Useful and Good to Read” in the 1534 edition of his Bible translation into German.
In the English language, the incomplete Tyndale Bible published in 1525, 1534, and 1536, contained the entire New Testament. Of the Old Testament, although William Tyndale translated around half of its books, only the Pentateuch and the Book of Jonah were published. Viewing the canon as comprising the Old and New Testaments only, Tyndale did not translate any of the Apocrypha.
However, the first complete Modern English translation of the Bible, the Coverdale Bible of 1535, did include the Apocrypha. Like Luther, Miles Coverdale placed the Apocrypha in a separate section after the Old Testament.
Other early Protestant Bibles such as the Matthew’s Bible (1537), Great Bible (1539), Geneva Bible (published by Sir Rowland Hill in 1560), Bishop’s Bible (1568), and the King James Version (1611) included the Old Testament, Apocrypha, and New Testament. Although within the same printed bibles, it was usually to be found in a separate section under the heading of Apocrypha and sometimes carrying a statement to the effect that the such books were non-canonical but useful for reading.
Protestant translations into Italian were made by Antonio Brucioli in 1530, by Massimo Teofilo in 1552 and by Giovanni Diodati in 1607. Diodati was a Calvinist theologian and he was the first translator of the Bible into Italian from Hebrew and Greek sources. Diodati’s version is the reference version for Italian Protestantism. This edition was revised in 1641, 1712, 1744, 1819 and 1821. A revised edition in modern Italian, Nuova Diodati, was published in 1991.
Several translations of Luther’s Bible were made into Dutch. The first complete Dutch Bible was printed in Antwerp in 1526 by Jacob van Liesvelt. However, the translations of Luther’s Bible had Lutheran influences in their interpretation.
At the Calvinistic Synod of Dort in 1618/19, it was therefore deemed necessary to have a new translation accurately based on the original languages. The synod requested the States-General of the Netherlands to commission it. The result was the Statenvertaling or States Translation which was completed in 1635 and authorized by the States-General in 1637. From that year until 1657, a half-million copies were printed. It remained authoritative in Dutch Protestant churches well into the 20th century.
Protestant translations into Spanish began with the work of Casiodoro de Reina, a former Catholic monk, who became a Lutheran theologian. With the help of several collaborators, de Reina produced the Biblia del Oso or Bear Bible, the first complete Bible printed in Spanish based on Hebrew and Greek sources.
Earlier Spanish translations, such as the 13th-century Alfonsina Bible, translated from Jerome’s Vulgate, had been copied by hand. The Bear Bible was first published on 28 September 1569, in Basel, Switzerland.
The deuterocanonical books were included within the Old Testament in the 1569 edition. In 1602 Cipriano de Valera, a student of de Reina, published a revision of the Bear Bible which was printed in Amsterdam in which the deuterocanonical books were placed in a section between the Old and New Testaments called the Apocrypha. This translation, subsequently revised, came to be known as the Reina-Valera Bible.
The first Protestant translations of portions of the Bible into Welsh were made in the 16th century with the Gospels and Epistles being published in 1551. In 1567, the entirety of the New Testament along with the Psalms were published in Welsh, while William Morgan translated the first version of the whole Bible into Welsh from Greek and Hebrew in 1588.
For the following three centuries, most English language Protestant Bibles, including the Authorized Version, continued with the practice of placing the Apocrypha in a separate section after the Old Testament. However, there were some exceptions.
A surviving quarto edition of the Great Bible, produced some time after 1549, does not contain the Apocrypha although most copies of the Great Bible did. A 1575 quarto edition of the Bishop’s Bible also does not contain them.
Subsequently, some copies of the 1599 and 1640 editions of the Geneva Bible were also printed without them. The Anglican King James VI and I, the sponsor of the Authorized King James Version (1611), threatened to fine and imprison anyone who omitted the Apocrypha.
The Souldiers Pocket Bible, of 1643, draws verses largely from
