Development of The Old Testament Canon - The Protocanonical and Deuterocanonical Books

The Protocanonical and Deuterocanonical Books

The Roman Catholic, Oriental Orthodox and Eastern Orthodox include books excluded by Judaism and later by Martin Luther, called the deuterocanonical books, which Protestants exclude as Biblical apocrypha. The basis for these books is found in the early Koine Greek Septuagint translation of the Jewish scriptures. This translation was widely used by the Early Christians and is the one most often quoted (300 of 350 quotations including many of Jesus' own words) in the New Testament when it quotes the Old Testament.

According to J. N. D. Kelly, "It should be observed that the Old Testament thus admitted as authoritative in the Church… always included, though with varying degrees of recognition, the so-called Apocrypha or deuterocanonical books."

The traditional explanation of the development of the Old Testament canon describes two sets of Old Testament books, the protocanonical and the deuterocanonical books. According to this theory, certain Church fathers accepted the inclusion of the deuterocanonical books based on their inclusion in the Septuagint (most notably Augustine), while others disputed their status based on their exclusion from the Hebrew Bible (most notably Jerome). Michael Barber argues that this time-honored reconstruction is grossly inaccurate and that "the case against the apocrypha is overstated".

While deuterocanonical books were sometimes referenced by some fathers as Scripture, men such as Athanasius held that they were for reading only and not to be used for determination of doctrine.

The Catholic Encyclopedia attributes the inferior rank to which the deuterocanonical books were relegated by authorities like Origen, Athanasius, and Jerome as being due "to too rigid a conception of canonicity, one demanding that a book, to be entitled to this supreme dignity, must be received by all, must have the sanction of Jewish antiquity, and must moreover be adapted not only to edification, but also to the "confirmation of the doctrine of the Church", to borrow Jerome's phrase."