Why does the Bible only contain 66 Books?

Whose Bible?

In Yeshua’s day, the Sadducees only accepted five–Moses’ writings; Pharisees accepted a larger canon–the Old Testament text we have today. They, however, later flatly rejected the Greek rendition of it, the LXX, a work translated by Jewish scholars in a previous generation. The standard Jewish Bible, the one Yeshua acknowledged, has twenty-seven books less than the sixty-six, given the non-acceptance of the New Testament, for obvious reasons. The Catholic Bible has seventy-three books, or seven more, given their inclusion of apocryphal books–books written by Jews in advance of the New Testament era. The Catholic inclusion of these Jewish documents into their Bible comes despite the fact that Jews never considered them canonical. St. Jerome, respectfully so-called, translated the early “official” Latin Bible, and did not include the Apocrypha in the Catholic Bible. Others thought otherwise, and the others eventually won out.

Questions pertaining to the criteria for inclusion into the list that builds to sixty-six are worthy of consideration. Since Yeshua used the Old Testament, and since New Testament writers hark back to it and use it authoritatively, it was eventually retained in the “Christian” Bible–despite the fact that many don’t read it and that, many who do, don’t read it literally and prefer displacing and replacing the Jews in their minds when so doing. The decision to include it was much debated in antiquity. Criteria for inclusion in the New Testament were: (1) documents had to have been written by an Apostle or a disciple of one; (2) there had to have been a history of the documents’ prior usage in the early fledgling communities–with noteworthy individuals authenticating them in the process; and (3) there had to be a more subjectively adjudged important spiritual content to the documents from (1) and (2) above.

Necessity was the mother of the aforementioned invention. With the first emissaries/apostles dying off, the need to preserve their word and guidance was felt acutely by the ancients. The documents in our New Testament were appropriately construed as a compendium of their teachings. Their possession and digestion helps insure that our modern faith is still guided by their ancient voices. By adding the accepted New Covenant documents to the accepted Old Covenant ones, we come to sixty-six.