‍Added by Catholics—or Removed by Protestants?

‍Did the Catholic Church add the “Apocrypha” to the Bible at the Council of Trent?

  Gary Hoge  ·  October 16, 2026

‍Catholic Bibles contain seven books in the Old Testament that Protestant Bibles don't have. Catholics call them the deuterocanonical books; Protestants call them the Apocrypha. Why do Catholic Bibles have these “extra” books? Well, according to the Protestant apologetics website GotQuestions.org:

‍The Roman Catholic Church officially added the Apocrypha/Deuterocanonicals to their Bible at the Council of Trent in the mid-1500s AD, primarily in response to the Protestant Reformation.¹

‍Pastor Mark Driscoll and apologists Todd Friel and Mike Winger have made essentially the same allegation.²

‍Other Protestant apologists present the allegation a little more subtly. Rather than saying outright that the Church added these books at Trent, they claim that the Church did not officially declare them Scripture until then. For example, Josh McDowell and Don Stewart write:

‍It cannot be overemphasized that the Roman Catholic Church itself did not officially declare these books Holy Scripture until 1545–1563 at the Council of Trent.³

‍Evangelical theologian Wayne Grudem makes essentially the same claim:

‍It was not until 1546, at the Council of Trent, that the Roman Catholic Church officially declared the Apocrypha to be part of the canon […].⁴

‍And according to the Orthodox Presbyterian Church:

‍The “Catholic” books were not officially declared to be part of the Bible until the Council of Trent, an action in reaction to the Protestant Reformers, and not a council of the whole church.⁵

‍But is that really what happened? Did the Catholic Church add these books to its Bible, or do Protestant Bibles lack them because Protestants removed them? Fortunately, there's a simple way to find out. Let's see which books the Church recognized as Scripture before the Council of Trent.

‍Hippo and Carthage

‍In 393, more than eleven hundred years before Trent, when Christianity was less than four centuries old, the Council of Hippo in North Africa issued a list of the books of Scripture. That list included the same books that Trent would recognize more than a millennium later, including every one of the books that Trent supposedly added.⁶

‍And the bishops at Hippo weren't introducing something new. As historian J. N. D. Kelly explains, the Old Testament accepted by the early Church “always included, though with varying degrees of recognition, the so-called Apocrypha or deutero-canonical books.” He adds that in the first two centuries, “the Church seems to have accepted all, or most of, these additional books as inspired and to have treated them without question as Scripture.”⁷

‍Kelly cites early Christian writers such as Clement of Rome, Polycarp, and Irenaeus, who used these books in their writings.

‍The Council of Carthage in 397 reaffirmed Hippo's list, as did another council at Carthage in 419. The latter declared that “besides the Canonical Scriptures nothing be read in church under the name of divine Scripture.”

‍It then identified the canonical books, including the books supposedly added by Trent: Tobit, Judith, and the two books of Maccabees, along with the five books attributed to Solomon, traditionally understood to include Wisdom and Sirach, with Baruch traditionally included under Jeremiah.

‍The council concluded by explaining that these were the books it had received from earlier generations of Christians: “For these are the things which we have received from our fathers to be read in church.”⁸

‍Hippo and Carthage were regional councils, not ecumenical councils representing the entire Church. Nevertheless, they provide clear evidence that the books Catholics are accused of adding at Trent were already recognized as Scripture by Christian bishops in the fourth and fifth centuries.

‍The Council of Florence

‍In 1442, more than a thousand years after Hippo, another council issued a list of the books of Scripture. This time, however, it was an ecumenical council of the Catholic Church: the Council of Florence.

‍In its decree Cantate Domino, issued for reunion with the Coptic Christians, the council explicitly listed the books of the Old and New Testaments.

‍Introducing that list, the council declared that the Church accepts and venerates the books of both Testaments, which were written under the inspiration of the same Holy Spirit. It then listed exactly the same books as Hippo and Carthage had listed, including Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, and the two books of Maccabees, the same books supposedly added by Trent more than a century later.⁹

‍Are you seeing a pattern here? The Councils of Hippo and Carthage in the fourth and fifth centuries, the Council of Florence in the fifteenth century, and the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century all listed the same books of Scripture. But, if Florence had issued an authoritative list “only” a century earlier, why did Trent feel the need to issue the same list again?

‍Well, something important happened between those two councils.

‍The Protestant Reformation

‍In 1517, Martin Luther initiated what became the Protestant Reformation. Among the many questions raised during the Reformation was the status of the deuterocanonical books.

‍The Protestant Reformers generally favored the shorter Hebrew canon of the Old Testament over the larger collection of books traditionally included in the Greek Septuagint (LXX) and the Latin Vulgate, the Bible used by the Catholic Church. As evangelical New Testament scholar Gerald F. Hawthorne explains:

‍Protestant leaders ignored traditional acceptance of all the books of the LXX and refused the status of inspiration to those books of the Vulgate not found in the Hebrew canon. Luther denied canonical status to the Apocrypha although he included them all (except 1-2 Esdras) as an appendix to his translation (1534). He called them “useful and good to be read.” Calvin and his followers completely gave up the idea of canonicity for the Apocrypha and excluded them from the Bible because the Jews who had been entrusted with the oracles of God (Rom. 3:2) had earlier rejected them from their canon.¹⁰

‍This was the first time since the canon was largely settled in the fifth century that a major Christian movement challenged that canon.

‍And that brings us to Trent.

‍The Council of Trent

‍The Council of Trent was convened to address the challenges that the Protestant Reformation had raised against Catholic teaching and practice, including the canon of Scripture. On April 8, 1546, the council issued its decree concerning the canonical Scriptures.

‍The council began by explaining that it was following the example of the Church Fathers and receiving the books of the Old and New Testaments with reverence. It then provided a list of those books, explaining that it wished to remove any uncertainty about which writings the Church received as Scripture.

‍And the books on that list were the same books recognized by Hippo and Carthage more than eleven hundred years earlier, and explicitly reaffirmed by the ecumenical Council of Florence in 1442.

‍Trent then declared:

‍If anyone does not accept as sacred and canonical the aforesaid books in their entirety and with all their parts ... let him be anathema.¹¹

‍Notice what Trent was doing. Contrary to the Protestant accusation, it wasn't introducing books to the canon that hadn't been there before. It was reaffirming the canon the Church had acknowledged for over a thousand years.

‍But Trent did something more. It solemnly defined the canon and explicitly required Catholics to accept every book on its list as a matter of faith. The Church doesn't issue such definitions just for the sake of doing so. It generally does so when a controversy makes clarification necessary. Earlier councils, including Florence, had already issued authoritative lists of Scripture. But the Protestant Reformation had mounted a major challenge to the Church's longstanding canon, and Trent responded by settling the question definitively.

‍Added—or reaffirmed?

‍The historical record is straightforward. The deuterocanonical books had been recognized as Scripture within the Church for more than a thousand years before Trent. They were declared canonical by councils in the fourth and fifth centuries and explicitly reaffirmed by an ecumenical council in 1442. So the claims that the Church first officially declared these books Scripture at Trent or that it added them to the Bible at that time, are demonstrably false. What Trent did in 1546 was solemnly reaffirm and define the already-existing canon.

‍Did you notice the misleading way the objections we quoted at the beginning of this article were phrased? They stated that the Catholic Church either added or canonized these books at Trent, which makes it sound as if Trent singled these books out for special treatment. But as we’ve seen, they didn’t. In fact, none of the councils we’ve looked at—Hippo, Carthage, Florence, or Trent—singled these books out. Each of these councils addressed the entire canon of Scripture, and each of them affirmed the same canon of Scripture.

‍So, now we know why Catholic Bibles include these books and Protestant Bibles don’t. The Catholic Church did not add these books to its Bible; Protestants removed them from theirs.

‍__________

^‍ 1 GotQuestions.org, “What Is the Wisdom of Solomon?” https://www.gotquestions.org/Wisdom-of-Solomon.html.

^‍2 Mark Driscoll, “How Were the Old Testament Books Chosen as Scripture?” Patheos (October 2015); Todd Friel, “Why Did the Reformers Remove Books From the Bible?” Wretched (video); Mike Winger, “How We Got the OT Canon: Evidence for the Bible, Part 11,” BibleThinker (August 10, 2016), approximately 36:12.

^‍3 Josh McDowell and Don Stewart, Answers to Tough Questions Skeptics Ask About the Christian Faith (San Bernardino, CA: Here's Life Publishers, Inc., 1980), 37.

^‍4 Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine, 1st ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1994), 59.

^‍5 Orthodox Presbyterian Church, discussion of the Apocrypha, https://www.opc.org/qa.html?question_id=94.

^‍6 Council of Hippo (393), Canon 36, preserved in the Breviarium Hipponense, Canon 36. See https://thecalvinist.net/files/Canon_Lists.pdf and https://data.mgh.de/databases/clavis/wiki/index.php/Breviarium_Hipponense.

^‍7 J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, rev. ed. (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978), 53–54.

^‍8 Council of Carthage (419), Canon 24 (Greek Canon 27), in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 14, 454. https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3816.htm.

^‍9 Council of Florence, Cantate Domino (February 4, 1442), decree for the Jacobites. https://www.vatican.va/content/eugenius-iv/en/documents/bulla-cantate-domino-4-febr-1442.html.

^‍10 Gerald F. Hawthorne, “Canon and Apocrypha of the Old Testament,” in The International Bible Commentary, ed. F. F. Bruce (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1986), 36.

^‍11 Council of Trent, Session IV, Decree Concerning the Canonical Scriptures (April 8, 1546). https://www.papalencyclicals.net/councils/trent/the-complete-text.htm.