Protestants and Catholics have the same New Testament, but they disagree about the contents of the Old Testament.

Protestant Old Testaments have 39 books, whereas Catholics have 46, with the inclusion of Tobit, Judas, Surac, Baruch,

wisdom, 1st and 2nd Maccabees, and portions of Daniel and Esther. But what kind of Old Testament did the

first Christians have? That's the question I want to answer in today's episode. So before we start,

it's important to avoid two extremes when approaching this issue. First, it's not accurate to say

Christians unanimously agreed about these books of the Old Testament until Martin Luther and other

Protestant reformers tried to move these Catholic books in the Old Testament from the Bible to create their own Protestant Bibles.

There was a dispute among some Christians in the early church because rabbinic Jews rejected these books scriptural status.

The fact that they were controversial is why in 1566 a Jewish convert to Catholicism named Sixtus of Siena created a three-tiered

classification system for the books of the Old Testament. At the top was the Proto canon, the 39 books of the Old Testament that Catholics and Protestants agree are the inspired word of God. At the bottom were the Apocrypha, works that both Catholics and Protestants did not regard as the inspired word of God. At the bottom, where the Apocrypha works that both Catholics and

Protestants did not regard as the inspired word of God, books like the book of Enoch. But between

the proto-canon and the Apocrypha were a group of books Catholics believed to be inspired,

but Protestants did not. Sixtus called these the Deutero canonical books, or the second canon.

Although many Protestants would say they should just be treated as apocrypha, the hidden books.

For more on why these books are not apocrypha, see my rebuttal to Alan Parr's video,

five reasons why the Apocrypha is not inspired.

So Catholics should acknowledge a dispute about

these books, but they should not grant a Protestant overreach. That's the other extreme I want

to talk about on this. That other overreach being the idea that the early church simply didn't

know if these books were Scripture. There's a lot that can be said about the Deutero-canonical

books of Scripture, and I'll probably return to the topic in future episodes. Today I just

want to focus on a single question. Did the first Christians think the Deutero-canonical

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