Canons of the Old Testament: A Comparison

Podcast Episodes: 1.1 to 2.15.

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This page shows two charts comparing the different canons of the Old Testament.

The Tanakh Compared to the Protestant Old Testament Canon

The Tanakh is the Jewish Bible, the collection of books that Christians call the Old Testamant. This table shows the books listed in the Tanakh compared to those found in most Protestant Old Testament (OT) canons. You will see that each canon has the same books, although sometimes in a different order or divided differently.

Old Testament Christian Canons Compared: Catholic, Protestant, Greek Orthodox and Ethiopian Orthodox

This table provides a comparison between the Catholic, Protestant, Greek Orthodox and Ethiopian Orthodox Old Testament canons. I have used two columns for the Catholic. The Vulgate was the standard Latin text used in the Catholic church until the 20th century. I have used the New American Bible (Revised Edition) (NABRE) as the exemplar of the modern Catholic English-language text. The canon of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo church diverges considerably from other Christian churches.

The shortest canon is that of the Protestants, which accords precisely with the Jewish canon. Protestants refer to the extra books used by Catholics and Orthodox as the apocrypha, a denigratory term meaning anything from hidden or obscure to spurious. They can be used for instruction, but not to establish doctrine. In the Catholic church they are known as the Deuterocanon, a neutral term meaning second canon, so given because their canonicity was defined much later than the other books.