Chapter 29

Luther, Calvin, and the Reformation Removal

Why Protestants Took Out the Books

If the Council of Trent did not add books to the Bible — and as we saw in Chapter 28, it did not — then a very uncomfortable question demands an answer. Did the Protestant Reformers remove them? For most Protestants today, the very question sounds absurd. The standard assumption is that the Catholic Church stuffed extra books into the Bible at Trent in 1546, and Protestants have simply been using the "original" Bible all along. But as we have seen throughout this book, the historical evidence tells a very different story. The deuterocanonical books were part of the Christian Bible for over fifteen hundred years before the Reformation. They were in the great codices — Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, and Alexandrinus. They were quoted as Scripture by the church fathers. They were affirmed by the councils of Hippo, Carthage, and Florence. And they were included in the Latin Vulgate — the Bible of the Western church for over a thousand years.

So what happened? How did these books go from being part of every Christian Bible in the world to being completely absent from the Bibles of hundreds of millions of Protestant Christians? The answer lies with the Reformation — and specifically with Martin Luther, John Calvin, and the theological and political forces they set in motion. In this chapter, we will trace the path by which the deuterocanonical books were first demoted, then segregated, and eventually expelled from the Protestant Bible. It is a story of genuine theological conviction mixed with polemical expediency, of brilliant minds making consequential mistakes, and of a decision whose effects have shaped Protestantism's understanding of the Bible to this day.

I want to be clear about something at the outset. I have deep respect for the Reformers. Luther's courage in standing against genuine corruption in the medieval church was extraordinary. Calvin's theological brilliance reshaped the landscape of Christian thought. These were serious, devout men who loved the Scriptures and were willing to suffer for them. But loving the Scriptures and making perfect decisions about the Scriptures are two different things. The Reformers got many things right. On the question of the deuterocanon, I believe they got it wrong — and the evidence supports this conclusion.

Luther Before the Break: A Man Who Used the Deuterocanon as Scripture

One of the most important — and most overlooked — facts about Martin Luther is that he did not always reject the deuterocanonical books. In the early years of his career, Luther used these books exactly the way every other Christian had used them for centuries: as inspired Scripture that could serve as proof in theological argument. Understanding this trajectory — from acceptance to rejection — is essential for evaluating whether Luther's eventual demotion of these books was driven by evidence or by something else entirely.

On October 31, 1517, Luther posted his famous Ninety-Five Theses, challenging the practice of selling indulgences. He never had a public debate on those theses, so he composed a written defense — the Resolutions on the Disputation Concerning the Power of Indulgences (1518). This document is significant for our purposes because of how Luther begins it. He opens with a protestatio — a formal declaration of his principles — in which he states: "First, I testify that I desire to say or maintain absolutely nothing except, first of all, what is in the holy scriptures and can be maintained from them."¹ In other words, Luther is saying that everything he argues in this document rests on the authority of Scripture.

And then, in that very same document, Luther cites the deuterocanonical books as scriptural proof. In his defense of thesis 17, he writes: "Although the righteous fall, he shall not be cast headlong, for the Lord is the stay of his hand" (Psalm 37:24). "And also, 'Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints'" (Psalm 116:15). "And again, 'If the just man shall be snatched by death, he shall be at rest'" (Wisdom 4:7).² Notice what Luther has done here. He places a quotation from the Wisdom of Solomon right alongside quotations from the Psalms — all under the banner of his declaration that he will argue only from "the holy scriptures." The clear implication is that Luther, at this point, regarded Wisdom as Scripture.

Luther does the same thing in his defense of thesis 35, where he cites Sirach 5:8 — "Do not delay in turning to the Lord" — alongside quotations from Matthew, Hebrews, and 2 Peter, all as scriptural proofs.³ As Michuta observes, the English translators of Luther's works actually tried to obscure this fact. Where Luther wrote the Latin word Scriptura ("Scripture") before quoting Sirach, the translators rendered it as "Bible" — and then added a footnote explaining that the Vulgate Bible "contained the apocryphal books." In the very next thesis, those same translators correctly translated the identical Latin word Scriptura as "Scripture." The inconsistency was clearly motivated by embarrassment: Luther's citation of Sirach as "Scripture" contradicted his later position.⁴

Luther continued this pattern in other early writings. In his Response to Silvester Prierias (1518), Luther again began with a protestatio declaring that he would give honor "alone to those books which are called canonical." And yet in that same document, he cited Tobit as authoritative.⁵ At the Heidelberg Disputation (also 1518), one of Luther's most famous theological engagements, he again adduced Sirach 5:8 as a scriptural proof, introducing it with the words: "For this reason the Scripture advises us."⁶

The pattern is unmistakable. In 1517 and 1518, Luther treated the deuterocanonical books as Scripture. He used them to prove doctrine. He cited them alongside the protocanonical books without qualification or apology. Whatever happened to change Luther's mind, it did not happen because of a careful, lifelong scholarly assessment. Something else intervened.

The Leipzig Disputation: The Turning Point

That "something else" happened on July 7, 1519, at the Second Leipzig Disputation. This was the public debate that changed everything — not just for Luther, but for the entire future of the Protestant Bible.

Luther's opponent was Johann Maier von Eck (1486–1543), a formidable Catholic theologian who was not afraid to go toe-to-toe with the fiery Reformer. One of the topics under debate was purgatory. To support the Catholic position, Eck appealed to 2 Maccabees 12:45–46, which speaks of Judas Maccabeus making atonement for fallen soldiers so that they might be delivered from their sin. This passage was — and remains — one of the strongest biblical texts supporting prayers for the dead.

Luther's response was telling. He disputed Eck's interpretation of every other proof text for purgatory. But when it came to 2 Maccabees, Luther took a different approach. He did not argue about what the text meant. Instead, he argued that the text should not be admitted into the debate at all. He declared: "There is no proof of purgatory in any portion of Sacred Scripture which can enter into the argument and serve as a proof; for the book of Maccabees, not being in the canon, is of weight with the faithful, but avails nothing with the obstinate."⁷

This was a momentous statement. Less than a year earlier, Luther had been citing Wisdom and Sirach as "Scripture" to prove his own theological points. Now he was refusing to allow a deuterocanonical book to be used against him. When pressed by Eck, Luther appealed to Jerome — the one church father who had distinguished between the protocanonical and deuterocanonical books — and in doing so rejected not only 2 Maccabees but the entire deuterocanon.⁸

What drove this dramatic about-face? Bruce Metzger, a respected Protestant scholar himself, offered a candid assessment:

It appears that Luther was first led to disparage the books of the Apocrypha when his opponents appealed to passages in them as proof for the doctrines of purgatory and the efficacy of prayers and Masses for the dead (2 Macc. 12:43–45). Likewise the emphasis that certain apocryphal books lay upon merit acquired through good works … was naturally distasteful to him.⁹

In other words, Luther was motivated — at least in part — by the fact that the deuterocanonical books supported doctrines he was actively attacking. When these books served his own purposes (as in the Resolutions), they were "Scripture." When they were used against him, they were "not in the canon." This is not the behavior of a scholar following the evidence wherever it leads. This is the behavior of a polemicist choosing his weapons.

Michuta notes that Luther's response at Leipzig effectively created a theological impossibility for Protestantism. Once Luther denied the canonicity of 2 Maccabees in a public debate, Protestantism could never allow the deuterocanon to enjoy its former status. To admit these books back into the canon would be to hand a powerful weapon to Catholic apologists. The decision was locked in place by polemical necessity, not by dispassionate scholarship.¹⁰

It is also significant that the Resolutions to the Leipzig Disputation, published in August 1519, contains Luther's earliest disparaging remarks about the Epistle of James — a book he would later call "an epistle of straw." The same theological impulse that led Luther to reject 2 Maccabees (because it supported prayers for the dead and good works) also led him to question James (because it taught that "a person is justified by works and not by faith alone" — James 2:24). Luther's canon decisions were not isolated judgments about individual books. They were expressions of a broader principle: theology determines canon.¹¹

Luther's "Canon Within a Canon"

To understand what Luther did to the deuterocanon, we need to understand the radical principle that guided his approach to the entire Bible. Luther did not simply accept or reject books in a binary fashion. Instead, he operated with what scholars call a "canon within a canon" — a hierarchical ranking of biblical books based on their theological content, as Luther understood it.

For Luther, the central criterion for a book's value was whether it "preached Christ." A book was canonical — or at least, more canonical — to the degree that Luther heard his gospel of justification by faith alone clearly proclaimed in it. Books that emphasized grace, faith, and Christ's saving work ranked highest. Books that emphasized works, merit, or human effort ranked lower. And books that seemed to contradict Luther's theology of grace were demoted to the bottom of the list — or removed from the main body of the canon altogether.¹²

This principle affected not just the Old Testament deuterocanon but the New Testament as well. In his 1522 German translation of the New Testament, Luther placed four books — Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation — in a separate section at the end, without page numbers in the table of contents. These books were literally set apart from the rest of the New Testament, and Luther's prefaces to them made clear why.

His preface to James is the most famous. Luther wrote that the Epistle of James "is flatly against St. Paul and the rest of Scripture" by ascribing "righteousness to works." He therefore could not "put James among the chief books."¹³ He called it "an epistle of straw" because it lacked, in his judgment, what he called the "nature of the gospel." He was also critical of Hebrews (because it seemed to teach the impossibility of repentance after apostasy), Jude (because it cited 1 Enoch and seemed to depend on 2 Peter), and Revelation (which he found confusing and insufficiently Christological).

This is an extraordinary state of affairs. The man who gave Protestantism its Bible also questioned the canonicity of four of its New Testament books — books that every other branch of Christianity, including the Eastern Orthodox, had received without controversy for over a millennium. If Luther could question James because it conflicted with his theology, was his demotion of 2 Maccabees any different? If Luther could relegate Hebrews and Revelation to a secondary tier, how confident should we be in his judgment about Wisdom and Sirach?

Luther's German Bible and the Segregation of the Deuterocanon

It is important to note — and to be fair to Luther — that he did not simply rip the deuterocanonical books out of the Bible. What he did was arguably worse in the long run: he segregated them.

Before Luther, Christian Bibles had always intermixed the deuterocanonical books with the rest of the Old Testament. This was true of the great codices. It was true of the Old Latin translations. It was true of the Latin Vulgate. It was true of John Wycliffe's English Bible. The deuterocanonical books appeared alongside the protocanonical books as part of a single, unified Old Testament. A reader encountering Wisdom or Sirach in a pre-Reformation Bible would have found them nestled among the other wisdom books, right where they naturally belonged. There was no visual or structural indication that they were any less authoritative than Psalms or Proverbs.¹⁵

Luther changed this. In his 1534 German Bible — the first complete German translation of the entire Bible — he removed the deuterocanonical books from their traditional positions throughout the Old Testament and gathered them into a separate appendix placed between the Old and New Testaments. He gave this appendix a title that would become famous — and fateful: "Apocrypha — that is, books which are not held equal to the holy Scriptures and yet are profitable and good to read."¹⁶

The word Apocrypha (from the Greek apokryphos, ἀπόκρυφος, meaning "hidden" or "concealed") had a complicated history by Luther's day. Some writers used it to mean "spurious writings of merely human origin." Others used it simply for books that were read privately rather than publicly. Still others used it for books they themselves considered canonical Scripture — the term had become, as Michuta notes, "quite fluid and confused."¹⁷ But regardless of what Luther meant by the term, the effect of his labeling was clear: these books were marked as different, lesser, and potentially suspect.

The physical segregation was even more consequential than the label. By removing the deuterocanonical books from their traditional locations and placing them in a separate section, Luther created a visual and psychological barrier between these books and the "real" Old Testament. A reader who encountered Wisdom or Sirach in the "Apocrypha" section would naturally assume they were less important — less authoritative — than the books in the main body of the text. The segregation implied a judgment, even for readers who never read Luther's prefaces.

And yet, even in segregation, Luther did not fully reject these books. He acknowledged that they contained "many good things." The colophon he placed after the "Apocrypha" section read: "The end of the books of the Old Testament" — indicating that he still considered these books, in some sense, part of the Old Testament corpus, even if not on an equal footing with the protocanon.¹⁸ As Woodward observes, Luther's relationship with the deuterocanon was complicated — he was creating a new category that had no real precedent in the history of the church.¹⁹

Furthermore — and this is a detail that is often overlooked — Luther continued to use the deuterocanonical books in his own writings even after publicly denying their canonicity. As Michuta documents, "He continued to use the deuterocanon in his writings in a way very similar to how he used it before the debate. The difference being that before the disputation, Luther cited deuterocanonical books in debate as scriptural proof of doctrine. During the disputation, however, Luther denied canonicity of these books."²⁰ This inconsistency between Luther's stated position and his actual practice is remarkably similar to the inconsistency we observed in Jerome (see Chapter 27). Both men claimed these books were not fully canonical, but both men used them as though they were.

Luther's Assessment of Individual Deuterocanonical Books

Luther's evaluation of the deuterocanonical books was not uniform. He wrote prefaces to most of them in his German Bible, and these prefaces reveal a range of attitudes — from grudging appreciation to sharp criticism.

Luther was relatively favorable toward the Wisdom of Solomon and 1 Maccabees. He recognized the theological depth of Wisdom and found 1 Maccabees valuable as a historical source. But he was hostile toward 2 Maccabees, primarily because of its support for prayers for the dead (chapter 12) and its theology of martyrdom and merit (chapter 7). He questioned the historical accuracy of Judith, though he acknowledged it could be read as an edifying allegory. He found Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) useful for practical moral instruction but not on the level of the canonical wisdom books. Tobit he treated as a kind of pious fiction — a good story with moral lessons but not inspired history.

The inconsistency is worth highlighting. If a book like Wisdom — which Luther himself appreciated — was demoted alongside 2 Maccabees, then the criterion was not really the intrinsic quality of each book. The criterion was the category: these books were all in the "Apocrypha" because the rabbinic Jewish canon did not include them. The merits of individual books were secondary to the decision that had already been made about the category as a whole.

And this brings us to a crucial question: Why did Luther accept the rabbinic Jewish canon as his standard? Luther was, after all, a man who rejected the authority of popes and councils when they contradicted his reading of Scripture. Why would he accept the authority of rabbis who had explicitly rejected Christianity? As we discussed in Chapter 12, the rabbinic canon that excluded the deuterocanonical books was itself a post-Christian development, shaped in part by the desire to distance Judaism from the Greek-speaking Christian church. Luther, by adopting the rabbinic canon, was unwittingly accepting a decision that was motivated — at least in part — by anti-Christian polemic.

Calvin's Position: More Measured, Equally Consequential

If Luther was the firebrand who set the process in motion, John Calvin (1509–1564) was the systematic theologian who gave it intellectual respectability. Calvin's approach to the deuterocanon was more measured than Luther's, less given to dramatic pronouncements and colorful insults. But the effect was the same: the deuterocanonical books were relegated to a secondary status that would eventually lead to their complete removal.

Calvin's formal argument against the deuterocanon rested on two pillars. First, these books were not in the Hebrew canon. Second, they were not formally quoted in the New Testament with introductory formulas like "it is written." Both arguments were standard Protestant fare, and both — as we have seen throughout this book — are weaker than they first appear. The Hebrew canon was a post-Christian rabbinic construction, not the pre-Christian Jewish canon (see Chapter 19). And the absence of formal quotation formulas is not evidence of rejection — the New Testament also lacks formal quotation formulas for several protocanonical books (Judges, Ruth, Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon), yet no one questions their canonicity.

Calvin also relied heavily on the "inward testimony of the Holy Spirit" as a means of discerning which books were canonical. In his Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin argued that the testimony of the Spirit is superior to reason and that God alone can properly bear witness to His own words.²¹ This is a profound theological principle — but it cuts both ways. If the Spirit testifies to the canonicity of Genesis and Isaiah, why would the same Spirit not testify to the canonicity of Wisdom and Sirach? The principle of the Spirit's testimony, taken seriously, should lead to more openness to the deuterocanon, not less — since the vast majority of Christians throughout history, guided (presumably) by the Spirit, received these books as Scripture.

What makes Calvin's position particularly interesting — and particularly vulnerable to the charge of inconsistency — is his own use of the deuterocanonical books. Calvin cited these books extensively in his own writings, especially early in his career. In his Psychopannychia (1542), a treatise on the soul's state after death, Calvin made extensive use of the Wisdom of Solomon, only occasionally qualifying its authority.²² In the 1536 edition of his Institutes, Calvin cited Baruch 3:12–14 and James 3:17 together for the divine attributes, introducing Baruch as the words of "another prophet." By the 1539 edition, however, Calvin had revised this to read: "Very true and very holy is another word which an unknown author (whoever he was) wrote, and which is attributed to the prophet Baruch." The word "prophet" was quietly dropped, though the citation itself remained.²³

As the Reformed theologian Wilhelm Neuser has documented, several citations from the books of Tobit, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, and the two books of Maccabees remain even in the later editions of the Institutes.²⁴ Calvin's actual practice, like Luther's and like Jerome's, was more generous toward the deuterocanon than his stated theory would allow. He kept finding these books useful, even while insisting they were not fully authoritative.

Calvin was also instrumental in shaping the prefaces to the Geneva Bible (first published as the Olivetan Bible in 1535), which included the deuterocanonical books in a separate section with cautionary notes. The Matthew Bible (1537), a reworking of the Coverdale and Tyndale translations, took its cautionary remarks about the "Apocrypha" largely from Calvin's preface in the Olivetan Bible.²⁵ Calvin's influence thus extended far beyond his own writings — it shaped the way English-speaking Protestants encountered (or failed to encounter) the deuterocanonical books for centuries to come.

The Role of Jerome: The Reformers' Patron Saint

Both Luther and Calvin — and virtually every Protestant theologian who followed them — appealed to Jerome as their primary patristic authority for the rejection of the deuterocanon. Jerome's Prologus Galeatus (Helmeted Prologue), with its distinction between canonical and apocryphal books based on the Hebrew canon, became the single most important text in the Protestant argument against the deuterocanon. As Wilhelm Neuser summarized it:

The Reformed theologians and confessions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries basically follow the Church Father Jerome, who "is the only person in the early Church who took up a position against the [Old Testament] Apocrypha."²⁶

There is a profound irony here. The Reformers, who rejected the authority of the Catholic Church and its traditions, based their canon on the authority of a single Catholic saint — a saint whose position on the deuterocanon was the minority view in his own time, rejected by the African councils during his own lifetime, and overridden by the very church he served. As we discussed in detail in Chapter 27, Jerome's position was opposed by Augustine, by the Council of Hippo, by the Council of Carthage, and by the overwhelming consensus of the church fathers. Jerome was, as Neuser acknowledged, "the only person in the early Church" who took this position. The Reformers built their canon on the lonely dissent of one man — and treated that dissent as though it represented the mainstream.

Furthermore, as we also saw in Chapter 27, Jerome's own practice contradicted his theory. He included the deuterocanonical books in his Vulgate translation. He cited them in his own theological writings. He even produced translations of Tobit and Judith, albeit under protest. The man whose authority the Reformers invoked did not himself consistently follow the position they attributed to him.

The Reformers' dependence on Jerome also exposed them to a deeper problem. Jerome's reason for preferring the Hebrew canon was his belief in the Hebraica veritas — the "Hebrew truth" — the idea that the Hebrew text preserved by the Jews was identical to the original inspired text. As we discussed in Chapter 18, this belief was based on a false premise. Jerome assumed there was only one Hebrew text, and that this text was the original. But as the Dead Sea Scrolls have demonstrated, the Hebrew textual tradition was far more diverse than Jerome knew. Multiple Hebrew text types circulated in the centuries before Christ. The proto-Masoretic text that Jerome trusted was just one among several — and in many cases, not the oldest or most reliable.²⁷

As Emanuel Tov, one of the world's leading experts on the Dead Sea Scrolls, has noted: "Since the discovery of the Qumran Scrolls, it has become clear that a unified text tradition before the turn of the eras never existed." Tov further observes that "the notion of textual uniformity was later perpetuated in the Judaism of the first century C.E. onward."²⁸ In other words, the idea that there was one authoritative Hebrew text — the foundation of Jerome's Hebraica veritas — was a rabbinic construction, not a historical fact. The Reformers, by following Jerome, were following a man who had been misled by rabbinic claims about their own text.

Zwingli and the Zurich Bible

Before we move on to the broader Protestant confessional tradition, we should note the contribution of Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531), the Swiss Reformer who played a significant role in shaping the early Protestant approach to the deuterocanon. Zwingli did not call the deuterocanonical books "Apocrypha" in the pejorative sense. Instead, he called them "Church Books" (Kirchenbücher) — books that the church read and valued, even if they could not be used to confirm doctrine.²⁹

Zwingli's preface to the Zurich Bible (1531) is particularly revealing. He stated that he included these books in his translation "so that no one may complain of lacking anything, and each may find what is to his taste."³⁰ This is a telling admission. Zwingli recognized that there was strong sentiment within the Protestant community that these books should remain in the Bible. The rank-and-file Christians of the Reformation — who had grown up reading Bibles that included these books — would have been alarmed to see them removed. As the Anglican scholar John Hey later observed, "At the Reformation, when men had been brought up to revere them [the deuterocanonical books], it would have been both imprudent and cruel to set them aside."³¹

Think about what this means. The Reformers themselves knew that removing the deuterocanonical books would have been "imprudent and cruel" — that their congregations regarded these books as Scripture and would have been shocked to see them gone. So instead of removing them outright, the Reformers took a more gradual approach: segregate, label, qualify, and wait. The full removal would come later — not from the Reformers themselves, but from their successors.

The Protestant Confessions: A Gradual Hardening

The Reformers' ambivalent position on the deuterocanon was eventually hardened into dogma through a series of Protestant confessional statements. Tracing the development of these confessions reveals a clear trajectory: from Luther's cautious "not equal to Scripture but good to read," through a middle ground of limited usefulness, to the Westminster Confession's outright rejection. It is a trajectory of progressive radicalization — and each step took Protestantism further from the historic Christian position.

The Belgic Confession (1561, revised 1619)

This is one of the oldest confessions in Reformed Protestantism, composed in the Lowlands (modern-day Belgium) by Guido de Brès. It raised the canon of Scripture to the level of dogma. Article 5 lists the books of the Protestant Old Testament canon and states: "We receive all these books, and these only, as holy and canonical, for the regulation, foundation, and confirmation of our faith; believing, without any doubt, all things contained in them, not so much because the Church receives and approves them as such, but more especially because the Holy Ghost witnesses in our hearts that they are from God."³²

Article 6 addresses the deuterocanonical books specifically: "All which the Church may read and take instruction from, so far as they agree with the canonical books; but they are far from having such power and efficacy as that we may from their testimony confirm any point of faith or of the Christian religion; much less detract from the authority of the other sacred books."³³ This is essentially Luther's position restated: useful for edification, but not authoritative for doctrine.

The French (Gallican) Confession (1559)

Composed by the first national Protestant synod in Paris, this confession reflects Calvin's influence. Article 3 states: "We know these books [the protocanon] to be canonical, and the sure rule of our faith, not so much by the common accord and consent of the Church, as by the testimony and inward illumination of the Holy Spirit, which enables us to distinguish them from other ecclesiastical books upon which, however useful, we cannot found any articles of faith."³⁴

Neuser contends that Calvin's teaching about the inner testimony of the Holy Spirit was originally about the Spirit's work in confirming the believer's faith in Scripture — not a test of canonicity. It was the French Confession, not Calvin himself, that extended the "inner testimony" to include the discernment of which books belong in the canon and which do not.³⁵ This is a significant distinction. Calvin's principle of the Spirit's testimony was being stretched beyond its original intent to serve as a tool for excluding the deuterocanon.

The Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England (1563)

The Anglican position, enshrined in Article 6 of the Thirty-Nine Articles, attempted a middle way: "In the name of Holy Scripture, we do understand those Canonical books of the Old and New Testaments, of whose authority was never any doubt in the Church." The article then lists the Protestant Old Testament canon, followed by the deuterocanonical books, about which it states: "The other books (as Hierome saith) the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine."³⁶

Notice the explicit appeal to Jerome ("Hierome"). The Anglican position was self-consciously Jeromist. But there was an internal contradiction. Article 35 of the same Thirty-Nine Articles endorsed the Book of Homilies as containing "godly and wholesome doctrine" — yet the Book of Homilies repeatedly cited the deuterocanonical books as Scripture to establish its doctrines. The tenth homily called the Wisdom of Solomon "the infallible and undeceivable word of God." The last homily cited Baruch as a prophet and Wisdom as "holy Scripture."³⁷ So Article 6 said the deuterocanon could not establish doctrine, while Article 35 endorsed a book that used the deuterocanon to do exactly that. The contradiction was glaring — and it illustrated the fundamental tension in the early Protestant position. The Reformers wanted to deny these books' authority in theory, but they could not stop using them as authoritative in practice.

The Synod of Dort (1618–1619)

This Reformed synod addressed the problem of the deuterocanon directly. Several members demanded that the synod insist on the removal of the "Apocrypha" from the Geneva Bible. Their motion failed — the approved version of Scripture endorsed by the synod still included the deuterocanonical books. But the dissenting party won several concessions. Dort adopted the sixth article of the Belgic Confession, which strongly opposed the deuterocanon. It recommended that these books be printed in smaller type to make them visually distinct. It recommended that derogatory notes be added to the margins. And it recommended that the appendix containing the deuterocanon be moved from between the two Testaments (where Luther had placed them) to the back of the Bible — creating even greater physical distance from the canonical text.³⁸

The Dutch Bible of 1637 carried out these dictates, complete with a critical preface and marginal notes explaining where these books supposedly contradicted the protocanon. The trajectory was clear: first segregation, then marginalization, then (eventually) removal.

The Westminster Confession (1647): The Point of No Return

The Westminster Confession represents the most radical departure from the historic Christian position on the deuterocanon — a departure that went significantly beyond what Luther, Calvin, or even the Thirty-Nine Articles had said.

The Westminster Confession was produced in the context of the English Civil War, under the influence of the Puritan movement. The Long Parliament, convened under Puritan influence in 1643, resolved to clarify the doctrines of the Church of England. Work on a new confession of faith proceeded until 1648, and the resulting document became the confessional standard for Presbyterians throughout the English-speaking world.

On the deuterocanon, the Westminster Confession declared:

The books commonly called Apocrypha, not being of divine inspiration, are no part of the Canon of the Scripture; and therefore are of no authority in the Church of God, nor to be any otherwise approved, or made use of, than other human writings.³⁹

This was a radical escalation. By declaring that the deuterocanon was "not of divine inspiration" and had "no authority in the Church of God," the Westminster Confession effectively equated Wisdom, Sirach, and Maccabees with Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress or any other human composition. Luther and Calvin had not ventured this far. They had demoted these books, but they had still acknowledged their value and their connection to the Old Testament. Westminster severed that connection entirely.⁴⁰

Michuta traces the roots of this radicalization not to the Reformers themselves but to the Puritans — "that radical body of self-proclaimed Puritans who seized control of the English government under Oliver Cromwell."⁴¹ The Puritans wanted to "purify" the Church of England of all remaining Catholic influence. For them, the deuterocanonical books were tainted by their association with Catholicism. The Council of Trent had solemnly affirmed these books in 1546 — and anything Trent affirmed, the Puritans were inclined to reject. Anti-Catholic sentiment became a driving force in the removal of the deuterocanon, joining theological conviction as a motive that shaped the Protestant canon.

The English Bibles: From Inclusion to Exclusion

The story of how the deuterocanonical books fared in the English Bible tradition illustrates the gradual nature of their removal. It was not a sudden act of deletion. It was a slow process of marginalization that took over two centuries.

The Coverdale Bible (1535) — the first complete printed English Bible — included the deuterocanonical books in a separate appendix, following Luther's model. Coverdale spoke of "dark sentences" in the deuterocanon that differed from the "open and manifest truth" of the protocanon, though as Michuta wryly notes, "as if no one ever finds 'dark sentences' in the Psalms or Ezekiel!"⁴²

William Tyndale died before completing his Old Testament translation, but it is reasonably certain that he would have included the deuterocanonical books in an appendix. His 1534 revision of the New Testament included readings from Sirach and Wisdom intended for particular feast days — indicating that he valued these books enough to keep them in circulation.⁴³

The Great Bible (1539), commissioned by King Henry VIII and edited by Coverdale, included the deuterocanonical books and went through seven editions — all of which included them. The Bishop's Bible (1568), which served as the primary basis for the King James Version, also included the deuterocanonical books. The Geneva Bible — beloved by the Puritans and created with the involvement of both Knox and Calvin — included them as well, though with critical prefaces.⁴⁴

And then there was the King James Bible. When the Authorized Version was published in 1611, it contained eighty books, not sixty-six. The deuterocanonical books were placed between the Old and New Testaments in a section labeled "Apocrypha." For over two centuries, the King James Bible — the most influential English Bible in history — included the deuterocanonical books as part of its contents. Most Protestants today have no idea that their beloved KJV was originally published with these "extra" books right in the middle of it.⁴⁵

As Michuta summarizes: "Before 1599, nearly all Protestant bibles included the deuterocanonical books; between the years 1526 and 1631, Protestant bibles with the deuterocanon were the rule and not the exception."⁴⁶ The idea that Protestants have "always" had a sixty-six-book Bible is simply false. For the first century and a half of the Reformation, Protestant Bibles looked much more like Catholic Bibles than most Protestants today would be comfortable admitting.

The Reformers' Arguments — and Why They Fail

Now that we have traced the historical trajectory, let us examine the Reformers' actual arguments for demoting the deuterocanon and assess their strength. I want to be fair to these arguments. They were made by brilliant men who believed they were following the evidence. Some of the arguments are stronger than others. But none of them, in my judgment, is strong enough to justify the removal of books that had been part of the Christian Bible for over fifteen hundred years.

Argument 1: "The books were not in the Hebrew canon."

This was the Reformers' primary argument, and it is the one most commonly repeated by Protestants today. The logic seems straightforward: the Old Testament was originally written in Hebrew (with some Aramaic); the Jews maintained a canon of twenty-two (or twenty-four) books; the deuterocanonical books were not in this canon; therefore, they are not part of the Old Testament.

The problem with this argument is that it assumes a fixed, closed Hebrew canon existed before the time of Christ — and as we saw in Chapter 19, this assumption is not supported by the evidence. The Dead Sea Scrolls demonstrate that the boundaries of the Jewish canon were still fluid during the Second Temple period. Fragments of Tobit, Sirach, the Letter of Jeremiah, and Psalm 151 were found at Qumran, intermixed with protocanonical books. Different Jewish communities maintained different collections of authoritative texts. The "Hebrew canon" that the Reformers accepted as normative was not the pre-Christian Jewish canon — it was the post-Christian rabbinic canon, formalized in the aftermath of the destruction of the Temple and the rise of Rabbinic Judaism.

Furthermore, as we discussed in Chapter 12, there is strong evidence that the rabbinic narrowing of the canon was motivated in part by the desire to distance Judaism from Christianity. The Septuagint — which included the deuterocanonical books — had become identified as the Christian Bible. By rejecting the books that were unique to the Septuagint, the rabbis were rejecting the Christian Bible. The Reformers, by adopting the rabbinic canon, were unwittingly accepting the results of an anti-Christian polemic.

Argument 2: "The books were not universally accepted in the early church."

The Reformers appealed to Jerome as evidence that the early church was divided over the deuterocanon. But as we demonstrated in Chapter 27, Jerome's position was emphatically the minority view. The overwhelming consensus of the church fathers — Clement of Rome, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Cyprian, Origen, Athanasius (with qualifications), Augustine, and many others — received the deuterocanonical books as Scripture. The councils of Hippo (393), Carthage (397 and 419), Florence (1442), and Trent (1546) all affirmed them. Jerome was, in Neuser's words, "the only person in the early Church who took up a position against the Apocrypha."⁴⁷

To build an entire canon on the minority position of one church father — while rejecting the majority consensus of the councils and the fathers — is a remarkable act of selective appeal to tradition. The Reformers were willing to reject the authority of popes and councils on many other issues. But on the canon, they were appealing to tradition — just a very narrow, very selective tradition.

Argument 3: "The books contain theological difficulties."

Luther objected to 2 Maccabees because it supported prayers for the dead. He questioned the historical accuracy of Judith. Some Reformers found the theology of merit in Sirach and Tobit distasteful.

But theological difficulties exist in the protocanonical books too — and we do not reject those books on that basis. The imprecatory psalms call for the violent destruction of enemies and their children (Psalm 137:9 — "Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock"). The book of Joshua commands genocide. Ecclesiastes seems to deny any afterlife. The book of Esther never mentions God. Kings and Chronicles contain apparent contradictions in their numerical data. If theological difficulty were grounds for rejecting a book, we would need to reject a significant portion of the protocanonical Old Testament as well.

The proper response to a difficult text is not to remove it from the Bible. It is to study it, wrestle with it, and interpret it within the broader context of the canonical witness. As I argued in Chapter 24, the passage in 2 Maccabees 12 about prayers for the dead does not require us to accept the Catholic doctrine of purgatory. We can affirm prayers for the dead within a Protestant framework — one that affirms a conscious intermediate state without accepting the idea that the saved must suffer to pay off punishment for their sins. The deuterocanonical books can be read responsibly within a Protestant theological framework. Removing them was an overreaction.

Argument 4: "Catholics used these books to support doctrines the Reformers rejected."

This is perhaps the most honest — and the most damning — of the Reformers' arguments. The deuterocanonical books were being used by Catholic apologists to support purgatory, merit of works, and prayers for the dead. Luther did not want to give his opponents ammunition. So he removed the ammunition.

But allowing polemical concerns to determine the canon is methodologically bankrupt. The canon should be determined by evidence — historical evidence, textual evidence, and theological evidence — not by which doctrines a book happens to support or oppose. If we removed every book that could be used to support a doctrine we find objectionable, the Bible would shrink considerably. Paul's letters have been used to support everything from slavery to misogyny. Should we remove Paul? Of course not. We interpret Paul responsibly. The same standard should apply to the deuterocanon.

The Ever-Shifting Sands of Protestant Argumentation

One of the most telling features of the Protestant case against the deuterocanon is how unstable its arguments have been over time. As Michuta documents, early Protestants differed widely among themselves about why the deuterocanon should be rejected — and their reasons kept changing.

Luther appealed to the inner quality of the books — a book was canonical only insofar as it "preached Christ." Zwingli called them "Church Books" that could not confirm doctrine. Calvin believed the "Apocrypha" was incapable of providing the full assurance of faith for the believer. The Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles distinguished the deuterocanon from the protocanon because the latter "was never in doubt by the Church." The French (Gallican) Confession proposed that the "inward illumination of the Holy Spirit" enabled believers to distinguish canonical from non-canonical books.⁴⁸

These are five different arguments — and they are not all compatible with each other. Luther's criterion (preaching Christ) would include some deuterocanonical books (like Wisdom, which Luther himself admired) and exclude some protocanonical books (like Esther, which never mentions Christ). Calvin's criterion (assurance of faith) is subjective and difficult to apply consistently. The Anglican criterion (never in doubt) is historically false — many protocanonical books were disputed in the early church, including Esther, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon. The French Confession's criterion (inner testimony of the Spirit) is unfalsifiable — who can adjudicate competing claims about what the Spirit has testified?

The instability of the arguments suggests that the conclusion — rejection of the deuterocanon — came first, and the arguments were constructed after the fact to justify it. If the evidence itself clearly pointed to the rejection of these books, we would expect the arguments to converge rather than diverge. The fact that they diverge suggests that the Reformers were looking for any argument that would support a conclusion they had already reached for other reasons — primarily the polemical reason that these books were being used against them.

Even the status of the deuterocanon within Protestantism has shifted dramatically over time. Luther considered them a kind of non-canonical Scripture — still valuable, still part of the Old Testament corpus, still "good and useful to read." Calvin similarly was not opposed to their being read. But the Westminster Confession declared them to have "no authority in the Church of God" — no better than any other human writing. And the Edinburgh Bible Society went even further, declaring that the very presence of the "Apocrypha" in Protestant Bibles furthered the cause of the Antichrist.⁴⁹

From "good and useful" to "furthering the cause of the Antichrist" — that is quite a journey. And it happened in barely three centuries. The trajectory tells us something important: the Protestant position on the deuterocanon was not stable. It was not the product of a careful, settled, scholarly consensus. It was the product of polemical forces that pushed the position further and further in one direction, from cautious qualification to total rejection.

Why the Removal Was a Mistake

Having traced the history and examined the arguments, I want to state clearly why I believe the Reformation removal of the deuterocanonical books was a mistake — a well-intentioned but ultimately misguided decision that has impoverished the Protestant Bible and weakened the Protestant understanding of the Old Testament.

First, the Reformers adopted the wrong canon. They accepted the rabbinic Hebrew canon as normative — a canon that was itself a post-Christian construction, shaped in part by anti-Christian polemic (see Chapters 12 and 19). They did this because Jerome had done it, and Jerome did it because he was influenced by the rabbinic claims about the Hebrew text without having access to the evidence (the Dead Sea Scrolls) that would have shown those claims to be misleading. The chain of reasoning — from the rabbis, through Jerome, to the Reformers — was built on a foundation that the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls has undermined.

Second, the Reformers relied on a minority patristic witness. As we have seen throughout this book, the vast majority of the church fathers received the deuterocanonical books as Scripture. Jerome was the exception, not the rule. By building their canon on Jerome's position and ignoring the consensus of the councils and the majority of the fathers, the Reformers were engaging in selective appeal to tradition — choosing the one voice that supported their conclusion while dismissing the many voices that contradicted it.

Third, the Reformers' decision was driven, at least in part, by polemical motives. Luther rejected the deuterocanon at the precise moment when 2 Maccabees was being used against him. The subsequent Protestant confessions hardened the position in direct response to the Council of Trent's reaffirmation of the deuterocanon. Anti-Catholic sentiment became a significant factor in the later stages of the removal, especially among the Puritans. When the motive for a canon decision is to deny your opponent a proof text, the integrity of the decision is compromised.

Fourth, the Reformers' own practice contradicted their theory. Luther, Calvin, and Jerome all used the deuterocanonical books as authoritative sources even while denying their full canonicity. If these books were truly no better than "other human writings," why did three of the most brilliant Christian minds in history keep finding them indispensable for theological argument? The answer is obvious: because the theological content of these books is too rich, too important, and too deeply connected to the rest of the biblical witness to be discarded.

Fifth — and this is the point I want to emphasize most strongly — the removal of the deuterocanonical books has left genuine gaps in the Protestant Old Testament. Without the Wisdom of Solomon, we lose the most powerful Old Testament-era teaching on the immortality of the soul and the suffering righteous one. Without Sirach, we lose the bridge between Proverbs and the New Testament's wisdom tradition. Without 1–2 Maccabees, we lose the historical context for the world Jesus entered and the theological foundations for the resurrection of the dead. Without Baruch, we lose a remarkable proto-incarnational text. These gaps are not trivial. They affect how we read the New Testament, how we understand the development of Old Testament theology, and how we connect the two Testaments. We will explore these gaps in detail in Chapter 31.

The Deeper Problem: Who Decides the Canon?

Beneath all the specific arguments about individual books and individual Reformers lies a deeper question that the Reformation never fully resolved: Who has the authority to determine which books belong in the Bible? This is, in many ways, the most fundamental question in the entire canon debate — and the Protestant answer to it is more complicated than most Protestants realize.

The Catholic answer is clear: the church, guided by the Holy Spirit, received the canonical books from the apostles and formally recognized them through councils. The canon is a product of the church's discernment under divine guidance. This is the position that Augustine articulated when he declared that he would not believe the gospel unless the authority of the Catholic Church moved him to do so — a statement that Luther found deeply problematic, but that reflects a coherent theological position.

The Protestant answer is supposed to be equally clear: Scripture authenticates itself. The canonical books possess an intrinsic authority that does not depend on the church's recognition. God's Word is God's Word whether the church recognizes it or not. This is the principle behind Calvin's appeal to the inner testimony of the Holy Spirit — the idea that the Spirit witnesses to the believer that these books are from God.

But here is the difficulty. If Scripture authenticates itself, and if the Spirit testifies to the hearts of believers which books are canonical, then why did the church — for over fifteen hundred years, guided (presumably) by that same Spirit — receive the deuterocanonical books as Scripture? Why did the overwhelming majority of Christians throughout history sense the Spirit's testimony in Wisdom, Sirach, and Maccabees? The Spirit-testimony argument, if taken seriously, actually weighs in favor of the deuterocanon, not against it — because far more Christians, over far more centuries, have sensed the Spirit's testimony in these books than have denied it.

Luther's alternative criterion — "does it preach Christ?" — is even more problematic, because it makes each individual reader the arbiter of the canon. If I hear Christ preached in the Wisdom of Solomon (and I do — especially in Wisdom 2:12–20, where the suffering righteous one is described in language that reads like a prophecy of the crucifixion), then Wisdom is canonical for me. If Luther does not hear Christ preached in the Epistle of James, then James is not canonical for him. The canon becomes subjective — a matter of individual theological taste rather than historical and ecclesial discernment.

At Leipzig, Johann Eck pressed this very point. If Luther could reject 2 Maccabees because it contradicted his theology, what was to stop someone else from rejecting Romans because it contradicted their theology? Luther's response was to argue that the church cannot give a book more authority than it possesses by its own nature — that a book's canonicity is intrinsic, not conferred. But this only pushes the question back one step: Who determines whether a given book possesses intrinsic authority? Luther's answer, in practice, was: Luther does.⁵¹

This is not a sustainable position. And it is one of the reasons why the Protestant canon has remained unstable. The same principle that allowed Luther to question James and remove 2 Maccabees allowed the Puritans to go further (declaring the deuterocanon "no part of the canon"), and it has allowed various groups throughout Protestant history to question or qualify the status of different biblical books. Without a clear, principled answer to the question of canonical authority, the Protestant canon rests on a foundation that is more fragile than most Protestants appreciate.

I believe the right answer lies somewhere between the Catholic and Protestant positions. The canon was not arbitrarily determined by church councils — the councils recognized what the church had already received from the apostolic community. But neither was the canon determined by individual readers applying their own theological criteria. The canon was discerned by the church corporately, over centuries, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit — and the result of that corporate discernment, across East and West, across centuries and cultures, consistently included the deuterocanonical books. Rejecting that consensus on the authority of one church father (Jerome) or one Reformer (Luther) is not following the evidence. It is replacing the church's corporate discernment with an individual's private judgment.

A Better Way Forward

What would it look like for Protestants to reconsider the deuterocanon? I want to suggest that it would not require abandoning Protestantism, becoming Catholic, or accepting doctrines like purgatory or the Magisterium. It would simply require following the evidence — something that the best of the Reformers would have affirmed as a principle, even if they did not always follow it in practice.

There is nothing in the deuterocanonical books that a thoughtful Protestant cannot read with profit. The Wisdom of Solomon's teaching on the immortality of the soul (Wisdom 3:1–9) is consistent with the NT's teaching and with the substance dualism that many evangelicals affirm. Sirach's wisdom teaching is continuous with Proverbs and deeply influential on the letter of James. The Maccabees' theology of martyrdom and resurrection anticipates the NT's own teaching. Even the controversial passage on prayers for the dead in 2 Maccabees 12 can be read within a Protestant framework — one that affirms a conscious intermediate state, the possibility of postmortem opportunity for salvation, and the legitimacy of praying for the dead, without accepting the Catholic doctrine of purgatory (as I argued in Chapter 24).

The first Protestants understood this. They included these books in their Bibles. They read them in their churches. They cited them in their sermons and theological treatises. They valued them as part of the Christian heritage. It was only later — under pressure from confessional hardening, anti-Catholic polemic, and eventually economic concerns (as we will see in Chapter 30) — that the deuterocanon was expelled completely. Recovering these books would not be innovation. It would be restoration. It would be returning to what the first generation of Protestants already had — and what the church had possessed for over a millennium before them.

As the Anglican scholar F.F. Bruce noted, the question of the deuterocanon is not a question of Catholic versus Protestant. It is a question of evidence versus assumption.⁵⁰ The evidence — from the Septuagint, from the Dead Sea Scrolls, from the church fathers, from the councils, and from the Reformers' own practice — favors the inclusion of the deuterocanonical books. The assumptions that led to their removal — that the rabbinic canon is the pre-Christian canon, that Jerome's position was the mainstream, that polemical concerns can legitimately determine the canon — are assumptions that the evidence does not support.

I believe the Reformers would be troubled to learn that their well-intentioned decisions about the deuterocanon had the long-term effect of severing Protestants from books that the apostles read, the church fathers quoted, and the councils affirmed. The Reformation was about returning to the sources — ad fontes, as the humanist scholars put it. On the question of the deuterocanon, returning to the sources means returning to the Septuagint, returning to the church fathers, and returning to the Bible that built the church.