Chapter 36

Conclusion — Recovering the Bible That Built the Church

We have covered a lot of ground together. Thirty-five chapters, hundreds of passages, dozens of scholars, and centuries of history. If you have stayed with me this far, I want you to know that I am genuinely grateful. The topics we have explored in this book are not easy. They challenge assumptions that most of us have held our entire lives. They ask us to reconsider things we were taught by pastors and teachers we deeply respect. And they lead us into territory that can feel uncomfortable — especially for Protestants who love the Bible and are fiercely committed to its authority.

But I believe the evidence demands our attention. And I believe that following the evidence — wherever it leads — is not a betrayal of our commitment to Scripture. It is the highest expression of it. If we truly believe that God's Word is truth, then we should want to know what that Word actually says. We should want to read it in its fullest form. And we should be willing to ask hard questions about whether the Bible sitting on our nightstand is really the complete Bible that the apostles and the early church received.

In this final chapter, I want to draw everything together. I want to summarize what we have learned, address the practical questions that naturally arise, and cast a vision for what it would look like for the Protestant church to recover the Bible that built the church.

The Two Central Arguments: A Summary

This book has advanced two interconnected theses. They are distinct but deeply related — and understanding how they connect is essential to understanding the full picture.

Thesis One: The Septuagint Deserves a Dramatically Higher Status

The first thesis is that the Septuagint — the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament — deserves a dramatically higher status in the Protestant church than it currently enjoys. Right now, most Protestants have never even heard of the Septuagint. Those who have tend to think of it as a mere translation — useful for historical background, perhaps, but not authoritative. The "real" Old Testament, in this view, is the Hebrew Masoretic Text. The Septuagint is just a Greek copy.

But as we have seen throughout this book, that picture is deeply misleading. Let me summarize the six pillars of the case we have built.

This is not a minor point. It goes straight to the heart of how we understand biblical authority. If the New Testament authors treated the Septuagint as their authoritative Scripture — if they built Christological arguments on its specific wording, used its unique vocabulary to describe the person and work of Christ, and never once corrected it against the Hebrew — then we need to take the Septuagint far more seriously than we currently do. As Lanier and Ross have observed, New Testament authors like Luke and the author of Hebrews made "near exclusive use of the Greek Old Testament."² The early church — from the apostolic period through the patristic era — universally regarded the Septuagint as authoritative Scripture. It was not a secondary or inferior translation. It was the Bible of the church for its first several centuries.³

The significance of this cannot be overstated. For centuries, defenders of the Masoretic Text could dismiss Septuagint differences by saying, "The translators just got it wrong." The Dead Sea Scrolls have demolished that argument. In case after case, the Scrolls confirm that the Septuagint was faithfully translating a Hebrew text — a text that happened to differ from the one that the later rabbinic establishment preserved.

Pillar Three: There Is Strong Evidence of Deliberate Alteration in the Masoretic Text. In Chapters 12 through 15, we examined the evidence that second-century rabbis — particularly Rabbi Akiba and his circle — made deliberate changes to the Hebrew text. These changes were not random scribal errors. They followed a consistent pattern: weakening or removing Messianic readings that Christians used to argue that Jesus was the promised Messiah. As we documented, the alterations consistently work in one direction — the Septuagint preserves a stronger Messianic reading, and the Masoretic Text weakens or eliminates it. As S. Douglas Woodward has argued, this unidirectional pattern is powerful evidence for intentional alteration.⁵

The motivation is not hard to find. In the aftermath of the Bar Kokhba revolt (132–135 AD), the rabbinic establishment had three powerful reasons to distance the Hebrew text from the Septuagint: first, the Septuagint had become identified as the Christian Bible, so the rabbis needed to delegitimize it; second, the Septuagint's Messianic readings supported Christian claims about Jesus; and third, the Septuagint's longer chronology conflicted with the compressed timeline of the Seder Olam — the rabbinic chronological work attributed to Rabbi Yose ben Halafta, one of Akiba's students.⁶

I want to be clear about the scholarly nuance here. Not all scholars agree that these textual changes were deliberate. Emanuel Tov, for example, attributes most LXX-MT differences to the normal processes of textual transmission — the Septuagint was translated from a different Hebrew Vorlage, and the differences reflect textual plurality rather than intentional tampering.⁷ We presented Tov's view fairly in Chapter 12. But the pattern, consistency, and direction of the changes — combined with the explicit testimony of early Christian writers like Justin Martyr, who accused the Jewish leaders of removing passages from Scripture — make the case for intentional alteration significantly stronger than the case for accidental divergence.⁸

Pillar Four: The Chronologies of Genesis 5 and 11 Have Been Corrupted in the MT. As we demonstrated in Chapters 16 and 17, the ages of the patriarchs in Genesis 5 and 11 differ dramatically between the Septuagint and the Masoretic Text. The pattern is unmistakable: the MT consistently reduces the "age at fathering" for each patriarch by exactly 100 years while adjusting the "remaining years" so that the total lifespan stays the same. Random scribal errors do not produce a consistent 100-year reduction across multiple patriarchs. This mathematical precision is itself evidence of deliberate editing. The total impact is enormous — the MT's compressed chronology removes roughly 1,500 years from world history, placing the creation of the world approximately 1,500 years later than the Septuagint does.⁹

Why would the rabbis compress the chronology? As Woodward has argued, the chronological compression was connected to the Seder Olam's manipulation of Messianic expectations. By compressing the biblical timeline, the rabbis could claim that the "six thousand years" before the Messianic age had not yet elapsed — countering Christian claims that Jesus came at the appointed time.¹⁰ The result is that the Jewish calendar today reads approximately 5786 AM (anno mundi, "from the creation of the world"), when the correct figure — based on the Septuagint's chronology — would be closer to 7,300 or more.¹¹

Pillar Five: The Masoretic Text Was Not Standardized Until Nearly a Thousand Years After Christ. As we documented in Chapter 18, the earliest complete Masoretic codex — the Aleppo Codex — dates to approximately 930 AD. The Leningrad Codex, which forms the basis for modern critical editions of the Hebrew Bible (and therefore for virtually all modern English Old Testament translations), dates to 1008 AD. While the consonantal text was largely stabilized by the second century AD, the vowel pointing, cantillation marks, and textual notes that define the "Masoretic" text were not finalized until centuries later. This means the MT as we have it reflects editorial decisions made over many centuries — decisions that the church has no obligation to treat as more authoritative than the much earlier Septuagint tradition.¹²

Pillar Six: The Patristic Consensus Favored the Septuagint. As we showed in Chapter 11, the early church fathers — from Clement of Rome through Augustine — universally used and cited the Septuagint as their authoritative Old Testament. Fathers such as Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Irenaeus, Origen, Athanasius, and Augustine all relied on the Greek Old Testament. Working knowledge of Hebrew was the exception, not the rule, among the church fathers. The Septuagint was the church's Bible — and the fathers knew it.¹³

Taken together, these six pillars form a powerful cumulative case. The Septuagint was the apostolic Bible. The Dead Sea Scrolls confirm its readings. The Masoretic Text shows evidence of deliberate alteration. The MT's chronology has been corrupted. The MT was not finalized until centuries after the Septuagint was already in use. And the church fathers unanimously favored the Septuagint. The conclusion is hard to avoid: the Septuagint deserves to be used alongside the Masoretic Text as a primary witness to the Old Testament text — not treated as a mere translation to be corrected against the Hebrew.

Addressing the Strongest Counterarguments

In the spirit of fairness that I have tried to maintain throughout this book, let me address the three strongest counterarguments to our case for the Septuagint.

Counterargument One: "The Masoretic Text is more original because it is in Hebrew." This is perhaps the most common objection. Hebrew was the original language of the Old Testament, so the Hebrew text must be more reliable than a Greek translation. But this reasoning contains a hidden assumption — namely, that the Hebrew text we have today is the same Hebrew text that was originally written. As we have demonstrated, the Septuagint was translated from Hebrew Vorlagen that may have been older than the proto-Masoretic text. The fact that our current Hebrew text is in Hebrew does not mean it is closer to the original. A translation made from an older, more reliable Hebrew manuscript may actually preserve the original better than a later Hebrew manuscript that has undergone centuries of editorial revision.¹⁴

Counterargument Two: "The Septuagint translators made mistakes." This is true. No translation is perfect, and the Septuagint contains translational errors, paraphrases, and interpretive renderings. But translational errors are fundamentally different from deliberate alteration. A translator who misunderstands a Hebrew word produces a different kind of variant than an editor who intentionally changes a Messianic reading to weaken its Christological force. We have never claimed that the Septuagint is perfect in every reading. Our claim is that when significant theological or chronological differences exist between the LXX and the MT, the LXX more often preserves the earlier reading and the MT more often reflects later alteration.¹⁵

Counterargument Three: "The MT's shorter readings are more likely original (lectio brevior)." This is an appeal to a well-known text-critical principle — the idea that scribes tend to add to a text rather than subtract from it, so shorter readings are generally older. But as we discussed in Chapter 34, this principle does not apply when the shorter reading can be explained by deliberate excision. If an editor intentionally removed a Messianic reference because it supported Christian claims, the resulting shorter text is not "more original" — it is more corrupted. The text-critical principle of lectio brevior (Latin for "the shorter reading") assumes accidental scribal activity. When there is evidence of intentional editorial activity, the principle does not hold.¹⁶

Thesis Two: The Deuterocanonical Books Are Very Likely Inspired Scripture

The second thesis of this book is that the deuterocanonical books — the books included in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles but excluded from Protestant Bibles — are very likely inspired Scripture that belongs in the canon. These books include Tobit, Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach (also called Ecclesiasticus), Baruch, 1 and 2 Maccabees, and the additions to Daniel and Esther.

I know that for many Protestant readers, this is the more challenging of the two theses. The idea that our Bible might be missing books feels unsettling. But I want to remind you of something we established early in this book: the deuterocanonical books are part of the Septuagint. And the Septuagint was the church's Bible. These two theses are not separate — they are two sides of the same coin. If the Septuagint was the Bible of the apostles, then the deuterocanonical books were part of the apostolic Bible.

Let me summarize the case we have built across Chapters 19 through 31.

The New Testament Authors Knew and Used the Deuterocanonical Books. In Chapter 20, we examined the extensive allusions, echoes, and theological parallels between the New Testament and the deuterocanonical books. While the NT does not quote these books with the introductory formula "it is written," the evidence of literary and theological dependence is overwhelming. Three cases are especially powerful.

First, Hebrews 11:35 — "Women received back their dead by resurrection. Some were tortured, refusing to accept release, so that they might rise again to a better life" — is universally recognized as an allusion to 2 Maccabees 7, the story of the seven brothers and their mother who were tortured and killed for their faithfulness to God. No other Old Testament text describes people who were "tortured, not accepting their release, so that they might rise again to a better life." And Hebrews 11 focuses exclusively on biblical characters — people "attested to" in Scripture. If the Maccabean martyrs appear in this list, then 2 Maccabees must be part of the author's Bible.¹⁸

Second, Matthew 27:43 — the mocking of Jesus on the cross — echoes Wisdom 2:18: "For if the just one be the son of God, he will defend him and deliver him from the hand of his foes." Psalm 22:8, often cited as the Old Testament source, provides only a partial parallel — it says nothing about the "Son of God." Wisdom 2:18 provides exactly the missing element. As Gary Michuta has argued, the chief priests, scribes, and elders "must have seen the Book of Wisdom as a prophetic and authoritative source capable of providing the divine warrant necessary to discredit Jesus."¹⁹

Third, Hebrews 1:3 — "He is the radiance [apaugasma, ἀπαύγασμα] of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature" — draws directly on Wisdom 7:26, which describes Wisdom as "a radiance [apaugasma] of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of his goodness." The word apaugasma appears in only these two places in the entire Greek Bible. The author of Hebrews is using a deuterocanonical book to formulate core Christological doctrine — which implies he regarded it as capable of confirming doctrine.²⁰

And these are only the most prominent examples. Michuta has catalogued over 300 verbal parallels and allusions between the New Testament and the deuterocanonical books.²¹ While any individual allusion might be coincidental, the sheer cumulative weight of the evidence creates a strong presumption that the New Testament authors regarded these books as part of their Scripture.

The Deuterocanonical Books Contain Remarkable Prophetic and Messianic Texts. In Chapter 35, we brought together the prophetic evidence from across the book. The Wisdom of Solomon's portrait of the suffering righteous one (Wisdom 2:12–20) reads like a preview of Christ's passion — the wicked plotting against the righteous man who "calls himself a child of the Lord," testing him "with insult and torture," condemning him "to a shameful death." The verbal parallels with Matthew's passion narrative are too extensive and too precise to be coincidental. If the Wisdom of Solomon was written in the first century BC — as most scholars believe — then this passage is genuinely prophetic.²²

Baruch 3:36–38 speaks of God "appearing on earth and living among human beings" — a remarkable proto-incarnational text that anticipates the central Christian confession. Sirach 24 personifies Wisdom in language that anticipates the Logos theology of John 1. And 2 Maccabees 7, with its powerful theology of bodily resurrection and the vindication of the righteous, provides what may be the clearest statement of resurrection hope in all of the Old Testament literature.²³

The Removal of the Deuterocanonical Books Was a Mistake. In Chapters 29 and 30, we traced the history of how these books disappeared from Protestant Bibles. The process was gradual: Luther relegated them to a separate section labeled "Apocrypha" in his 1534 German Bible; the Synod of Dort moved the section to the back of the Bible; and eventually the British and Foreign Bible Society, in 1826, decided to stop printing Bibles with these books altogether — primarily to save money on paper and printing. The books that had been part of the Christian Bible for over 1,800 years were removed for economic reasons.²⁵

Luther's own motivations were revealing. He was uncomfortable with 2 Maccabees 12 because it supported the Catholic doctrine of purgatory — a doctrine he was actively attacking. He also famously questioned several New Testament books that he found theologically inconvenient, calling the Epistle of James "an epistle of straw." If Luther could question James because it conflicted with his theology of justification by faith alone, was his demotion of 2 Maccabees equally motivated by theological convenience rather than genuine scholarly assessment?²⁶

As we noted, the early Reformers did not initially remove these books outright. As the Anglican scholar John Hey observed, "At the Reformation, when men had been brought up to revere them, it would have been both imprudent and cruel to set them aside."²⁷ That tells us something important: the first Protestants — who were all former Catholics — grew up reading Bibles that contained the deuterocanonical books. The removal happened gradually, over centuries, driven by a combination of anti-Catholic polemic, the growing influence of the Westminster Confession's dismissive language, and finally, economic pressure from Bible societies.

We Lose Something Real When These Books Are Missing. As we explored in Chapter 31, the absence of the deuterocanonical books leaves genuine theological gaps in the Protestant Old Testament. Without the Wisdom of Solomon, we lose the clearest Old Testament-era testimony to the immortality of the soul and the conscious survival of the righteous after death. Without 2 Maccabees, we lose the most explicit pre-Christian statement of bodily resurrection and the most powerful martyrdom narratives in Jewish literature. Without Sirach, we lose a rich wisdom tradition that directly influenced Jesus and James. Without Baruch, we lose proto-incarnational language that anticipates John 1. And without 1 Maccabees, we lose the historical context for the entire intertestamental period — the period between the Old and New Testaments that shaped the world into which Jesus was born.

The Interconnection: Why These Two Theses Belong Together

Throughout this book, I have insisted that these two theses — the case for the Septuagint and the case for the deuterocanon — are not separate arguments. They are two expressions of a single underlying reality. Let me explain why.

The deuterocanonical books are part of the Septuagint. They were included in the Greek Old Testament that the church received from the Hellenistic Jewish community. When the apostles quoted from the Septuagint — which they did constantly — they were quoting from a collection of Scripture that included these books. When the early church fathers used the Septuagint as their Bible, they were using a Bible that contained Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, 1 and 2 Maccabees, and the additions to Daniel and Esther.

The Protestant rejection of both — the demotion of the Septuagint in favor of the Masoretic Text, and the removal of the deuterocanonical books — stems from the same root: an uncritical acceptance of the rabbinic Hebrew canon as normative for Christians. Let me say that again, because it is the key insight of this entire book. The reason Protestants have a smaller Old Testament is that the Reformers — following Jerome's minority position — adopted the rabbinic Hebrew canon as their standard for the Old Testament. They assumed that the Hebrew text was more reliable than the Greek, and they assumed that the books contained in the Hebrew canon were the only legitimate Old Testament books.

But as we have shown, both of these assumptions are problematic. The Hebrew text has been altered. The Hebrew canon was shaped by the same second-century rabbinic establishment that rejected Christ, produced the replacement translations of Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion (as we documented in Chapter 13), and compressed the biblical chronology through the Seder Olam. When Protestants adopt the rabbinic Hebrew canon as their standard, they are — perhaps unwittingly — allowing the rabbis who rejected Jesus to determine which books belong in the Christian Bible.²⁸

But Does This Mean We Need to "Become Catholic"?

This is the question I hear most often from fellow Protestants, and I want to address it head-on. The answer is no. Absolutely not.

My argument throughout this book has been based entirely on the historical, textual, and theological evidence — not on papal or magisterial authority. I am not asking you to accept the deuterocanonical books because the Catholic Church says so. I am asking you to accept them because the evidence says so. The evidence includes: the testimony of the apostles (who used the Septuagint, including the deuterocanonical books, as their Bible), the witness of the Dead Sea Scrolls (which confirm the antiquity of these books), the practice of the early church (which received these books as Scripture for over a millennium before the Reformation), and the internal evidence of the books themselves (which bear the marks of divine inspiration in their prophetic content, theological depth, and literary quality).

A Protestant can accept the deuterocanonical books on the same grounds that we accept the protocanonical books — the thirty-nine books that all Christians agree on. How do we know that Genesis is Scripture? Not because a pope declared it so, but because the church has always received it as inspired, because it bears the internal marks of divine authorship, and because the Holy Spirit testifies to its truth in the hearts of believers. The same criteria apply to the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, and the rest of the deuterocanonical books. The testimony of the early church, the evidence of inspiration, and the illumination of the Holy Spirit — these are Protestant criteria, and they point toward inclusion.²⁹

I should also say clearly what I am not arguing. Accepting the deuterocanonical books does not require accepting the Catholic doctrine of purgatory. As I discussed in Chapter 24, 2 Maccabees 12:38–46 — the passage about Judas Maccabeus offering prayers and a sin offering on behalf of fallen soldiers — supports the legitimacy of prayers for the dead. But it does not support the elaborate Catholic dogma of purgatory, in which the saved must suffer to pay off the temporal punishment for their sins. A Protestant who affirms the conscious intermediate state (as I do) can read 2 Maccabees 12 as evidence that the dead can benefit from the prayers of the living without accepting Catholic soteriology. The proper response to the abuse of a text is not to remove the text from the Bible. It is to interpret it correctly.³⁰

Nor does accepting the deuterocanonical books require accepting every historical detail in these books as factually accurate. The book of Judith, for example, contains possible historical inaccuracies that scholars have long debated. But historical difficulties are not unique to the deuterocanon — the protocanonical books also contain passages that have generated centuries of scholarly discussion about genre, historical context, and literary convention. We do not reject Judges or Chronicles because they raise difficult historical questions. We should not apply a stricter standard to the deuterocanonical books than we apply to the rest of the Bible.³¹

The Strongest Objections — Honestly Faced

I have tried throughout this book to steel-man the opposing arguments — to present them in their strongest possible form before responding. In this concluding chapter, let me revisit the most important objections and offer a final assessment.

Objection One: "Jesus and the Apostles Used the Hebrew Canon"

This is one of the most common Protestant arguments against the deuterocanon. The reasoning goes like this: Jesus used the Hebrew Scriptures. The Hebrew Scriptures did not include the deuterocanonical books. Therefore, Jesus' Bible did not include them, and ours should not either.

But this argument rests on several questionable assumptions. First, as we documented in Chapter 6, Jesus and the apostles used the Scriptures available in their context — which included diverse textual traditions. Jesus most likely read from a Hebrew scroll of Isaiah in the Nazareth synagogue (Luke 4:17–20), but the New Testament writers overwhelmingly quoted from the Greek Septuagint when citing the Old Testament in their writings.³²

Second, the claim that "the Hebrew canon did not include the deuterocanonical books" assumes that there was a fixed, universally agreed-upon Hebrew canon in the first century. But as we demonstrated in Chapter 19, the evidence suggests otherwise. The canon was still fluid in Jesus' day. The Dead Sea Scrolls community at Qumran possessed and used copies of Tobit, Sirach, and other deuterocanonical books. There was no official rabbinic "closing" of the canon until well after the time of Christ — and the process by which certain books were excluded was shaped by anti-Christian polemic, as we documented in Chapter 12.³³

Third, even if we grant (for the sake of argument) that Jesus used a Hebrew canon that did not include the deuterocanonical books, it does not follow that the church's canon should be identical to the synagogue's canon. The church received the Spirit's guidance in recognizing inspired Scripture — and the church, for over a thousand years, recognized the deuterocanonical books as part of that Scripture. The question is not "What was in the synagogue's Torah scroll?" but "What did the church receive as Scripture under the guidance of the Holy Spirit?" And the answer to that question includes the deuterocanon.³⁴

Objection Two: "The Deuterocanonical Books Are Never Quoted in the New Testament"

This objection is technically correct — the New Testament never introduces a deuterocanonical citation with the formula "it is written" or "Scripture says." But as we demonstrated in Chapter 20, this criterion is far too narrow. Several protocanonical books — Judges, Ruth, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Obadiah, and Nahum — are also never directly quoted in the New Testament. If lack of a formula quotation disqualifies a book from the canon, these books would also be disqualified.³⁵

Moreover, the New Testament contains extensive allusions to and theological dependence on the deuterocanonical books, as we have documented. The author of Hebrews builds a Christological argument using vocabulary drawn directly from the Wisdom of Solomon. The structure of Romans 1:18–32 closely parallels the argument of Wisdom 13–14. James draws extensively on Sirach. These are not casual echoes — they are evidence that the New Testament authors regarded these books as part of their theological vocabulary and their scriptural heritage.

Objection Three: "The Books Are Too Late to Be Canonical"

Some Protestants argue that the deuterocanonical books cannot be inspired because they were written too late — after the prophetic voice had supposedly ceased in Israel. This argument typically appeals to the idea that prophecy ended with Malachi (around 400 BC) and did not resume until John the Baptist.

But this argument has serious problems. First, the dating of some protocanonical books is also debated — Daniel, for example, is dated by many critical scholars to the second century BC, the same period as some of the deuterocanonical books. If lateness of composition were a disqualifying factor, Daniel would also be in jeopardy.³⁶ Second, the idea that prophecy "ceased" after Malachi is itself a rabbinic tradition, not a biblical teaching. The New Testament nowhere states that the Old Testament canon was closed at any particular point. Third, the question of when a book was written is separate from the question of whether God inspired it. If God chose to inspire a writer in the second century BC — or the first century BC, in the case of the Wisdom of Solomon — who are we to say He could not do so?

Objection Four: "The Books Contain Theological Errors or Hellenistic Philosophy"

This objection is worth taking seriously. The Wisdom of Solomon, in particular, shows the influence of Greek philosophical concepts — especially its language about the immortality of the soul and the pre-existence of the soul (Wisdom 8:19–20). Some Protestant critics argue that this Hellenistic influence disqualifies the book from canonical status.

But we should be careful here. The New Testament itself was written in Greek, uses Greek philosophical vocabulary (the Logos of John 1, for example), and engages with Hellenistic thought in sophisticated ways. Paul quotes Greek poets in Acts 17:28. The author of Hebrews uses the philosophical concept of apaugasma — drawn from the Wisdom of Solomon — to describe the relationship between the Father and the Son. If engagement with Hellenistic thought disqualifies a book from inspiration, then significant portions of the New Testament would also be in jeopardy.³⁷

As for specific theological concerns — such as the possible implication in Wisdom 8:19–20 that the soul pre-exists the body — these can be handled through careful exegesis, just as we handle difficult passages in the protocanonical books. The presence of a challenging passage does not disqualify an entire book. If it did, we would need to remove Ecclesiastes (with its apparent skepticism about the afterlife) and Song of Solomon (with its explicit erotic imagery) from the canon as well.

Objection Five: "Accepting the Deuterocanon Undermines Sola Scriptura"

This is a more sophisticated objection. Some Protestants worry that if we reopen the canon question, we undermine the Protestant principle of sola Scriptura — Scripture alone as the ultimate authority for faith and practice. If we can add books to the Bible, what is to stop us from adding more? Where does it end?

But this objection actually works in the opposite direction from what its proponents intend. Sola Scriptura means that Scripture is our ultimate authority. But sola Scriptura does not tell us which books constitute Scripture — that is the canon question, and it is logically prior to the authority question. You cannot appeal to "Scripture alone" until you know what Scripture is. And the question of what Scripture is requires us to look at the historical evidence — which, as we have shown, favors the inclusion of the deuterocanonical books.³⁸

Far from undermining sola Scriptura, accepting the deuterocanon actually strengthens it — because it gives us more Scripture to stand on. A more complete Bible is a more authoritative Bible. The Protestant who recovers the deuterocanon is not undermining biblical authority. They are expanding it.

Objection Six: "The Protestant Canon Has Served the Church Well for Five Hundred Years"

This is a pragmatic argument, and I understand its appeal. The 66-book Protestant Bible has been the foundation for five centuries of faithful preaching, teaching, missionary work, and theological reflection. The Protestant tradition has produced some of the greatest theologians, preachers, and scholars in Christian history — all working from a Bible that did not include the deuterocanonical books. Why fix what is not broken?

I take this argument seriously. I am not suggesting that the Protestant church has been faithless or ineffective because it lacked the deuterocanonical books. God has clearly blessed the Protestant tradition and used the 66-book Bible powerfully for His purposes. The absence of these books has not prevented millions of people from coming to faith in Christ, and I want to honor the legacy of the Protestant church even as I challenge one of its inherited assumptions.

But the fact that God has blessed us despite our incomplete Bible does not mean that the Bible is complete. God blesses His people in spite of their errors, not because of them. He blessed the early church even when individual congregations held incorrect beliefs. He has blessed the Protestant church even though we have been reading from an Old Testament that is missing several books. His grace compensates for our mistakes — but His grace does not transform our mistakes into virtues.

Think of it this way. Imagine a church that, for historical reasons, had lost the letter of James. For five hundred years, this church faithfully preached Christ, baptized believers, and spread the gospel — all without ever reading James. Would we say, "The church has done fine without James, so we do not need to recover it"? Of course not. We would say, "Thank God the church has thrived, but now that we know James exists, we should restore it immediately." The same logic applies to the deuterocanonical books. The fact that the church has survived without them does not mean the church would not be enriched by their recovery.

Moreover, the pragmatic argument cuts both ways. While the Protestant church has done much good with its 66-book Bible, it has also developed some theological blind spots that the deuterocanonical books would have prevented. As we discussed in Chapter 31, the absence of the Wisdom of Solomon has left many Protestants without a clear Old Testament witness to the immortality of the soul and the conscious intermediate state. The absence of 2 Maccabees has impoverished Protestant discussions of bodily resurrection and the theology of martyrdom. The absence of Sirach has left a gap in the church's wisdom tradition. These are real losses — and recovering the deuterocanon would address them.

A Word About the Cumulative Case

Before we move to practical implications, I want to make one more important observation about the nature of the argument we have been making. The case for the Septuagint and the deuterocanon is a cumulative case. No single piece of evidence proves the entire thesis. But when you line up all the evidence together — the apostolic use of the Septuagint, the Dead Sea Scrolls' confirmation of LXX readings, the evidence of deliberate MT alteration, the corrupted Genesis chronologies, the late standardization of the MT, the patristic consensus, the New Testament's allusions to the deuterocanonical books, the early church's reception of these books as Scripture, the councils' affirmation, the dubious circumstances of the Protestant removal — the cumulative weight is formidable.

This is how most historical arguments work. We do not prove the resurrection of Jesus with a single piece of evidence either. We build a cumulative case from the empty tomb, the post-resurrection appearances, the transformation of the disciples, the rise of the early church, and the testimony of hostile witnesses. Each piece of evidence is strengthened by the others. Remove any one piece, and the case still stands. But together, they form an argument that is far stronger than any single piece alone.

The same is true here. You might remain unconvinced by the argument from the Genesis chronologies alone. You might find the evidence of deliberate MT alteration suggestive but not conclusive. You might think that the New Testament allusions to the deuterocanon are interesting but not decisive. But when you consider all of these arguments together — when you see the full pattern — the case becomes very difficult to dismiss. The convergence of so many independent lines of evidence, all pointing in the same direction, is itself a powerful argument.

What Should a Protestant Reader Do?

If you have found the arguments in this book persuasive — or even just thought-provoking — you may be wondering: what now? What practical steps can I take? Let me offer four suggestions.

1. Read the Deuterocanonical Books

This is the simplest and most important step. You cannot evaluate these books until you have actually read them. And I suspect that once you read them, you will find them far more edifying, spiritually rich, and theologically profound than you expected.

Where can you find them? They are included in every Catholic Bible (the New American Bible, the Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition, the New Jerusalem Bible). They are included in every Orthodox Bible. They are also available in standalone editions — the NRSV with Apocrypha and the ESV with Apocrypha both include them. Oxford University Press publishes an affordable edition of the NRSV that includes the deuterocanonical books. If you prefer to start with a single book, I would recommend the Wisdom of Solomon. Read chapters 2–3, and tell me you are not reading Scripture.

I would also encourage you to read these books devotionally — not just as historical curiosities, but as potential Scripture. Pray before you read. Ask the Holy Spirit to illuminate the text. Approach them with the same reverence and expectation that you bring to the protocanonical books. If they are inspired — and I believe they are — then the Spirit will testify to their truth in your heart, just as He does with every other book of the Bible.

2. Learn About the Septuagint

Start paying attention to the Septuagint when you read the Old Testament. Many modern study Bibles include footnotes that indicate where the Septuagint differs from the Masoretic Text. The English Standard Version (ESV), for example, occasionally notes LXX variants in its footnotes. The New English Translation of the Septuagint (NETS) provides a complete English translation of the entire Greek Old Testament. And several excellent introductions to the Septuagint are available for the general reader — I particularly recommend Lanier and Ross's The Septuagint: What It Is and Why It Matters as an accessible starting point, and their more recent edited volume The Authority of the Septuagint for a deeper dive into the theological implications.³⁹

When you encounter a passage where the LXX and the MT differ — and especially when a New Testament citation follows the LXX against the MT — ask yourself: which reading makes better sense of the New Testament passage? Which reading better supports the Christological claim the NT author is making? In many cases, you will find that the Septuagint reading is not only different from the Masoretic Text but actually better — more theologically rich, more Christologically clear, and more consistent with the New Testament's own use of the Old Testament.

3. Be Aware of the Differences When Reading and Hearing Sermons

Most English Old Testament translations are based almost exclusively on the Masoretic Text. When you read your ESV or NIV or NASB, you are reading the Masoretic Text in English. This means that in passages where the LXX and the MT differ, you are reading the MT's version — which, as we have argued, is sometimes the altered version rather than the original.

This has practical implications for how you read the Old Testament and how you evaluate sermons. When a pastor preaches on a Messianic prophecy, for example, it is worth asking: does the Septuagint have a different reading here? Is the pastor's interpretation based on the MT reading, and would the argument look different if we used the LXX reading? I am not suggesting that you should challenge your pastor from the pew. But I am suggesting that you should be an informed reader — aware that the English text you are reading represents one textual tradition, and that another, older tradition may preserve a different (and possibly more original) reading.

4. Approach the Canon Question with Humility

Perhaps the most important thing I can ask of my fellow Protestants is this: approach the question of the canon with humility. The Protestant 66-book canon is not self-evident. It is not the result of divine dictation. It is a tradition — a tradition that emerged over centuries, was shaped by particular historical circumstances, and was finalized relatively recently in church history. The books that the British and Foreign Bible Society removed in 1826 had been part of the Christian Bible for over 1,800 years. The tradition of the 66-book canon is younger than the tradition of the larger canon it replaced.

I am not saying that tradition is automatically wrong. But I am saying that it requires justification. And when we examine the evidence — the apostolic use of the Septuagint, the testimony of the early church, the decisions of the councils, the internal evidence of the books themselves — the justification for excluding the deuterocanonical books turns out to be significantly weaker than most Protestants assume.

A Balanced Conclusion on the Septuagint

Let me be very clear about what I am and am not arguing regarding the Septuagint.

I am not arguing that the Septuagint is always superior to the Masoretic Text in every reading. That would be an overstatement. There are passages where the MT clearly preserves the better reading. There are passages where the Septuagint translators made genuine translational errors — misunderstanding a Hebrew word, paraphrasing too freely, or inserting interpretive glosses. No serious textual critic would argue for blanket Septuagint superiority any more than they would argue for blanket Masoretic superiority.

What I am arguing is this: the Septuagint should be used alongside the Masoretic Text as a primary witness to the Old Testament text. It should not be treated as a mere translation to be corrected against the Hebrew whenever the two disagree. When the LXX and the MT differ, both readings deserve serious consideration — and the LXX should not be automatically dismissed in favor of the MT simply because the MT is in Hebrew.

Modern Protestant Old Testament translations should give significantly more weight to Septuagint readings than they currently do. This is especially true in three areas: Messianic passages (where the MT shows evidence of deliberate weakening), the chronologies of Genesis 5 and 11 (where the MT's numbers have been systematically reduced), and passages where the Dead Sea Scrolls support the LXX against the MT. In these areas, the Septuagint very likely preserves the original reading, and our English translations should reflect that.⁴⁰

I am also arguing for something broader: a change in attitude. The Protestant church needs to stop treating the Septuagint as an afterthought and start treating it as what it is — the Bible that the apostles used, the Bible that the church fathers trusted, and a priceless witness to the original text of the Old Testament. The Septuagint deserves a place of honor in the Protestant church. It has been neglected for too long.

A Balanced Conclusion on the Deuterocanon

Similarly, let me be clear about what I am and am not arguing regarding the deuterocanonical books.

I am not arguing that these books are without difficulties. The book of Judith, as we acknowledged in Chapter 23, contains historical details that are difficult to reconcile with what we know from other ancient sources. Some scholars question whether the Wisdom of Solomon's engagement with Greek philosophy is entirely consistent with Hebrew theological tradition. The late date of composition for some of these books raises legitimate questions about when the prophetic voice was active in Israel.

These are real difficulties, and I have tried to engage them honestly throughout this book. I have not hidden inconvenient evidence or pretended that the case for the deuterocanon is stronger than it is. Honest scholarship requires acknowledging weaknesses as well as strengths.

But having acknowledged these difficulties, I want to say clearly: the strengths decisively outweigh the weaknesses. The evidence for the inspiration of the deuterocanonical books is strong. These books were part of the Septuagint — the apostolic Bible. They were used and cited by New Testament authors. They were received as Scripture by the early church for over a millennium. They contain prophetic content that bears the marks of divine inspiration. And their removal from the Protestant Bible was driven by polemical concerns, economic pressures, and an uncritical reliance on the rabbinic Hebrew canon — not by a careful, dispassionate evaluation of the evidence.

I am increasingly persuaded — as a Protestant who takes the evidence seriously — that these books belong in the canon. I do not say this lightly. I have spent years studying this question, reading the primary sources, engaging the scholarship, and wrestling with the arguments on both sides. And the more I study, the more convinced I become that the Protestant church made a mistake when it removed these books. It was a well-intentioned mistake, driven by genuine theological concerns. But it was a mistake nonetheless.

I encourage you, the reader, to read these books and judge for yourself. Do not take my word for it. Do not take any scholar's word for it. Read the texts. Study the evidence. Pray for the Spirit's guidance. And reach your own conclusion. If you approach this question with an open mind and an honest heart, I believe you will find — as I have found — that the deuterocanonical books are worthy of a place in your Bible.

The Ecclesiological Question: Protestant Identity and the Deuterocanon

I want to address one more concern that I know many Protestant readers will have. If I accept the deuterocanonical books, does that make me less Protestant? Does it mean I am moving toward Rome? Am I on a "slippery slope" that will eventually lead me to accept the papacy, the Magisterium, and all of Catholic doctrine?

No. And I want to explain why.

Protestantism, at its core, is not defined by the number of books in the Bible. Protestantism is defined by its commitment to certain theological principles — sola fide (faith alone), sola gratia (grace alone), solus Christus (Christ alone), sola Scriptura (Scripture alone), and soli Deo gloria (to God alone be the glory). None of these principles requires a 66-book canon. None of them is threatened by the inclusion of Tobit or Sirach or the Wisdom of Solomon. You can affirm justification by faith alone and still read 2 Maccabees. You can affirm sola Scriptura and still include the deuterocanonical books in your Scripture.⁴¹

In fact, early Protestantism did include the deuterocanonical books. Luther's German Bible included them. The original 1611 King James Version included them. The Geneva Bible included them. The Zurich Bible included them. For the first three centuries of Protestantism, most Protestant Bibles contained the deuterocanonical books — usually in a separate section between the Testaments, but present and available for reading. The idea that "real Protestants" have never had these books in their Bibles is historically false. It is a product of the nineteenth century, not of the Reformation.⁴²

What I am proposing is not that Protestants "become Catholic." What I am proposing is that Protestants recover something that was originally theirs — something that was taken from them not by theological argument but by economic convenience and anti-Catholic prejudice. The deuterocanonical books are not "Catholic books." They are Christian books — books that belong to the whole church, Protestant and Catholic and Orthodox alike. They belonged to the church long before the Reformation, and they should belong to the church still.

My argument is based on the same principle that drove the Reformation itself: follow the evidence. The Reformers were right to challenge medieval abuses and to call the church back to Scripture. But they were wrong to adopt the rabbinic Hebrew canon as their standard for the Old Testament. They were wrong to let their polemical battles against Catholic doctrine determine which books belong in the Bible. And the subsequent Protestant tradition was wrong to complete the removal that Luther and Calvin had only begun.

A Protestant who accepts the deuterocanonical books is not betraying the Reformation. They are fulfilling it — carrying the Reformers' own commitment to truth wherever it leads, even when it leads to conclusions the Reformers themselves did not reach.

What Would It Look Like? A Vision for the Protestant Church

Let me close this book with a vision. What would it look like for the Protestant church to recover the Bible that built the church?

Imagine a Protestant church that takes the Septuagint seriously. In this church, the pastor's study contains not only a Hebrew Bible and a Greek New Testament but also a Septuagint — Rahlfs' edition or the Göttingen critical edition. When the pastor prepares a sermon on an Old Testament passage, he or she checks the Septuagint reading alongside the Masoretic Text. When there is a significant difference — especially in a Messianic passage — the congregation hears about both readings and is invited to consider which one the New Testament authors were citing.

In this church, the Sunday Bible reading occasionally comes from the Septuagint tradition rather than the MT. When the congregation reads Isaiah 7:14, they hear about parthenos (παρθένος, "virgin") in the Septuagint and almah (עַלְמָה, "young woman") in the MT — and they understand why the difference matters for the New Testament's claim that Jesus was born of a virgin. When they read Deuteronomy 32:8, they hear the Septuagint's "sons of God" alongside the MT's "sons of Israel" — and they see how the Dead Sea Scrolls confirm the Septuagint's reading. They become literate in the textual history of their Bible in a way that deepens, rather than threatens, their faith.

Now imagine that this church also includes the deuterocanonical books in its Bible and its worship. During Advent, the congregation reads from the Wisdom of Solomon — the passage about the suffering righteous one (Wisdom 2:12–20) followed by the vindication of the souls of the righteous (Wisdom 3:1–9). They hear the prophecy that anticipates the passion and resurrection of Christ, and they marvel at the God who reveals His plans centuries in advance through inspired writers.

During Lent, the congregation reads from 2 Maccabees 7 — the story of the seven brothers and their mother who chose torture and death rather than apostasy. They hear the mother's remarkable declaration of faith in the resurrection: "The Creator of the world, who shaped the beginning of humankind and devised the origin of all things, will in his mercy give life and breath back to you again, since you now forget yourselves for the sake of his laws" (2 Maccabees 7:23). They see in these ancient martyrs a preview of the courage that would sustain the early church through centuries of persecution.

On ordinary Sundays, the congregation reads from Sirach — the wisdom of Jesus ben Sira, whose practical counsel on humility, generosity, friendship, and the fear of the Lord sounds remarkably like the teaching of Jesus himself. They read Tobit and encounter a story of faithfulness in exile that speaks to their own experience of living as God's people in a world that does not share their values. They read Baruch and hear the prophet's assurance that God has not abandoned His people — and they encounter the stunning declaration that God "appeared on earth and lived among human beings" (Baruch 3:38), a proto-incarnational text that points directly to the mystery of Christ.

In this church, the four hundred years between Malachi and Matthew are no longer a "silent" period. They are filled with the voices of Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, and the Maccabees — voices that bridge the two Testaments and prepare the reader for the coming of Christ. The "intertestamental gap" that so many Protestants experience when they read from Malachi to Matthew disappears. The story flows naturally — from the last of the Old Testament prophets through the rich theological reflection of the deuterocanon into the Gospels' announcement that the promises of God have been fulfilled in Jesus of Nazareth.

The Personal Dimension: My Own Journey

I want to close on a personal note. This book represents years of study, prayer, and honest wrestling with difficult questions. When I began this journey, I was a fairly typical Protestant — confident in my 66-book Bible, suspicious of "Catholic additions," and largely unaware of the Septuagint's significance. I had never read the deuterocanonical books. I had never seriously considered the possibility that my Old Testament might be incomplete.

What changed? In a word: evidence. The more I studied the history of the biblical canon, the more I realized that the story I had been told — "The Catholic Church added books at Trent, and the Reformers bravely removed them" — was almost exactly backwards. The truth is that these books had been part of the Christian Bible for over a thousand years before the Reformation. The Reformers removed them. And the subsequent Protestant tradition completed the removal. The Council of Trent did not add the deuterocanonical books. It reaffirmed what had been the church's position since Hippo and Carthage in the fourth century.

The more I studied the Septuagint, the more I realized that the Greek Old Testament is not a secondary or inferior translation. It is a priceless witness to the original text of the Hebrew Bible — and in many cases, it preserves readings that the later Masoretic tradition altered or suppressed. The Dead Sea Scrolls confirmed what the Septuagint had been telling us all along: the Hebrew text behind our English Bibles is not the only (or even the most reliable) witness to the original Old Testament.

And the more I read the deuterocanonical books themselves, the more I found in them the unmistakable marks of divine inspiration. The Wisdom of Solomon's portrait of the suffering righteous one took my breath away. The theology of resurrection in 2 Maccabees 7 moved me to tears. The wisdom of Sirach shaped my prayer life. The book of Tobit — with its beautiful depiction of faithful marriage, angelic protection, and the power of prayer — became one of my favorite books in the entire Bible.

I do not claim to have all the answers. I am a student, not a professor. I am on a journey, not at a destination. But I can tell you this: the journey has been worth it. Every step of the way, the evidence has strengthened my faith rather than weakened it. Every new discovery has made the Bible bigger, richer, and more beautiful. And I am convinced — more convinced than ever — that the God who inspired the Scriptures wants His people to have the full Scriptures. Not the truncated version. Not the edited version. The full Bible that built the church.

A Final Word: Truth, Humility, and the Love of Scripture

I began this book with a scenario: a thoughtful Protestant Christian picks up a Catholic Bible and discovers books they have never seen before. Their first reaction is suspicion. But I asked: what if the truth is the opposite of what they assume? What if these books were not added by Catholics but removed by Protestants?

We have spent thirty-six chapters examining the evidence. We have looked at the Septuagint's origins, its use by the apostles, its relationship to the Masoretic Text, and the Dead Sea Scrolls' testimony. We have studied the deuterocanonical books themselves — their theology, their prophetic content, their literary quality. We have traced the history of how these books were received by the early church, debated by Jerome and Augustine, affirmed by the councils, and ultimately removed by the Reformers and the Bible societies. We have engaged the strongest objections and found them wanting.

The evidence, I believe, points clearly in one direction: the Septuagint deserves a dramatically higher status in the Protestant church, and the deuterocanonical books are very likely inspired Scripture that belongs in the canon.

But I want to end not with an argument but with an invitation. I am not asking you to agree with me on every point. I am asking you to do what I did — study the evidence, read the books, pray for wisdom, and follow the truth wherever it leads. If you do, I believe you will discover what I have discovered: that the Bible is bigger than we thought. That the Old Testament is richer than we knew. That the church's earliest Scriptures — the Septuagint, with the deuterocanonical books — contain treasures that the Protestant tradition has lost and desperately needs to recover.

The Bible that built the church is still available. The Septuagint has not disappeared. The deuterocanonical books have not been destroyed. They are waiting for us — waiting to be read, studied, prayed over, and received. They are waiting for the Protestant church to come home to the fullness of its own Scripture.

May God grant us the courage to follow the evidence, the humility to reconsider our assumptions, and the love of truth that puts Scripture above tradition — even when the tradition being challenged is our own.

"The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and no torment will ever touch them. In the eyes of the foolish they seemed to have died, and their departure was thought to be a disaster, and their going from us to be their destruction; but they are at peace. For though in the sight of others they were punished, their hope is full of immortality." — Wisdom 3:1–4

"All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work." — 2 Timothy 3:16–17 (ESV)

May we receive all of it. Every word. Every book. The complete Bible that the apostles knew, that the fathers treasured, and that the church — the whole church — was built upon.

Soli Deo Gloria.