What is the difference between the Catholic Bible and the Protestant Bible?

Answer

The Bibles used by Catholics and Protestants are not the same. Catholics and Protestants use the word "apocrypha" differently. There are OT books that are considered apocryphal by all Christian churches, including Catholicism. There are other books, called "Deuterocanonical" by Rome, that are considered part of the canon by Rome, and are considered apocryphal by other Christian churches. These Deuterocanonical books are: Tobit, Judith, First and Second Maccabees, The Book of Wisdom, and Ecclesiasticus (NOT to be confused with Ecclesiastes, which is accepted as canonical by all Christian churches). Protestant churches do not accept the deuterocanonical books as canonical, and you will not find them in their bibles.

Another difference are the texts from which the translations were made.
The Catholic Bible is sourced primarily from the Latin Vulgate and Codex Vaticanus. The early Protestants used the Textus Receptus. This difference is not so pronounced today with many different versions available for Protestants being sourced from additional texts.

Special note on The Jerusalem Bible:

As biblical scholarship opened up in the mid-20th century, Catholics began to pay more attention. The Dominican Biblical School in Jerusalem was called upon by a French publisher (Editions du Cerf) to rise to the occasion and produce a French translation from the best available texts. The result was a single-volume translation of the entire Bible in 1956 known popularly as La Bible de Jerusalem. This French version, of very good quality with full textual critical aparatus of a very scholarly nature, was translated into English. But the English was not simply taken from the original French. Some books were first drafted from the French into English and then compared word for word with the Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, and other books were drafted into English from the ancient texts first and then compared word for word with the French. The desire was to be as completely faithful to the original texts as possible, while preserving the intent and scholarship of the original French materials.

The General Editor of the English translation effort was Alexander Jones, and those who are not aware of this will be fascinated to learn that among the major contributors to the work was J. R. R. Tolkien of literary fame.

This English version is called The Jerusalem Bible, and it contains the standard books of the Catholic canon. Notes are paraphrased from the first (I believe) English publication; Doubleday, Garden City New York, 1966.

Answer

Bible translations developed for Catholic use are complete Bibles. This means that they contain the entire canonical text identified by Pope Damasus and the Synod of Rome (382) and the local Councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397), contained in St. Jerome's Latin Vulgate translation (420), and decreed infallibly by the Ecumenical Council of Trent (1570). This canonical text contains the same 27 NT Testament books which Protestant versions contain, but 46 Old Testament books, instead of 39. These 7 books, and parts of 2 others, are called Deuterocanonical by Catholics (2nd canon) and Apocrypha (false writings) by Protestants, who dropped them at the time of the Reformation. The Deuterocanonical texts are Tobias (Tobit), Judith, Baruch, Ecclesiasticus (Sirach), Wisdom, First and Second Maccabees and parts of Esther and Daniel. Some Protestant Bibles include the "Apocrypha" as pious reading.

As a side note:

The bible is the most preserved work of literature in our history. In fact, there are approximately 5,600 original manuscripts still today. When the Catholic church translated into english in 1966, it used as many of the original texts as there were. What is most interesting is that in 1415 AD, Erasus translated to english using 5 copies of a german translation. Then King James used Erasus translation to come up with the KJV of the bible. Ever wonder why there are differences???? These differences are very minor other than the KJV no including the Apocrypha as God had originally inspired. If we all agree that the bible is inspired by God, then how can we as man decide later that those books we don't agree with are not?

First answer by ID996107221. Last edit by Christian Historian. Contributor trust: 23 [recommend contributor]. Question popularity: 18 [recommend question]