The Orthodox Old Testament contains books that Protestant Bibles don’t. It’s not that we added them. Protestants removed them.
For fifteen hundred years, Christians used the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament made a couple centuries before Christ. This version included books like Tobit, Judith, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach (also called Ecclesiasticus), Baruch, and 1 and 2 Maccabees. It also had additions to Daniel and Esther that aren’t in the Hebrew version. The Apostles quoted from the Septuagint. The early Church Fathers preached from it. When St. Paul wrote to Timothy that “all Scripture is God-breathed,” he meant the Scriptures the Church actually used, the Septuagint.
Then came the Reformation.
Martin Luther and other Protestant reformers wanted to get back to what they saw as the pure, original text. They looked at the Hebrew canon that Jewish rabbis had settled on around AD 90 at the Council of Jamnia, after the Temple’s destruction, after Christianity had already separated from Judaism. Those rabbis excluded the books that existed only in Greek, not in Hebrew. Luther followed their lead in the 1530s. He called these books “Apocrypha”, useful for reading but not for establishing doctrine. Over time, Protestant publishers stopped printing them altogether.
We kept them because the Church had always used them.
We call these books the Anagignoskomena, which means “worthy to be read.” Some people use the term “deuterocanonical,” meaning “second canon,” but that’s a bit misleading. It makes it sound like they’re somehow lesser. They’re not. They’re Scripture, received and used by the Church from the beginning.
If you grew up Baptist or in a non-denominational church around Beaumont, you probably had a 66-book Bible. The Orthodox Bible has more, usually between 76 and 81 books, depending on how you count the additions to Esther and Daniel. Catholics have these books too, though they organize them slightly differently than we do.
Here’s what matters: we don’t believe the canon of Scripture was decided by a single council that made a list and closed the book. The canon emerged organically through the Church’s life. Which books did the Church read in worship? Which ones did the Fathers quote as authoritative? Which ones shaped how Christians prayed and understood God? That’s how the canon formed. It wasn’t a decision made in a conference room. It was the Church recognizing what the Holy Spirit had already been doing.
This is where Scripture and Tradition come together. You can’t separate them. The Church gave us the Bible, decided which books were in and which were out, preserved the text, translated it, interpreted it. To accept the Bible’s authority while rejecting the Church’s authority makes no sense. It’s like trusting a letter but not trusting the person who handed it to you and told you it was genuine.
We use these books constantly. At Orthodox funerals, we read from Wisdom of Solomon: “The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and no torment will ever touch them.” When we teach about prayer, we turn to Sirach. When we talk about the martyrs, we remember the Maccabees, those seven brothers and their mother who died rather than betray God’s law. Their story isn’t just history. We commemorate them on August 1st.
The Prayer of Manasseh shows up in some of our services. Psalm 151, which tells about David’s anointing, appears in our Psalters. The story of Susanna from the additions to Daniel teaches about false accusation and God’s justice. Tobit gives us Raphael the Archangel and a beautiful picture of faithful family life. These aren’t footnotes to our faith. They’re woven into how we worship and what we believe about God’s work in the world.
If you’re coming from a Protestant background, you might feel uneasy about this at first. That’s normal. You’ve been taught these books aren’t Scripture, and now you’re hearing they are. Take your time with it. Get an Orthodox Study Bible and read Wisdom or Sirach. See what you think. You’ll find the same God you’ve always known, the same call to righteousness, the same promise of His presence.
The question isn’t really whether the Orthodox Bible has “more” books. The question is whether we trust the Church that gave us the Bible in the first place. We do. That’s why we’ve kept what was handed down to us, even when others decided to trim the collection. The Church isn’t a book club that votes on which texts make the cut. It’s the living Body of Christ, guided by the Holy Spirit, preserving what it received from the Apostles. And what it received included these books.
