A brief history of how the Catholic Bible came to be

The canon of sacred Scripture (the list of books included in the Old and New Testaments of the Catholic Church), was first defined at the Council of Rome in A.D. 382 under the authority of Pope Damasus I. This canon was reaffirmed several times thereafter, including at the Synod of Hippo in 393 and at the Council of Carthage in 397. In A.D. 405 Pope Innocent I reaffirmed the canon in a letter to Bishop Exuperius of Toulouse. A later Council at Carthage in A.D. 419 reaffirmed the canon of its predecessors as did Church Councils at Nicaea (II) in 787 and Florence in 1442.

Throughout the Middle Ages this same canon was utilized in numerous venues, both large (e.g., adoption by the Frankish empire) and small (e.g., parish Mass readings). Nevertheless, over the intervening centuries, an occasional academic, cleric, or heretic would question, even challenge, this list of books, but to little effect.

Then in the 16th century, Protestant leaders chose to reject seven Old Testament books known as the deuterocanonicals: Sirach, Baruch, Tobit, 1 and 2 Maccabees, Wisdom, and Judith and parts of two others, Daniel and Esther. They did so primarily to bolster their novel teachings, and even though (1) these books had been considered sacred Scripture from the birth of the Church, (2) the remaining books had never before been proposed as a definitive biblical canon, and (3) many Jews of ancient lineage held (and still hold) the deuterocanonicals to be sacred Scripture.

In response to Protestant efforts to delegitimize the deuterocanonicals, the Council of Trent in A.D. 1546 reaffirmed the original list by declaring the books "sacred and canonical." And in 1870, the declaration of Trent was formally ratified by Vatican Council I. Since A.D. 382 when it was first defined, the Church has always held to this same canon.

As Protestant historian J. N. D. Kelly admits: "It should be observed that the Old Testament thus admitted as authoritative in the Church was somewhat bulkier and more comprehensive [than the Protestant Bible]... It always included, though with varying degrees of recognition, the so-called apocrypha or deuterocanonical books" (Early Christian Doctrines, 53, emphasis added).