Why the Orthodox Old Testament Has More Books Than the Catholic Old Testament

"There are other books besides these not indeed included in the Canon, but appointed by the Fathers to be read by those who newly join us… But the former, my brethren, are included in the Canon, the latter being read."

—St. Athanasius of Alexandria, Festal Letter 39 (A.D. 367)

A Catholic Asks Why His Own Bible Is Shorter

The usual way this question gets posed online is adversarial: Why did the Catholics remove books from the Bible? or Why did the Orthodox add books to the Bible? Both framings are wrong, and both make the same mistake—they assume there was once a single, fixed Christian Old Testament that one side or the other tampered with. There was not. What the early Church possessed was a Greek translation of the Jewish Scriptures that was wider, and at its edges fuzzier, than the list the rabbis would later settle on. Every Christian tradition has drawn a line somewhere inside that wider material. The interesting question is not who moved the line but how each tradition decided where to put it.

I write as a Catholic, and I am not going to pretend to neutrality I do not have. I think my Church drew the line in the right place, and I will say why. But the honest version of this story has to begin by admitting something Catholic apologetics sometimes glosses over: the books the Orthodox keep and we do not were read as Scripture by serious Christians for centuries, they sit in the oldest complete Bibles we possess, and the reason Rome excluded them is not that they are obviously spurious. It is that Rome eventually did something the Christian East never quite did—it closed the question.

What “More Books” Actually Means

Let me start with the concrete delta, because vague talk of “extra books” generates more heat than light.

Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and Oriental Orthodox all agree on a core that Protestants do not accept: the seven deuterocanonical books—Tobit, Judith, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach (Ecclesiasticus), Baruch, and 1 and 2 Maccabees—together with the Greek expansions of Esther and Daniel (the Prayer of Azariah and Song of the Three Young Men, Susanna, and Bel and the Dragon).⁠¹ If you have already read my longer treatment of those seven shared books, you know the Catholic case for them; this essay assumes that ground and moves past it.⁠² The question here is what the Orthodox have that Catholics do not.

The Greek Orthodox Old Testament, as printed in the Bibles published by the Church of Greece and reflected in the standard critical edition of the Septuagint, contains four books beyond the Catholic forty-six:⁠³

• 1 Esdras (Greek Esdras A)—a Greek retelling of material from Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah, plus the famous “Tale of the Three Guardsmen.” This is a different book from Ezra-Nehemiah, which the Greek Bible calls Esdras B.
• 3 Maccabees—a story of the deliverance of Egyptian Jews under Ptolemy IV, unrelated in plot to 1 and 2 Maccabees.
• Psalm 151—a short autobiographical psalm of David, appended after Psalm 150. The Greek tradition counts it as part of the Book of Psalms rather than a separate book.⁠⁴
• The Prayer of Manasseh—a penitential prayer placed among the Odes appended to the Psalter.

To these the Greek Bible adds, usually in an appendix and with a lower and disputed status, 4 Maccabees, a philosophical meditation on the supremacy of pious reason. The Greek Orthodox typically reckon “the books of the Maccabees” as four in number, even as 4 Maccabees is “often placed in a separate section or excluded.”⁠⁵

The Slavonic and Russian Orthodox Bibles overlap with the Greek but are not identical to it—a point I will return to, because the fact that the Orthodox do not all agree with one another is central to the whole story. For now, hold onto the shape of the thing: relative to a Catholic Bible, an Orthodox Bible adds roughly four to six books, depending on tradition and on how you count the items folded into the Psalter.

The Trap Nobody Warns You About: The Esdras Tangle

Before going further I have to defuse the single most reliable source of confusion in this entire subject, because if you do not get it straight, nothing else will make sense. It is the numbering of the books named “Esdras.”

“Esdras” is simply the Greek and Latin form of “Ezra.” The problem is that across four traditions, the same numbers attach to different books. Hold the content fixed and watch the labels slide:⁠⁶

The actual book	Septuagint (Greek)	Vulgate (Latin)	English (KJV, RSV)	Slavonic / Russian
Ezra (canonical)	part of Esdras B	1 Esdras	Ezra	1 Esdras
Nehemiah (canonical)	part of Esdras B	2 Esdras	Nehemiah	Nehemiah
Greek retelling + Three Guardsmen	Esdras A	3 Esdras	1 Esdras	2 Esdras
Apocalyptic visions of Ezra	(not in the Greek)	4 Esdras	2 Esdras	3 Esdras

Three things to lock in. First, in the Septuagint, Esdras A is the “extra” book—the one Rome excluded—and Esdras B is the ordinary protocanonical Ezra-Nehemiah. Getting these reversed is the most common error in the field. Second, the apocalyptic Ezra book (the one with the eagle vision and the angel Uriel, called 4 Ezra by scholars) is not in the Greek Septuagint at all. It survives in Latin and, through the Latin, in the Slavonic Bible. Third, the reason the Slavonic numbers run one higher than the Greek is simply that the Slavonic tradition counts Ezra and Nehemiah as two separate books, pushing everything else up a notch.

So when someone says “the Orthodox have 2 Esdras and 3 Esdras,” they are describing the Slavonic Bible, and they mean the Greek retelling and the apocalypse, respectively. When the Council of Trent listed “the first book of Esdras, and the second which is entitled Nehemias,” it meant Ezra and Nehemiah—the ordinary books—not the Greek Esdras A.⁠⁷ Most explanations garble exactly this point, and a surprising amount of online argument about “books Rome removed” dissolves once you see that the disputants are using the same numerals for different texts.

The Septuagint Was the Church’s First Bible

To understand why the East ended up with a larger Old Testament, you have to understand that the Church did not begin with the Hebrew Bible. It began with the Greek one.

By the time of Christ, the Jewish Scriptures had been translated into Greek over roughly two centuries for the enormous Greek-speaking Jewish diaspora. That translation is the Septuagint, traditionally abbreviated LXX. A legend preserved in the Letter of Aristeas says seventy-two elders produced it at the request of Ptolemy II of Egypt; the legend is pious fiction, and in any case it concerns only the five books of Moses—the rest of the Greek Old Testament was rendered piecemeal afterward, and some of it was composed in Greek to begin with.⁠⁸ What matters is that this Greek Bible circulated with more books, and a looser boundary, than the canon the rabbis would later fix in Hebrew. It included Wisdom, Sirach, Tobit, Judith, the books of Maccabees, additions to Daniel and Esther, the Greek Esdras A, Psalm 151, the Prayer of Manasseh.

This was the Bible of the apostolic Church. When the New Testament authors quote the Old Testament, they quote the Septuagint far more often than not. The Greek Fathers regarded the Septuagint itself as a providential, even inspired, rendering—a conviction the Greek Orthodox retain to this day, holding the Septuagint, rather than the Masoretic Hebrew, as their authoritative Old Testament text.⁠⁹ So the starting point for the East was not a sparse Hebrew list to which books were added. It was a capacious Greek Bible whose outer edge had never been precisely drawn.

The Fathers Could Not Agree—and the East Never Made Them

Here is the fact that explains nearly everything downstream: the early Church inherited not one Old Testament canon but several, and they did not match.

Consider four witnesses, all from the Christian East, all revered. Melito of Sardis, around A.D. 170, traveled east to determine the Hebrew books and produced a short list that omits Esther and contains none of the deuterocanon.⁠¹⁰ St. Athanasius of Alexandria, in his famous Festal Letter of 367—the same letter that gives us the earliest list of exactly our twenty-seven New Testament books—counts the Old Testament at twenty-two books on the Hebrew model, excluding the deuterocanon and even excluding Esther from the strict canon. Yet in the same breath he creates a middle category. There are, he writes, “other books besides these not indeed included in the Canon, but appointed by the Fathers to be read by those who newly join us”—and he names Wisdom, Sirach, Esther, Judith, and Tobit among them. “But the former,” he concludes, “are included in the Canon, the latter being read.”⁠¹¹

That distinction—canonical books on one side, books “appointed to be read” on the other—is the seed of the entire Orthodox approach, and we will see the East returning to it again and again. But notice that Athanasius’s canon is shorter than the modern Orthodox one; he would not have called 3 Maccabees Scripture.

Now set beside him two other Eastern authorities. The Council of Laodicea (around 363), in the list attached to its sixtieth canon—a list whose authenticity is itself disputed, since it is missing from many manuscripts—gives essentially the Hebrew canon, with none of the deuterocanon except Baruch and the Letter of Jeremiah.⁠¹² But Apostolic Canon 85, the list closing the Apostolic Constitutions, runs the other way: it numbers three books of Maccabees and the Wisdom of Sirach among the sacred books—and lists Esther and Judith as well—while omitting Tobit and the Wisdom of Solomon.⁠¹³ Meanwhile the Western councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) had settled on the fuller list, with Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, and the Maccabees all received as Scripture.⁠¹⁴

Lay these side by side and the disagreement is stark. Athanasius excludes the deuterocanon from the canon but commends some of it for reading; Laodicea has almost none of it; Apostolic Canon 85 has three Maccabees, Sirach, and Judith but not Tobit or the Wisdom of Solomon; Carthage has the whole fuller set. Four authorities, four different Old Testaments—and all of them were bequeathed to the Christian East together.

Trullo, 692: The Council That Ratified the Contradiction

What the East did with this inherited mess is the structural heart of the matter. In 692 the Council in Trullo, also called the Quinisext Council, met in Constantinople to supply disciplinary canons for the Fifth and Sixth Ecumenical Councils. The Orthodox regard Trullo’s canons as carrying ecumenical authority. And in its second canon, Trullo did something remarkable.

It ratified, all at once, the earlier canonical collections of the Church—“the eighty-five canons, received and ratified by the holy and blessed Fathers before us,” together with the canons of, among others, “Laodicea in Phrygia… and those of Carthage… of Athanasius, Archbishop of Alexandria… of Amphilochius of Iconium.”⁠¹⁵ Read that list again with the previous section in mind. In one breath, Trullo set its seal on the Apostolic Canons (with their three Maccabees), on Laodicea (with almost no deuterocanon), on Carthage (with the full deuterocanon), and on Athanasius (who excluded the deuterocanon from the canon proper). These collections give mutually inconsistent Old Testaments. Trullo endorsed all of them without harmonizing any of them.

This is not a Catholic gotcha; it is the candid Orthodox self-description. As one Orthodox reference work puts it, “the matter of the Apocrypha was raised in the Trullan Council at Constantinople in 692, but no binding conclusions were reached.”⁠¹⁶ The most authoritative canonical act of the Christian East ratified a set of contradictory canon lists and left the contradiction standing. That is precisely why the Orthodox Old Testament remained, in the technical sense, open—received in practice, never fixed by definition.

The West Draws the Line: Florence and Trent

The Latin Church did the one thing the East did not. It issued a binding catalogue.

It is worth correcting a popular myth here, because it bears directly on the comparison. Catholics did not first define the Old Testament canon at Trent in reaction to Luther. A full century before the Reformation, the Council of Florence, in the bull Cantate Domino of 4 February 1442, enumerated the canon—the same forty-six-book Old Testament—as part of a decree of union with the Coptic Church.⁠¹⁷ What the Council of Trent added in 1546 was not the list but the anathema. In its fourth session, Trent set down “the first book of Esdras, and the second which is entitled Nehemias; Tobias, Judith, Esther… two books of the Machabees, the first and the second,” and then bound the whole Church to it: “But if any one receive not, as sacred and canonical, these same books entire with all their parts, as they have been used to be read in the Catholic Church… let him be anathema.”⁠¹⁸

Look closely at what Trent listed and what it did not. Its Old Testament has one Esdras and Nehemiah—Ezra and Nehemiah, the protocanonical pair—and two books of Maccabees. It does not contain the Greek Esdras A, 3 Maccabees, Psalm 151, or the Prayer of Manasseh. And here is the decisive point for anyone tempted to think Rome simply never knew these books: Rome knew them perfectly well. The post-Tridentine Clementine Vulgate of 1592 did not pretend they did not exist. It relegated the Prayer of Manasseh and the two extra Esdras books to an appendix after the New Testament, with a preface explaining that they are placed “outside the series of canonical books which the holy Tridentine Synod received… lest they should perish utterly, since they are sometimes cited by some of the holy Fathers and are found in some Latin Bibles.”⁠¹⁹

That sentence is the cleanest contrast in the whole subject. The very same books that the Greek Bible prints among the Scriptures, the Latin Bible prints in an appendix labeled explicitly non-canonical—preserved out of respect, but consciously set outside the line. Rome had the identical raw material the East had. It drew the boundary tighter, and it drew it once, with finality.

Jerusalem, 1672: The Nearest Thing to an Orthodox Trent

The East was not indifferent to the canon; it simply never produced a Trent. The closest it came was the Synod of Jerusalem in 1672, convened by Patriarch Dositheus largely to repudiate a Calvinizing confession that had circulated under the name of the late Patriarch Cyril Lucaris—a confession that, among other Protestant moves, had relegated the deuterocanon to the status of apocrypha. The historian Philip Schaff called this synod “the most important in the modern history of the Eastern Church,” comparable to the Council of Trent.⁠²⁰

Its canon ruling is worth quoting at length, and it repays careful reading. The list appears not in the doctrinal decrees of the Confession of Dositheus but in the catechetical questions appended to it—specifically Question 3 (a small point, but one routinely cited wrong as “Decree 3,” which actually concerns predestination):⁠²¹

What Books do you call Sacred Scripture? Following the rule of the Catholic Church, we call Sacred Scripture all those which Cyril collected from the Synod of Laodicea, and enumerated, adding to Scripture those which he foolishly and ignorantly, or rather maliciously, called Apocrypha; specifically, “The Wisdom of Solomon,” “Judith,” “Tobit,” “The History of the Dragon,” “The History of Susanna,” “The Maccabees,” and “The Wisdom of Sirach.” For we judge these also to be… genuine parts of Scripture.

This is the maximalist Orthodox position, stated as plainly as Trent stated the Catholic one: these books are “genuine parts of Scripture,” and to deny them is to reject the rest. And yet even here, in the East’s most Trent-like moment, the definition is softer than it first appears. Dositheus immediately concedes the very point that distinguishes the Eastern temper from the Latin: “if, perhaps, it seems that not always have all of these been considered on the same level as the others, yet nevertheless these also have been counted and reckoned with the rest of Scripture.”⁠²² Trent’s decree contains no such concession. It lists the books and pronounces an anathema. Jerusalem lists the books and admits that they have not always been ranked equally.

There is a further, decisive limitation. The Synod of Jerusalem was a regional council—neither ecumenical nor pan-Orthodox—and on the Orthodox understanding of authority, its decrees “were not obligatory unless accepted by all Orthodox Churches.” There has been, an Orthodox source candidly notes, “no official acceptance of the canon outlined at Jerusalem,” even though Greek Bibles in fact print the books it named.⁠²³ So the nearest Orthodox parallel to Trent is, by Orthodoxy’s own measure, not binding on the whole Church the way Trent binds Catholics.

Philaret, 1839: The Catechism That Counted Twenty-Two

If the Synod of Jerusalem were the last word, the Orthodox canon would look settled and maximal. It is not the last word—and the proof is a document that, to a Catholic reading it for the first time, is genuinely startling.

In 1839 the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church approved The Longer Catechism of the Orthodox, Catholic, Eastern Church, composed by St. Philaret (Drozdov), Metropolitan of Moscow—an official catechism, taught to generations of Russian Orthodox. Asked how many books are in the Old Testament, Philaret answers not with the maximal Greek list but with the Hebrew count: “St. Cyril of Jerusalem, St. Athanasius the Great, and St. John Damascene reckon them at twenty-two, agreeing therein with the Jews, who so reckon them in the original Hebrew tongue.”⁠²⁴ And when the catechism asks why the Wisdom of Sirach and “certain others” go unmentioned in the enumeration, the answer is blunt: “Because they do not exist in the Hebrew.” How, then, should these books be regarded? Philaret reaches straight back to Athanasius: “they have been appointed of the Fathers to be read by proselytes who are preparing for admission into the Church.”⁠²⁵

Read Jerusalem 1672 and Philaret 1839 side by side and the internal tension is unmistakable. Two official Orthodox texts, a century and a half apart, give materially different verdicts on the same books. The Greek synod calls them “genuine parts of Scripture.” The Russian catechism quietly omits them from the canonical count, says they “do not exist in the Hebrew,” and assigns them Athanasius’s humbler role of edifying reading for catechumens. Neither has ever been overruled by a higher Orthodox authority, because no higher Orthodox authority has ruled. This is not a scandal the Orthodox hide; it is a feature of how their tradition holds Scripture—by reception and reading rather than by a single decree.

How the Orthodox Actually Regard These Books

Given all this, what does an Orthodox Christian today actually believe about the extra books? The most accurate answer is that there is a spectrum, and the standard Orthodox vocabulary is built to accommodate it.

The Eastern term for these books is the anagignoskomena (ἀναγιγνωσκόμενα)—“the things that are read.” The word is descended directly from Athanasius’s category of books “appointed by the Fathers to be read,” and it occupies a deliberate middle ground: not the Protestant “apocrypha” (hidden, non-canonical), and not quite the Catholic “deuterocanonical” (fully canonical, merely later-recognized), but Scripture that is read in the Church while often being held at a slightly lower dogmatic weight than the books of the Hebrew canon.⁠²⁶

No one has stated the prevailing modern view more clearly than Metropolitan Kallistos (Timothy) Ware, whose book The Orthodox Church introduced the tradition to more English readers than any other. “The Septuagint,” Ware writes, “contains in addition ten further books, not present in the Hebrew, which are known in the Orthodox Church as the ‘Deutero-Canonical Books.’” These were declared genuine Scripture by the synods of Jassy (1642) and Jerusalem (1672); “most Orthodox scholars at the present day, however, following the opinion of Athanasius and Jerome, consider that the Deutero-Canonical Books, although part of the Bible, stand on a lower footing than the rest of the Old Testament.”⁠²⁷ “Part of the Bible,” but on “a lower footing”—that phrase captures the Orthodox center of gravity better than any conciliar decree.

And these books are not museum pieces. They live in Orthodox worship. The Prayer of Manasseh is chanted in the penitential office of Great Compline. The Song of the Three Holy Children, from the Greek additions to Daniel, forms the seventh and eighth biblical odes of Matins and is read among the fifteen Old Testament lessons at the Vespers of Holy Saturday. Wisdom of Solomon is read as a Vespers lesson on feasts of the saints.⁠²⁸ Whatever their precise canonical rank, the anagignoskomena are woven into the liturgical life of the Church in a way that makes the question of their “status” feel, to many Orthodox, beside the point.

The Orthodox Do Not Even Agree With Each Other

I have mostly spoken of “the Orthodox” as if they were one, but the Greek and Slavonic traditions differ from each other in exactly the places you would expect a never-formally-closed canon to differ.

The Greek Orthodox Bible, as we saw, carries 4 Maccabees—usually in an appendix, sometimes excluded. The Slavonic and Russian Bibles do not contain 4 Maccabees at all. Conversely, the Slavonic tradition contains a book the Greek Bible lacks entirely: the apocalyptic 4 Ezra (its “3 Esdras”), which never existed in Greek and entered Slavonic by way of the Latin Vulgate.⁠²⁹ And the Russian Synodal Bible of 1876, while printing all of these books, marks the ones outside the Hebrew canon as “non-canonical” (неканонические) with an asterisk and a note—a formal two-tier distinction that the Greek tradition does not typeset the same way.⁠³⁰

If you keep pulling this thread, you reach the far end of the spectrum: the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, whose canon is the largest in traditional Christianity—reckoned at eighty-one books, and uniquely including works like Jubilees, 1 Enoch, and the three books of Meqabyan.⁠³¹ From the Catholic forty-six to the Ethiopian eighty-one, the historic apostolic churches occupy a continuous range. The disagreement among them is real but narrow, and it lies entirely at the outer margin—never about the Law, the Prophets, or the Gospel, only about a handful of books on the edge.

The Real Difference Is the Mechanism, Not the Booklist

Here is where, as a Catholic, I will lay my cards on the table.

The deepest difference between the Catholic and Orthodox Old Testaments is not which books each contains. It is how each tradition draws the line—and that difference of method is, I think, more revealing than the difference of contents. Catholicism possesses a mechanism for closing questions: an ecumenical council, confirmed by the bishop of Rome, can issue a definition that binds the whole Church. Trent used that mechanism on the canon, and the result is a single list, closed with an anathema, identical for every Catholic on earth. Orthodoxy received its Scriptures the way it receives most things—through the consensus of liturgical and patristic tradition, tested over time by the whole Church’s reception—and it never possessed, after the schism, an organ of that universal reach willing to fix the canon by decree. Trullo ratified the contradictions; Jerusalem was regional; Philaret spoke for the Russians. No act has spoken for all the Orthodox at once.

This is why the Orthodox Old Testament is, at the same moment, larger and less sharply bounded than the Catholic one. The same instinct that keeps the wider Septuagint in the Church’s hands also keeps the Church from slamming the door on its edges. A Catholic looks at this and sees a question left open that ought to be answered. An Orthodox Christian looks at the Catholic canon and sees a juridical precision imposed where the living tradition was content to let a softer consensus stand. Each is, in a sense, being faithful to its own understanding of how the Church teaches. I am persuaded by the Catholic way—I think a Church given authority to bind and loose is meant to use it, and that a defined canon is a gift to the faithful, not a constraint on them. But I can state the Orthodox instinct fairly: the canon was received, not legislated, and a tradition secure in its reception feels no need to legislate it.

What Most Explanations Get Wrong

Because this subject is a minefield of confident error, let me close the analysis by naming the mistakes I had to unlearn while researching it.

The first is the direction of the difference. The Orthodox did not add books to a settled Bible; the wider Greek Septuagint came first, and the tighter Catholic and Protestant lists were drawn later, by subtraction from it. If anyone “removed” books, in the order of history it was the West narrowing the East’s inheritance, not the East padding the West’s.

The second is treating deuterocanonical, apocrypha, and anagignoskomena as synonyms. They are three different verdicts—fully canonical, non-canonical, and read-but-lesser—and the whole disagreement lives in the gap between them.

The third is imagining that “the Orthodox Church teaches” a single doctrine of the canon. It does not. Dositheus, Ware, and Philaret span the entire range from “genuine Scripture” to “not in the Hebrew, read for edification,” and no pan-Orthodox council has ever chosen among them.

The fourth is the Esdras tangle, which I have already untied: the same numerals name different books in Greek, Latin, English, and Slavonic, and most online arguments about “the books Rome removed” are two people meaning different texts by “1 Esdras.”

And the fifth is the lazy assumption that Rome excluded these books out of ignorance or anti-Eastern animus. The Clementine appendix preface refutes it in a single Latin sentence: Rome knew the books, respected them enough to preserve them “lest they perish utterly,” and still placed them, deliberately, outside the canon. The line Rome drew was not careless. It was, for better or worse, a decision—the kind of decision the Christian East, by temperament and by ecclesiology, has never felt obliged to make.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many more books does the Orthodox Old Testament have than the Catholic one?

The Greek Orthodox Old Testament contains four books the Catholic canon does not—1 Esdras, 3 Maccabees, Psalm 151, and the Prayer of Manasseh—plus 4 Maccabees in an appendix. The Slavonic and Russian Bibles differ slightly, lacking 4 Maccabees but including the apocalyptic 4 Ezra (which they call “3 Esdras”). Depending on the tradition and on how you count items folded into the Psalter, the Orthodox Old Testament runs about four to six books longer than the Catholic one.

What books are in the Orthodox Bible but not the Catholic Bible?

1 Esdras (the Greek Esdras A, a retelling of Ezra–Nehemiah material with the “Tale of the Three Guardsmen”); 3 Maccabees; Psalm 151; and the Prayer of Manasseh. The Greek tradition adds 4 Maccabees, usually in an appendix; the Slavonic tradition adds the apocalyptic book scholars call 4 Ezra. All of these sit beyond the seven deuterocanonical books that Catholics and Orthodox already share.

Did the Orthodox add books to the Bible, or did Catholics remove them?

Neither framing is quite right. The Greek Septuagint—the wider Old Testament—was the early Church’s Bible, and the narrower Catholic list was defined later, at Florence (1442) and Trent (1546). The Clementine Vulgate of 1592 even moved the extra Esdras books and the Prayer of Manasseh into a non-canonical appendix. So in the order of history, the West drew its boundary tighter than the inherited Greek tradition—rather than the East padding a settled Bible.

Why doesn’t the Orthodox Church have a single official canon like the Catholic Church?

Because it never issued one. The Council in Trullo (692) ratified earlier canon lists that contradicted one another without resolving them. The Synod of Jerusalem (1672) defined a maximal canon but was a regional council, not binding on all Orthodox. St. Philaret’s Russian catechism (1839) followed the shorter Hebrew count. With no post-schism pan-Orthodox council to settle the matter, the Orthodox canon remains received in practice rather than fixed by definition.

What does “anagignoskomena” mean?

It is the Greek term (ἀναγιγνωσκόμενα) for “the things that are read”—the standard Orthodox name for the books in their Old Testament beyond the Hebrew canon. It descends from St. Athanasius’s category of books “appointed by the Fathers to be read,” and it marks a middle status: Scripture read in the Church, but often held on a “lower footing” than the books of the Hebrew canon, as Metropolitan Kallistos Ware put it.

Is the “1 Esdras” in the Orthodox Bible the same as Ezra?

No—and this is the most common confusion in the subject. In the Septuagint, the protocanonical Ezra–Nehemiah is called Esdras B, while Esdras A (the “extra” book) is a separate Greek retelling. In the Latin Vulgate the numbering shifts, so that book becomes “3 Esdras”; in English Bibles it is “1 Esdras”; in the Slavonic Bible it is “2 Esdras.” The same numerals name different books across traditions, which is why so many discussions of the canon talk past each other.

Do Catholics and Orthodox disagree about the New Testament canon?

No. Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and Oriental Orthodox all share the identical twenty-seven-book New Testament. The entire disagreement is confined to the outer edge of the Old Testament. (The Ethiopian Orthodox tradition has a somewhat broader New Testament canon in its widest reckoning, but the mainstream Greek, Slavonic, and Catholic churches agree completely on the twenty-seven books.)

Footnotes

1. 1. On the shared deuterocanon and the convergence of the Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Oriental Orthodox traditions on these seven books, see the Catholic Encyclopedia, "Canon of the Old Testament," newadvent.org; and the survey in Lee Martin McDonald, The Biblical Canon: Its Origin, Transmission, and Authority (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2007).

2. 2. See my essay "The Deuterocanonical Books: What They Are, Where They Came From, and Why Christians Disagree About Them," which treats the seven shared books and the Catholic–Protestant dispute over them at length.

3. 3. The contents follow the standard critical edition, Alfred Rahlfs and Robert Hanhart, eds., Septuaginta (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2006), and are conveniently displayed in the table of contents of the New English Translation of the Septuagint (Oxford University Press, 2007), NETS online. The Catholic forty-six-book Old Testament is defined at Trent, Session IV (see n. 18).

4. 4. "The Greek Orthodox generally consider Psalm 151 to be part of the Book of Psalms." OrthodoxWiki, "Old Testament Canon," orthodoxwiki.org.

5. 5. "The 'books of the Maccabees' are four in number, though 4 Maccabees is generally in an appendix… today 4 Maccabees is often placed in a separate section or excluded." OrthodoxWiki, "Old Testament Canon," orthodoxwiki.org.

6. 6. On the cross-tradition numbering of the Esdras books, see "1 Esdras" and "2 Esdras," with their bibliography, in The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church; and the detailed treatment in John Gallagher and John Meade, The Biblical Canon Lists from Early Christianity (Oxford University Press, 2017). The Septuagint names the protocanonical Ezra–Nehemiah Esdras B and the additional book Esdras A; the apocalyptic Ezra (scholars' 4 Ezra) is absent from the Greek and survives via the Latin.

7. 7. Council of Trent, Session IV, lists "the first book of Esdras, and the second which is entitled Nehemias"—i.e., the protocanonical Ezra and Nehemiah, not the Greek Esdras A. See n. 18 for the text.

8. 8. The Letter of Aristeas is a pseudonymous work of perhaps the second century B.C., and even on its own terms it concerns only the translation of the Pentateuch. On its legendary character see the discussion in Benjamin G. Wright III, The Letter of Aristeas (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), and the overview at Wikipedia.

9. 9. "The Greek Orthodox generally consider the Septuagint to be divinely inspired." OrthodoxWiki, "Old Testament Canon," orthodoxwiki.org. On the New Testament's predominant use of the Septuagint, see the data summarized in McDonald, The Biblical Canon.

10. 10. Melito's list is preserved in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 4.26.12–14. It omits Esther and contains none of the deuterocanonical books. Text at bible-researcher.com.

11. 11. St. Athanasius, Festal Letter 39 (A.D. 367), §§4–7, trans. in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 4. The full passage on books "appointed by the Fathers to be read" names "the Wisdom of Solomon, and the Wisdom of Sirach, and Esther, and Judith, and Tobit." newadvent.org.

12. 12. Council of Laodicea, Canon 60. The OT list attached to the canon is of disputed authenticity, being absent from many Greek manuscripts and the Latin versions; many scholars regard it as a later addition. See the discussion in Gallagher and Meade, The Biblical Canon Lists from Early Christianity, and the summary at Wikipedia.

13. 13. Apostolic Canon 85 (the concluding canon of the Apostolic Constitutions) numbers "three books of the Maccabees" and "the Wisdom of the very learned Sirach" among the venerable books, along with Esther and Judith, while omitting Tobit and the Wisdom of Solomon. Text in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 7; see also Gallagher and Meade, Biblical Canon Lists.

14. 14. The councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397, reaffirmed 419) listed the fuller canon including Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, and the Maccabees. See the Catholic Encyclopedia, "Canon of the Old Testament," newadvent.org.

15. 15. Council in Trullo (Quinisext), Canon 2, trans. in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 14. The canon ratifies "the eighty-five canons, received and ratified by the holy and blessed Fathers before us," and sets its seal on the canons of, among others, Laodicea, Carthage, Athanasius, and Amphilochius. newadvent.org.

16. 16. OrthodoxWiki, "Old Testament Canon," orthodoxwiki.org. On Trullo's ecumenical standing in Orthodox reckoning, see the Orthodox Church in America, "The Council of Trullo," oca.org.

17. 17. Council of Florence, bull Cantate Domino (4 February 1442), the Bull of Union with the Copts, enumerates the same forty-six-book Old Testament. English text in Norman P. Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990); Latin original at vatican.va. Florence's canon list precedes Luther by three-quarters of a century.

18. 18. Council of Trent, Session IV, "Decree Concerning the Canonical Scriptures" (8 April 1546). The Old Testament list and the closing anathema are quoted from the translation in Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, Wikisource.

19. 19. Clementine Vulgate (1592), appendix preface: "Oratio Manassae, necnon Libri duo, qui sub libri Tertii & Quarti Esdrae nomine circumferuntur, hoc in loco, extra scilicet seriem canonicorum Librorum, quos sancta Tridentina Synodus suscepit… sepositi sunt, ne prorsus interirent, quippe qui a nonnullis sanctis Patribus interdum citantur, & in aliquibus Bibliis Latinis tam manuscriptis quam impressis reperiuntur" ("The Prayer of Manasseh, and two books circulating under the name of the Third and Fourth Book of Esdras, are set aside in this place—that is, outside the series of canonical books which the holy Tridentine Synod received—lest they should perish utterly, since they are sometimes cited by some of the holy Fathers and are found in some Latin Bibles"). See Edmon Gallagher, "The Vulgate Appendix," sanctushieronymus.blogspot.com, quoting the 1592 edition directly.

20. 20. Philip Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, vol. 1, "The Synod of Jerusalem and the Confession of Dositheus," ccel.org.

21. 21. The canon ruling appears in Question 3 of the catechetical questions appended to the Confession of Dositheus, not in the eighteen doctrinal Decrees (Decree 3 concerns predestination). English translation adapted from J. N. W. B. Robertson, The Acts and Decrees of the Synod of Jerusalem (London, 1899); text at crivoice.org.

22. 22. Confession of Dositheus, Question 3 (Robertson trans.), crivoice.org.

23. 23. "Because the Jerusalem Council was a regional council and neither ecumenical nor pan-Orthodox, its decrees were not obligatory unless accepted by all Orthodox Churches. Although there has been no official acceptance of the canon outlined at Jerusalem, all editions of the Bible published by the Greek Orthodox Church include the books selected in 1672." OrthodoxWiki, "Old Testament Canon," orthodoxwiki.org.

24. 24. St. Philaret (Drozdov), The Longer Catechism of the Orthodox, Catholic, Eastern Church (1839), Q. 31, trans. R. W. Blackmore, pravoslavieto.com.

25. 25. Philaret, Longer Catechism, Q. 34–35 (Blackmore trans.), pravoslavieto.com.

26. 26. On the term anagignoskomena ("things that are read") and its descent from Athanasius's category, see "Deuterocanonical books," Wikipedia, and the discussion of the Orthodox canon in The Old Testament in Eastern Orthodox Tradition, ed. Eugen Pentiuc (Oxford University Press, 2022).

27. 27. Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Church, new ed. (London: Penguin, 1993), in the chapter "The Holy Tradition." Ware's enumeration of "ten further books" counts the Greek 1 Esdras and three books of Maccabees and lists Baruch and the Letter of Jeremiah separately, so his "ten" differs in arrangement from the Catholic seven. Excerpt at fatheralexander.org.

28. 28. On the Prayer of Manasseh in Great Compline, see OrthodoxWiki, "Prayer of Manasseh," orthodoxwiki.org. The Song of the Three Holy Children underlies the seventh and eighth odes of the Matins canon and is among the Holy Saturday Vesperal readings; Wisdom of Solomon is read as a Vespers lesson (paroemia) on feasts of saints. See "Prayer of Azariah and Song of the Three Holy Children," Wikipedia, and OrthodoxWiki, "Lectionary."

29. 29. On the Greek–Slavonic divergence (4 Maccabees in Greek but not Slavonic; the apocalyptic 4 Ezra in Slavonic, from the Latin, but not in Greek), see Lénart de Regt, "Canon and Biblical Text in the Slavonic Tradition in Russia," The Bible Translator 67, no. 2 (2016): translation.bible; and "2 Esdras," Wikipedia.

30. 30. The Russian Synodal Bible (1876) prints the books outside the Hebrew canon but marks them "non-canonical" (неканонические) with an asterisk and note. De Regt, "Canon and Biblical Text in the Slavonic Tradition" (2016), translation.bible.

31. 31. On the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo canon, reckoned at eighty-one books and uniquely including Jubilees, 1 Enoch, and the three books of Meqabyan, see "Orthodox Tewahedo biblical canon," Wikipedia. (Popular Bible editions sometimes advertise "88 books"; the standard scholarly figure is 81.)