Development of The Old Testament Canon - Reformation Era

Reformation Era

One of the tenets of the Protestant Reformation (beginning c. 1517) was that translations of scriptures should be based on the original texts (i.e. Biblical Hebrew and Biblical Aramaic for the Old Testament and Biblical Greek for the New Testament) rather than upon Jerome's translation into Latin, which at the time was the Bible of the Catholic Church.

Statements were included in the Protestant Bibles indicating that the Apocrypha was not to be placed on the same level as the other documents. Luther's translation (1534) placed the Apocrypha between the Old and New Testaments with this title:

"Apocrypha, that is, books which are not held equal to the Sacred Scriptures, but nevertheless are useful and good to read."

A year later Coverdale's Bible was published with the Apocrypha placed between the two Testaments under this description:

"Apocrypha, the books and treatises which among the fathers of old are not to be reckoned of like authority with other books of the Bible neither are they found in the canon of the Hebrew."

The reformers saw the Apocrypha at variance with the rest of Scripture. In them, the Roman Catholic Church claimed scriptural authority for the doctrine of Purgatory, for prayers and Masses for the dead (2 Macc 12:43-45), and for the efficacy of good works in attaining salvation (Tobit 12:9; Ecclesiasticus 7:33), things that Protestants then and today deem to be blatantly contradicting other parts of the Bible.