But fourth-century Christians themselves disagreed on precisely which books constituted God’s authentic revelation. Especially with regard to the books most in dispute in the sixteenth century—the so-called deuterocanonical books of the Old Testament—the fourth century could provide no assured guide because even those ancient luminaries, St. Jerome and St. Augustine, disagreed particularly on the status of these books.

One of the side effects of the Protestant Reformation was intense scrutiny of the biblical canon and its contents. Martin Luther did not broach the issue in his 95 Theses, but not long after he drove that fateful nail into the door of the Wittenberg chapel, it became clear that the exact contents of the biblical canon would need to be addressed. Luther increasingly claimed that Christian doctrine should rest on biblical authority, a proposition made somewhat difficult if there is disagreement on which books can confer “biblical authority.” (Consider, e.g., the role of 2 Maccabees at the Leipzig Debate.) There was disagreement—and there had been disagreement for a millennium or more beforehand. Almost always, the sixteenth-century disputants pointed back to Christian authors in the fourth century or thereabouts for authoritative statements on the content of the Bible.

But fourth-century Christians themselves disagreed on precisely which books constituted God’s authentic revelation. Especially with regard to the books most in dispute in the sixteenth century—the so-called deuterocanonical books of the Old Testament—the fourth century could provide no assured guide because even those ancient luminaries, St. Jerome and St. Augustine, disagreed particularly on the status of these books.

The deuterocanonical books—as they would come to be called by Sixtus of Siena in 1566—are essentially those portions of Scripture that form part of the Roman Catholic Bible, but not the Protestant Bible. (Sixtus had a slightly wider definition of the term “deuterocanonical.”) In this sense, there are seven deuterocanonical books: Tobit, Judith, Wisdom of Solomon, Wisdom of Sirach (Ecclesiasticus), Baruch, and 1–2 Maccabees. There are also two books with deuterocanonical portions: Daniel and Esther.

In the sixteenth century, it was not clear whether these books belonged in the Bible or not; different theologians and church authorities took different positions on the matter, and there had never been a council that settled the issue for the entire church. While these books appeared in biblical manuscripts and printed Bibles, it was not uncommon in the Latin Church to question their status. For instance, one of the great publishing ventures of the early part of the century was the Complutensian Polyglot, a Bible printed in multiple languages in the Spanish town of Alcalá (Latin name: Complutum), produced under the oversight of the Roman Catholic Cardinal Jiménez de Cisneros and granted permission for publication by Pope Leo X in 1520. While this Bible includes the deuterocanonical books, Cardinal Jiménez explains in a prefacethat they “are books outside the canon which the Church has received more for the edification of the people than for the authoritative confirmation of ecclesiastical dogmas.”

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