Protestant Bible

A Protestant Bible is any Christian Bible translation or revision that comprises 39 books of the Old Testament (according to the Jewish Hebrew Bible canon, sometimes known as the protocanonical books) and the 27 books of the New Testament for a total of 66 books. The Protestant Bible excludes the 15 books of Biblical apocrypha or other writings. This practice was standardized among Protestants following the 1825 decision by the British and Foreign Bible Society to omit books of the apocrypha. This is often contrasted with the 73 books of the Catholic Bible, which includes 7 deuterocanonical books according to Roman Catholic Canon Law 825, as a part of the Old Testament.

Early Protestant Bibles

While from the Reformation, Protestants have usually excluded the Apocrypha from the canon, prior to the 1825 British and Foreign Bible Society decision most Protestant Bibles did include the Apocrypha within the same printed books. It was usually to be found in a separate section and sometimes carrying a statement to the effect that the Apocryphal books were non-canonical. A surviving quarto edition of the Great Bible, produced some time after 1549, does not contain the Apocrypha although most copies of the Great Bible contained the Apocrypha interspersed with the Old Testament books. A 1575 quarto edition of the Bishop's Bible also does not have the Apocrypha. Subsequently, some copies of the 1599 and 1640 editions of the Geneva Bible were printed without the Apocrypha.