Canon of the Bible, Traditions of The Canon of the Bible, Traditions of. An overview of the books considered canonical and included in the Bibles of different traditions.

Jews and Christians throughout the centuries have produced Bibles with varied content and organization. Before the Protestant Reformation, Christian versions of the Old Testament generally included a variety of books that were not included in Jewish Bibles. Protestant Reformers like Martin Luther doubted the canonicity of these books, now known by Protestants as the Apocrypha, but when Luther prepared his translation of the Bible into German, he did not remove the Apocrypha; he simply moved those books to an appendix. This tradition continues in many European Bibles.

The English were the first group of people to remove the Apocrypha altogether. In 1599, an edition of the Geneva Bible was published without the Apocrypha. In 1615, during the reign of King James the First, George Abbot, the Archbishop of Canterbury, declared the penalty for printing a Bible without the Apocrypha to be a year in prison. Over the next three centuries the growing influence of Puritans and Presbyterians over the populace, the government, and the British and Foreign Bible Society led to a strong tradition of printing Bibles containing only 66 books.

The situation today reflects this bifurcation: The Bibles used by many European Protestants, as well as the Anglican church, still include the Apocrypha as a separate section. Most other English-speaking Protestant churches have Bibles without the Apocrypha.

Non-Protestant groups of Christians continue to include books in their Old Testaments that are outside the Jewish canon and classified by Protestants as Apocrypha; the details of which books are included vary from tradition to tradition.

Christian canons of the New Testament show less variation than canons of the Old Testament, but Syriac and Ethiopian traditions show some variation relative to the Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox canon.