How the Bible Was Formed: Why Catholic and Protestant Scriptures Differ, and What the Quran Is

In 1947, two Bedouin shepherds threw stones into a cave on the cliffs west of the Dead Sea at Qumran. One stone struck a clay jar inside the cave, and from within it spilled out a set of parchment scrolls two thousand years old.^[1] Until that moment, the oldest known Hebrew biblical manuscripts dated to around the tenth century. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls pushed that date back by more than a thousand years in an instant.

What makes the find even more remarkable is this: among the documents unearthed at Qumran were writings that appear in the Catholic Old Testament but are absent from the Protestant Old Testament. Why, starting from the same faith tradition, did Catholic and Protestant Christianity end up with different versions of the Old Testament? And where does the Islamic Quran fit into this story?

The Bible was not completed overnight. It is the accumulated result of thousands of years of debate and selection over which documents would be recognized as “the word of God.” Let us trace that process.

The Formation of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh)

The text that Christianity calls the “Old Testament” was originally the Jewish scriptures — the Tanakh. The name is an acronym formed from the first letters of its three sections: Torah (the Law), Nevi’im (the Prophets), and Ketuvim (the Writings).^[2]

The Torah consists of five books, from Genesis through Deuteronomy. Tradition held that Moses wrote them, but modern biblical scholarship views them as a compilation of multiple document layers composed at different periods and later edited together. The prevailing scholarly view is that they were assembled into their current form during or shortly after the Babylonian exile of the sixth century BCE.^[2] The Nevi’im attained canonical status around the second century BCE, while the Ketuvim did so even later.

Crucially, the canonical list of the Tanakh had not been fully settled even by around the first century BCE. Debates within Judaism over which books to include continued — the status of certain texts in the Ketuvim, such as Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs, and Esther, was disputed for generations.^[3]

The Septuagint and the Divergence of the Hebrew Canon

In the third century BCE, a large Jewish community lived in Alexandria, Egypt — a generation that had already become far more comfortable in Greek than in Hebrew. To serve this community, the Hebrew scriptures were translated into Greek: this translation is known as the Septuagint (LXX).^[4]

The Septuagint was more than a translation. It incorporated texts that were not transmitted in Hebrew or had no extant Hebrew originals — books such as Tobit, Judith, First and Second Maccabees, the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach (Ecclesiasticus), and Baruch. These works were composed roughly between 200 BCE and 50 CE, and circulated as authoritative documents within Hellenistic Jewish communities.^[4]

Early Christianity spread primarily in a Greek-speaking world. As a result, the early Church naturally adopted the Septuagint as its Old Testament. When the authors of the New Testament quoted the Old Testament, they did so largely from the Septuagint.^[4]

However, after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE, Judaism felt the need to re-establish its identity. In this process, Rabbinic Judaism moved toward recognizing only texts written in Hebrew as canonical, setting aside books found only in the Septuagint.^[3] This divergence planted the seed for the eventual split between Catholic and Protestant Old Testaments.

The Canonization of the New Testament: From Dozens of Gospels to Twenty-Seven Books

In the decades after Jesus’s death, the number of documents recording his teachings and deeds began to multiply. The four canonical Gospels — Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John — were far from alone. Dozens of “gospels” circulated, including the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Philip, and the Gospel of Mary.^[5]

How did the early Church choose twenty-seven books from this vast body of literature? Historians have identified roughly three criteria. First, apostolic authority — was the text written by an apostle or someone in close association with one? Second, universal acceptance (catholicity) — was it being widely read across diverse church communities? Third, orthodoxy — did it conform to already-established theological principles?^[5]

These criteria were not applied systematically from the outset, however. In practice, the process was gradual. When the second-century heretic Marcion created his own drastically reduced scriptural list, the Church was spurred to hasten the formal definition of a canon.^[5]

In 367 CE, Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, became the first to specify in his Easter letter a list of New Testament books identical to the twenty-seven we have today.^[6] This list was formally ratified at the Council of Hippo in 393 CE and the Council of Carthage in 397 CE.^[7] From start to finish, it took roughly three hundred years for the twenty-seven books to solidify as the standard.

As for the documents that did not make the canon — such as the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945 — why were they excluded? The Gospel of Thomas is a collection of sayings that contains no account of the resurrection or the crucifixion, placing it in fundamental conflict with the theology of the mainstream Church.^[13] These texts were classified as “heretical” not only because of their content, but also because they were the products of communities that stood in opposition to the central authorities of the Church in the theological power structures of their time.

The Deuterocanonical Debate: The Same Old Testament, Different Book Counts

The Catholic Old Testament contains seven books not found in the Protestant Old Testament: Tobit, Judith, First Maccabees, Second Maccabees, the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, and Baruch (along with additional passages in Esther and Daniel). Catholics and Orthodox Christians call these the deuterocanonical books, while Protestants call them the Apocrypha.^[8]

The question of how to regard these books became a flash point during the sixteenth-century Reformation. When Martin Luther translated the German Bible in 1534, he removed these texts from the body of the Old Testament and placed them in a separate appendix. His reasoning rested on two points.

First, they do not appear in the Hebrew Bible of the Jews. Therefore, by his logic, they fall outside the scope of scriptures whose authority Jesus himself had recognized.^[8] Second, these books were being used to support the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory. Second Maccabees 12 refers to prayer and sacrifice on behalf of the dead — the biblical basis for the doctrine of Purgatory. Since Luther rejected the doctrine of Purgatory, he also denied these books canonical status.^[8]

In response, the Catholic Church formally declared at the Council of Trent in 1546 that the deuterocanonical books hold authority equal to the rest of the canon.^[9] This decision was a direct reaction to the Reformation.

An important nuance deserves mention here. Luther did not “remove” these books; he said they were “profitable to read” but reclassified them as lacking the same canonical authority as Scripture. Today, some Protestant Bibles — particularly in the Anglican tradition — do include the Apocrypha.^[8]

The Dead Sea Scrolls: Witnesses from Two Thousand Years Ago

The Dead Sea Scrolls, excavated from eleven caves at Qumran between 1947 and 1956, comprise more than nine hundred scrolls containing the entirety of the Hebrew Bible except for the book of Esther.^[1] The significance of this discovery for biblical scholarship can be understood in three respects.

First, it provided confirmation of textual stability. In the case of Isaiah, comparing the second-century BCE manuscript found at Qumran with the tenth-century CE Masoretic Text — which had been the oldest standard reference until that point — reveals a remarkable degree of correspondence. This demonstrates that the scribal tradition was maintained with extraordinary accuracy across approximately 1,200 years.^[1]

Second, the scrolls also serve as evidence of textual diversity. Some Qumran manuscripts show “variant versions” that align more closely with either the Masoretic Text or the Septuagint. This suggests that even around the first century BCE, the biblical text had not yet been fully standardized.^[1]

Third, among the documents found at Qumran were Hebrew and Aramaic manuscripts of deuterocanonical books such as Tobit and Sirach. The Catholic side uses this as evidence that these texts were not entirely disconnected from the Hebrew tradition — contrary to the Protestant argument.^[1]

The Quran: The Same Root, a Different Scripture

Abraham, Moses, Jesus — all of them appear as prophets in the Quran. The Quran mentions Abraham no fewer than sixty-nine times, more than any other single figure.^[10] Islam is classified alongside Judaism and Christianity as one of the Abrahamic religions.

Yet the process by which the Quran was formed is fundamentally different from that of the Bible. According to Islamic tradition, the Quran was revealed to the Prophet Muhammad over approximately twenty-three years, from around 610 CE until his death in 632 CE.^[11] Unlike the Bible — a compilation of texts by numerous authors spanning centuries — Islam understands the Quran as the direct and unalterable word of God (Allah).

During Muhammad’s lifetime, the Quran was transmitted through oral recitation while also being recorded in fragmentary written form. After his death, the first official compiled edition was assembled at the command of the first Caliph, Abu Bakr. As the Muslim community expanded across vast territories, however, multiple recitation traditions began to diverge.^[11]

It was the third Caliph, Uthman ibn Affan, who resolved this confusion. Around 650 CE, he convened a committee chaired by Zayd ibn Thabit to establish a standardized text. Authorized copies were distributed to major cities — Medina, Kufa, Basra, and Damascus — and existing variant copies were ordered destroyed.^[11] Every Quran in use across the world today traces its origins essentially to this Uthmanic standard edition.

How should we understand the relationship between the Bible and the Quran? The Quran acknowledges the Torah (Tawrat), the Psalms (Zabur), and the Gospels (Injil) as true revelations delivered by God to earlier prophets. At the same time, it claims that these earlier scriptures were corrupted (tahrif) by human hands. Accordingly, Islam holds that the Quran is the most complete and final revelation.^[10]

This view stands in direct conflict with the Christian perspective. Christianity does not accept the claim that biblical texts were corrupted. The Dead Sea Scrolls and countless other ancient manuscripts are seen as demonstrating the remarkable consistency of the text over time. Although both religions share Abraham as a common ancestor, they have arrived at different conclusions about the authority each scripture possesses.

The Paradox of Canon Formation

Looking back at the process of biblical canonization, one uncomfortable truth remains. The process by which certain documents came to be recognized as “sacred” was not purely theological. Power dynamics within particular communities, cultural language (Hebrew versus Greek), political context (the Roman Empire’s recognition of Christianity), and the theological disputes of the time all played complex roles.

The Protestant decision to adopt the Hebrew canon as its standard was also aligned with the humanist spirit of the Reformation — the call to return to the original sources (ad fontes). But the Catholic Church argues, on the grounds that early Christianity used the Septuagint, that these books are in fact part of authentic Christian tradition. The answer to the question of who is following the older tradition depends entirely on one’s perspective.^[8][9]

Much the same can be said of the Quran. Uthman’s standardization project is credited with preserving the unity of the Muslim community, but it has also been criticized for suppressing the diversity of early recitation traditions.^[11]

It was human beings, not God, who decided which documents were sacred and which were not. The accumulation of those decisions became the scriptures that now shape the faith lives of billions of people. To ask why the Bible took the shape it did is ultimately to ask what human beings have agreed to regard as holy.