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Protocanonical books

The protocanonical books are those books of the Old Testament that are also included in the Hebrew Bible (the Tanakh) and that came to be considered canonical during the formational period of orthodox Christianity. The Old Testament is entirely rejected by some forms of Gnosticism, but the Hebrew Bible was adhered to even more tightly by Jewish Christians than Gentile Christians. The term protocanonical is often used to contrast these books to the deuterocanonical books or apocrypha, which "were sometimes doubted"[1] by some in the early church, and are considered non-canonical by most Protestants.

There are typically 39 protocanonical books in most Christian bibles, which correspond to the 24 books in the Jewish Tanakh.

Early variants[edit]

Most of the protocanonical books were broadly accepted among early Christians. However, some were omitted by a few of the earliest canons, The Marcionites, an early Christian sect that was dominant in some parts of the Roman Empire,[7] recognised a reduced canon excluding the entire Hebrew Bible in favor of a modified version of Luke and ten of the Pauline epistles.[8]


Apart from the extreme example of the Marcionites, isolated disagreements over certain books' canonicity continued for centuries. Athanasius, a fourth-century bishop of Alexandria, omitted Esther from his list,[9] potentially having been influenced by an early 22-book Jewish canon, possibly the one mentioned but not specified by Josephus. Theodore of Mopsuestia omitted Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, Job, and Ezra–Nehemiah to obtain a listing of 22 books.[10]

Ehrman, Bart D. (2005). Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew. . ISBN 9780195182491.

Oxford University Press