This page was migrated in July 2022 from my older website, biblicalambiguities.net. As such, it is subject to the biblicalambiguities-general-disclaimer and the biblicalambiguities-general-disclaimer.
23 July 2022
In the context of this website, canon refers the collection of works which a particular religious group treats as being part of its Bible. There are, generally speaking, three kinds of canons that are of interest to this site. I'll use terminology I picked up from David Noel Freedman.[1]
The "core" Bible, in the sense of being the one that contains all the books broadly agreed upon in the Judeo-Christian faiths, is the Hebrew Bible.
The Septuagint contains he books of the Hebrew Bible and then some. The Septuagint plus the New Testament make up what we might call the "Greek Bible". This, roughly, was the Christian Bible until the Protestant Reformation.
The Greek Bible, as used by Catholics and Orthodox, contains the Hebrew Bible plus Tobit, Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon, Ben Sira, Baruch, 1 Maccabees, and 2 Maccabees. The various Orthodox Churches, depending from Church to Church, have more books.
Protestantism's great innovation with respect to the Bible was to restrict the canon to the New Testament plus the Hebrew Bible. There did exist some individuals who expressed a sort of proto-Protestant view of the canon prior to the coming of Protestantism, but unless I'm mistaken it was not until Protestantism that the deuterocanonical books were separated from the "Old Testament" in Christian Bibles.
Protestantism relied heavily on Judaism as it sought to return to the "original" Old Testament, and therefore consists of the Hebrew Bible plus the New Testament. This is how one might put it in a favorable light. A more critical way of putting it might be that Protestants rejected the deuterocanonical books because they were theologically inconvenient, teaching such non-Protestant ideas as, for example, prayers for the dead.