Books of the Bible: Complete Guide to Every Book

The Bible contains 66 books in the Protestant canon, 73 books in the Catholic canon, and 78 or more in the Eastern Orthodox canon. All three traditions share the same 39 Old Testament books and the same 27 New Testament books. The differences come from a group of writings called the Deuterocanon—books that Catholics and Orthodox Christians read as Scripture and that Protestants, beginning with the Reformation, set apart or removed.

This guide walks through every book in order, explains what each one is for, and then traces the history: how the canon was formed, what Jerome did in the fourth century, what Luther did in the sixteenth, and why the Council of Trent drew a line in response.

How Many Books Are in the Bible?

The number depends on which Christian tradition you ask.

• Protestant Bible: 66 books (39 Old Testament + 27 New Testament)
• Catholic Bible: 73 books (46 Old Testament + 27 New Testament)
• Eastern Orthodox Bible: 76 to 81 books, depending on the specific church
• Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo: 81 books in its broader canon

Every Christian tradition agrees on the 27 books of the New Testament. Every tradition also agrees on the 39 Old Testament books found in Protestant Bibles. The disagreement is about additional Old Testament books—writings produced mostly between about 300 BC and 100 AD—that were included in the Greek Septuagint and in early Christian Bibles but were not part of the Hebrew Bible that took final shape in Jewish tradition.

We will walk through the books shared by everyone first, then address the Deuterocanon, then explain the history behind the split.

The Old Testament: 39 Books Shared by All Christians

The Old Testament tells the story of God's covenant with Israel. It is arranged in Christian Bibles in four sections: the Law, the Historical Books, the Wisdom and Poetry books, and the Prophets. (Jewish tradition arranges the same material differently—we will return to that.)

The Law (Pentateuch) — 5 Books

These are the first five books, attributed to Moses and called the Torah in Jewish tradition. They tell the story of creation, the call of Abraham, the exodus from Egypt, and the giving of the Law at Sinai.

1. Genesis — Creation, Fall, Flood, and the stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph.
2. Exodus — Israel's deliverance from Egypt and the covenant at Mount Sinai.
3. Leviticus — Sacrificial system, priesthood, and holiness laws.
4. Numbers — Israel's forty years of wilderness wandering.
5. Deuteronomy — Moses's farewell sermons before Israel enters the Promised Land.

Historical Books — 12 Books

These books trace Israel from the conquest of Canaan through the monarchy, the exile in Babylon, and the return to the land.

6. Joshua — The conquest and division of the Promised Land.
7. Judges — A cycle of rebellion, oppression, and rescue before Israel had a king.
8. Ruth — A Moabite widow enters the line of David.
9. 1 Samuel — Samuel, Saul, and the rise of David.
10. 2 Samuel — David's reign over a united Israel.
11. 1 Kings — Solomon, the temple, and the divided kingdom.
12. 2 Kings — The decline of Israel and Judah, ending in exile.
13. 1 Chronicles — David's reign retold with a priestly and temple focus.
14. 2 Chronicles — Solomon through the exile, written to re-center a returned community.
15. Ezra — Return from Babylon and rebuilding of the temple.
16. Nehemiah — Rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem and renewing the covenant.
17. Esther — A Jewish queen rescues her people in Persia (God is not named in the book).

Wisdom and Poetry — 5 Books

These books address suffering, prayer, wisdom for daily life, the limits of human effort, and love.

18. Job — A righteous man's suffering and God's answer from the whirlwind.
19. Psalms — 150 songs and prayers covering every human emotion.
20. Proverbs — Practical wisdom for living well under God.
21. Ecclesiastes — A sustained meditation on meaning "under the sun."
22. Song of Solomon — Hebrew love poetry, read devotionally as a picture of covenant love.

The Major Prophets — 5 Books

"Major" refers to length, not importance. These are the long prophetic books.

23. Isaiah — Judgment and hope, with the clearest Old Testament portraits of the Messiah.
24. Jeremiah — The "weeping prophet" warning Judah before the Babylonian exile.
25. Lamentations — Five poems mourning the fall of Jerusalem.
26. Ezekiel — Visions and symbolic acts delivered to exiles in Babylon.
27. Daniel — Faithfulness under pagan empires, plus apocalyptic visions.

The Minor Prophets — 12 Books

"Minor" simply means shorter. In the Hebrew Bible these twelve are counted as one scroll, "The Twelve."

28. Hosea — A prophet's marriage mirrors Israel's unfaithfulness and God's mercy.
29. Joel — A locust plague becomes a call to return to the Lord.
30. Amos — Judgment on social injustice and empty religion.
31. Obadiah — The shortest Old Testament book; judgment on Edom.
32. Jonah — A reluctant prophet and a repenting city.
33. Micah — Judgment and the promise of a ruler from Bethlehem.
34. Nahum — The fall of Nineveh.
35. Habakkuk — A prophet wrestles with God about evil and learns to live by faith.
36. Zephaniah — The Day of the Lord and hope beyond judgment.
37. Haggai — A call to rebuild the temple after the exile.
38. Zechariah — Visions pointing to the coming Messiah.
39. Malachi — The last Old Testament prophet, closing with a promise of Elijah's return.

The New Testament: 27 Books

The New Testament tells the story of Jesus and the birth of the church. Every major Christian tradition—Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox—accepts the same 27 books in the same order.

The Four Gospels

Four accounts of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

1. Matthew — Written for a Jewish audience; shows Jesus as the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy.
2. Mark — The shortest and fastest-paced Gospel, likely the earliest written.
3. Luke — A careful historical account by a physician; emphasizes outsiders and the Holy Spirit.
4. John — A theological Gospel framed around signs and "I am" statements.

Acts of the Apostles

5. Acts — Luke's second volume. The Holy Spirit launches the church in Jerusalem and carries the gospel to Rome.

The Letters of Paul — 13 Letters

Paul wrote to churches and to individuals between roughly 48 and 67 AD. These letters work out what the gospel means for belief and for daily life.

6. Romans — The most systematic explanation of the gospel in the Bible.
7. 1 Corinthians — Pastoral correction for a messy, gifted church.
8. 2 Corinthians — A defense of Paul's ministry and a theology of weakness.
9. Galatians — Justification by faith, not by works of the Law.
10. Ephesians — The church as the body of Christ and the unity of believers.
11. Philippians — Joy in Christ, written from prison.
12. Colossians — The supremacy of Christ over every rival power.
13. 1 Thessalonians — Encouragement and the return of Christ.
14. 2 Thessalonians — Correction about the Day of the Lord.
15. 1 Timothy — Pastoral instructions for church leadership.
16. 2 Timothy — Paul's final letter; charge to a younger pastor.
17. Titus — Appointing elders and teaching sound doctrine in Crete.
18. Philemon — A personal appeal for a runaway slave turned brother in Christ.

The General Letters — 8 Letters

Called "General" or "Catholic" (meaning universal) because most were written to broader audiences rather than single congregations. Hebrews is traditionally grouped here, though its author is unnamed.

19. Hebrews — Christ as the greater high priest who fulfills the old covenant.
20. James — Practical faith that shows itself in action.
21. 1 Peter — Hope and holiness in the face of suffering.
22. 2 Peter — A warning against false teachers.
23. 1 John — Assurance of salvation and the command to love.
24. 2 John — A short warning against deceivers.
25. 3 John — A short commendation and a rebuke of a controlling leader.
26. Jude — A sharp call to contend for the faith.

The Apocalypse

27. Revelation — John's visions of Christ's victory, the judgment of evil, and the new creation.

The Deuterocanonical Books: Why Catholic and Orthodox Bibles Have More

The Deuterocanonical books—often called the Apocrypha in Protestant contexts—are Jewish writings composed mostly between about 300 BC and 100 AD. They were included in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures used by Greek-speaking Jews and by the earliest Christians.

The Catholic Bible includes these seven books plus additions:

• Tobit — A family narrative with angels, blindness healed, and faithful prayer.
• Judith — A widow saves her city by killing an Assyrian general.
• Wisdom of Solomon — A Greek-influenced reflection on wisdom and immortality.
• Sirach (also called Ecclesiasticus) — A long book of practical wisdom.
• Baruch — Attributed to Jeremiah's scribe; includes the Letter of Jeremiah.
• 1 Maccabees — The Jewish revolt against Greek rule in the second century BC.
• 2 Maccabees — Parallel material with more theological reflection on resurrection.
• Additions to Esther — Prayers and letters not in the Hebrew text.
• Additions to Daniel — The Prayer of Azariah, Susanna, and Bel and the Dragon.

Eastern Orthodox Bibles add more, with some variation between churches:

• 1 Esdras (sometimes called 3 Esdras in Latin)
• Prayer of Manasseh
• Psalm 151
• 3 Maccabees
• 4 Maccabees (usually as an appendix in Greek Orthodox Bibles)

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church has the broadest canon, adding books such as 1 Enoch, Jubilees, and 1–3 Meqabyan.

Protestants do not treat these books as Scripture, but many early Protestant Bibles—including the 1611 King James Version—still printed them in a separate section between the Testaments, labeled "Apocrypha" and recommended for reading but not for establishing doctrine.

How the Bible Canon Was Formed

The word canon comes from a Greek word for a measuring reed. A canonical book is one the church recognized as the rule of faith, not simply an ancient book about religion. The canon was recognized over time, not handed down as a list from the start.

The Hebrew Canon (roughly 400 BC to 100 AD)

The Jewish Scriptures took shape in three sections, still reflected in the modern Hebrew Bible (the Tanakh):

• Torah (Law) — the five books of Moses, recognized as authoritative by around the time of Ezra.
• Nevi'im (Prophets) — the historical and prophetic books, largely settled by the second century BC.
• Ketuvim (Writings) — Psalms, Proverbs, Job, and the rest, settled last.

By the time of Jesus, the Torah and Prophets were firmly fixed. The Writings were still being discussed at the edges. Jesus himself refers to "the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms" (Luke 24:44), a phrase that matches this three-part structure.

Traditionally, the Jewish canon was said to have been closed at the so-called Council of Jamnia around 90 AD. More recent scholarship views that as a gradual consensus rather than a single decision, but the endpoint is the same: a 24-book Hebrew canon (identical in content to the 39-book Protestant Old Testament, just grouped differently).

The Septuagint and the Early Church

Greek-speaking Jews in Alexandria began translating the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek around the third century BC. That translation, called the Septuagint (abbreviated LXX), also included later Jewish writings like Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, and the Maccabees.

The New Testament writers largely quote from the Septuagint. When the Greek-speaking early church read "the Scriptures," it usually meant the Septuagint—so the Deuterocanonical books circulated alongside the Hebrew books from the beginning of Christian history.

Jerome, the Vulgate, and the "Apocrypha" Label (late 4th century)

In the late 300s, Jerome translated the Bible into Latin. His Vulgate became the standard Bible of the Western church for more than a thousand years.

Jerome did something important: he distinguished between books that existed in Hebrew (what he called the Hebraica veritas, the "Hebrew truth") and the additional books found only in Greek. He used the label apocrypha for this second group, arguing they were useful for the church but not on the same level as the Hebrew Scriptures for settling doctrine.

Jerome's mentor Augustine disagreed and argued for accepting the broader Greek canon. Regional councils in North Africa—Hippo in 393 and Carthage in 397 and 419—endorsed the broader list. In practice, the Western church used both books together for the next thousand years, even while Jerome's reservations stayed on record.

The Medieval Consensus (roughly 500 to 1500 AD)

Through the Middle Ages, the Vulgate was the Bible in the West. The Deuterocanonical books were bound in the same volumes as Genesis and Isaiah, read in worship, and cited by theologians. But Jerome's distinction never fully disappeared. Medieval writers sometimes flagged these books as "ecclesiastical" rather than "canonical in the strict sense," even while quoting them freely.

When the printing press arrived in the 1450s, it locked in the Vulgate order and content as the Western norm—right as the Reformation was about to challenge it.

What the Reformation Changed

The Reformation did not invent the idea that the Deuterocanonical books stood on different ground than the Hebrew Scriptures. Jerome had said that more than a thousand years earlier. What the Reformers did was act on that distinction in a way the medieval church had not.

Luther's Reordering of the Old Testament

Martin Luther translated the Bible into German—New Testament in 1522, complete Bible in 1534. When he reached the Deuterocanonical books, he did not erase them. He moved them into a separate section between the Old and New Testaments, labeled "Apocrypha: These Books Are Not Held Equal to the Scriptures, but Are Useful and Good to Read."

That placement captured the Protestant verdict in a single line. The books were worth reading. They were not worth building doctrine on.

Luther's reasoning was rooted in a principle he called sola Scriptura—Scripture alone as the final authority for faith and practice. If a writing was going to ground doctrine, it needed to be unambiguously part of the canon the church received from Israel. The Hebrew canon—39 books—was the canon the Jewish people kept, the canon Jesus used, and the canon Jerome had flagged. Luther accepted it.

Luther's Handling of the New Testament

Luther also had opinions about the New Testament. He thought Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation stood on weaker historical ground than the other 23 books. In his German Bible he placed them at the end of the New Testament, unnumbered in his table of contents, and famously called James an "epistle of straw" in his 1522 preface—though he softened that line in later editions.

He did not remove any of these books. They are in every Lutheran Bible and every Protestant Bible today. Luther's reordering was a private judgment that did not become a Protestant standard. The church kept all 27 New Testament books.

The Council of Trent's Response (1546)

The Roman Catholic Church answered the Reformation at the Council of Trent, which opened in 1545. In its fourth session, on April 8, 1546, the council defined the Catholic canon as a matter of binding doctrine for the first time.

Trent declared that the books of the Old Testament—including Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, 1 and 2 Maccabees, and the longer versions of Esther and Daniel—were to be received "with equal devotion and reverence" as the others. Anyone who rejected them was declared anathema.

This was not a new canon. It was a formal confirmation of the Vulgate canon that had been in use since Jerome and Augustine. But Trent closed a door that had been quietly open for over a millennium. Where medieval writers could distinguish between "canonical" and "ecclesiastical" books, Trent said the Catholic Church recognized one canon, full stop.

The Protestant Settlement: Articles, Confessions, and the King James Bible

Other Reformation churches followed Luther's general approach with their own formulations:

• The Thirty-Nine Articles (1563, Church of England) listed the 39 books Protestants receive as Old Testament and said the Apocryphal books were read "for example of life and instruction of manners" but not used to establish doctrine.
• The Belgic Confession (1561, Reformed) drew the same line.
• The Westminster Confession of Faith (1647, Presbyterian) made it most explicit: "The books commonly called Apocrypha, not being of divine inspiration, are no part of the canon of the Scripture, and therefore are of no authority in the Church of God."

The King James Version of 1611 originally included the Apocrypha between the Testaments, following the Lutheran pattern. The British and Foreign Bible Society decided in 1826 to stop printing Bibles with the Apocrypha, and most Protestant Bibles have been 66 books only ever since.

The Orthodox Position

The Eastern Orthodox churches were not directly involved in the Reformation debates and kept their received canon—a slightly broader list than the Catholic one, still rooted in the Septuagint. Orthodox churches sometimes call the Deuterocanonical books anagignoskomena, meaning "worth reading," and distinguish them lightly from the "primary" canon without treating them as a separate category the way Protestants do.

A Side-by-Side View of the Three Canons

The New Testament is the same in every column. Every difference is in the Old Testament.

How to Start Reading the Books of the Bible

Knowing how many books exist is not the same as knowing how to read them. A few practical notes:

• Do not start at Genesis and push straight through. Most people stall in Leviticus. Start with the Gospel of John, then Mark, Genesis, Exodus, Acts, and a Pauline letter like Romans or Ephesians.
• Use a readable translation. The NASB is our default at Lumenology for its accuracy; the NLT and CSB are excellent for first-time readers.
• Read a whole book, not just verses. Most books of the Bible are shorter than a paperback chapter. You can read Philippians in twenty minutes and Ruth in thirty.
• Keep a map of the canon in your head. Knowing that you are in the Prophets, or in a Pauline letter, or in a Gospel, changes how you read what is in front of you.

For a longer walkthrough, see our guide on where to start reading the Bible.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do Catholic Bibles have more books than Protestant Bibles?

Catholic Bibles include seven Deuterocanonical books (Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, 1 Maccabees, 2 Maccabees) plus longer versions of Esther and Daniel. These books were part of the Greek Septuagint used by the early church and were included in Jerome's Latin Vulgate. Protestants, beginning with Luther, returned to the Hebrew canon for the Old Testament. The Council of Trent in 1546 formally defined the Catholic canon in response.

Is the Apocrypha the same thing as the Deuterocanon?

Yes, mostly. They are two different labels for the same group of books. Apocrypha is the Protestant term and comes from Jerome. Deuterocanonical ("second canon") is the Catholic term, first used in the sixteenth century by Catholic scholar Sixtus of Siena. Some Protestants also use "Apocrypha" more broadly to include Orthodox-only books and certain later writings that no major church accepts as Scripture.

Did Martin Luther remove books from the Bible?

No. Luther did not remove any books. He moved the Deuterocanonical books into a separate section between the Testaments, labeled them helpful but not Scripture, and kept all 27 New Testament books. His private opinions about Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation never became a Protestant standard. Every Lutheran and Protestant Bible today includes the full 27-book New Testament.

What order were the books of the Bible written in?

The order of books in the Bible is not the order they were written. Job may be one of the oldest texts. Moses's Pentateuch was compiled in the 1400s to 1200s BC. Most prophetic books date from the 800s to the 400s BC. In the New Testament, James and Galatians were likely first (around 48–49 AD), followed by the other Pauline letters, then Mark (around 65–70 AD), the other Gospels, and Revelation last (around 95 AD). The earliest New Testament book is not Matthew, and the last is not 3 John.

How did the New Testament get its 27 books?

Early Christians were reading and copying the apostolic writings from the first century onward. By the second century, the four Gospels and Paul's letters were already treated as Scripture across the church. The first list matching the 27 books exactly is in a festal letter from Athanasius of Alexandria in 367 AD. The councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) confirmed the same list. No major Christian tradition has disputed those 27 books since.

Does the Bible's order in Jewish and Christian tradition differ?

Yes. Jewish Bibles group the same 39 books into three sections—Torah, Prophets, Writings—and end with 2 Chronicles. Christian Bibles regroup them into Law, History, Wisdom, and Prophets, and end with Malachi. The content is identical. Ending on Malachi, with its promise of Elijah's return, creates a smoother literary bridge into the New Testament's opening with John the Baptist.

What are the shortest and longest books in the Bible?

The shortest book by chapter count is Obadiah in the Old Testament (one chapter, 21 verses) and 3 John in the New Testament (14 verses). The longest book by chapter count is Psalms (150 chapters); the longest prose book is Jeremiah. Psalm 119 alone is longer than many whole books.

Lumenology helps you read the Bible book by book, chapter by chapter, with context and reflection built in. If you are not sure where to start, begin with the Gospel of John.