Ask how many books are in the Bible and the answer depends on who you ask — 66, 73, and in some traditions more still. None of those answers is wrong. They are counting different traditions, shaped by specific historical decisions, each one with a date and a reason you can trace.
The Bible used by most Protestant churches has 66 books. The one used by the Catholic Church has 73. The difference comes from old decisions about which texts belong on the official list of books recognized as Scripture — the canon — made at different times, by different groups, centuries before any of today's traditions existed the way they exist now. What follows is the full count, book by book and section by section, and then the real history behind the difference.
The short answer
The Protestant Bible — the one used by Terra Gospel — has 66 books: 39 in the Old Testament and 27 in the New. The Catholic Bible has 73: the same 66, plus seven books called deuterocanonical, all of them in the Old Testament. The New Testament is identical in both traditions; neither one adds or removes a single book from it. Orthodox Bibles vary more, and from one tradition to the next — most run somewhere between about 75 and 81 books, and the Ethiopian one comes close to that ceiling, including texts like the Book of Enoch that no other major tradition treats as Scripture.
The 66 books, section by section
The easiest way to hold onto the 66 books is not memorizing the whole list — it is remembering the five sections in each Testament. They appear in roughly this order in nearly every edition of the Protestant Bible.
| Testament | Section | Books | Count |
|---|---|---|---|
| Old | Pentateuch (the Law) | Genesis – Deuteronomy | 5 |
| Old | Historical | Joshua – Esther | 12 |
| Old | Poetic | Job – Song of Solomon | 5 |
| Old | Major Prophets | Isaiah – Daniel | 5 |
| Old | Minor Prophets | Hosea – Malachi | 12 |
| New | Gospels | Matthew – John | 4 |
| New | Historical | Acts | 1 |
| New | Paul's Letters | Romans – Philemon | 13 |
| New | General Letters | Hebrews – Jude | 8 |
| New | Prophetic | Revelation | 1 |
Add the five Old Testament sections and you get 39. Add the five New Testament sections and you get 27. Thirty-nine plus twenty-seven closes the 66 — the same count used elsewhere on this site to estimate how long it takes to read every one of those books, from the fastest to the slowest.
Worth noting: this 39-book split is the Christian way of organizing the Old Testament, not the only one. The Hebrew Bible — the Tanakh, used in Judaism — arranges the same content into 24 books, grouped as the Torah (5), the Prophets (8), and the Writings (11). The difference is not in content, it is in how it is divided: where the Tanakh treats Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles as one book each, and the twelve minor prophets as a single scroll, the Christian tradition splits each one out separately — which is how 24 becomes 39 without a single text being added or removed.
Why the New Testament is the same everywhere
The New Testament is the one place where practically every Christian tradition agrees completely — the same 27 books, in the same list, whether the Bible is Protestant, Catholic, or Orthodox. That list closed early. In 367, Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria wrote an Easter letter to the churches under his leadership listing exactly the 27 books that make up the New Testament today — the earliest known record of that full list appearing together, with no book added or missing. Later councils confirmed the list; none reopened it.
That is why the debate over 66 versus 73 books is never about the New Testament — it is entirely about seven specific Old Testament books, and about which ancient collection each tradition chose to follow.
Why the Catholic Bible has 73 books
The gap between 66 and 73 is seven Old Testament books called deuterocanonical — Greek for "second canon" — that the Catholic Church recognizes as Scripture and most Protestant churches do not:
- Tobit
- Judith
- 1 Maccabees
- 2 Maccabees
- Wisdom
- Sirach (also called Ecclesiasticus)
- Baruch
The Catholic Bible also carries a few extra passages inside Esther and Daniel. Those passages count as part of the books that already exist, not as extra books on their own — which is why the total stops at 73 rather than climbing higher.
The root of the difference sits in two Old Testament collections that were already circulating among Jews centuries before Christ. The Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures begun around the third century BC, included these seven books. The Hebrew canon that later took shape among the rabbis did not. The earliest Christians read mostly in Greek and inherited the Septuagint along with the extra books, which is why they show up in Christian translations long before any split between Catholics and Protestants existed.
The formal split came much later. At the Council of Trent, in 1546 — part of the Catholic Church's response to the Protestant Reformation — the seven books were formally declared canonical for Catholics. Protestant reformers, following the principle of returning to the original Hebrew canon, chose not to treat them as Scripture with the same authority as the other 66, though Luther and others still printed them separately, as worthwhile historical reading. Each side followed a consistent principle across decades of debate; neither invented its list overnight.
What about Orthodox Bibles?
Orthodox churches do not share one fixed number the way Protestants and Catholics each do, because there is no single central Orthodox authority publishing one identical list for every branch. Depending on the tradition — Greek, Russian, Ethiopian, and others — the count usually runs somewhere between about 75 and 81 books. The Ethiopian Orthodox Bible comes close to that 81-book ceiling, including texts no other major Christian tradition treats as canon, such as the Book of Enoch and the Book of Jubilees. That is not vagueness — it is the natural result of a family of churches that kept its own regional catalogs instead of converging on a single list.
Verifiable trivia about the Bible's structure
The chapters and verses in any printed Bible today are not part of the original text — they are a medieval and Renaissance-era addition, meant to make a passage easy to locate, not part of the revelation itself. The chapter divisions still used today are credited to Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, around 1205, in the thirteenth century. Verse numbering came later, in the sixteenth century: the French printer Robert Estienne introduced it in the New Testament in 1551 and in the Old Testament shortly after, fitting the numbers inside the chapters Langton had already fixed three centuries earlier.
The original 1611 King James Bible, published in English and used as a reference point by generations of Protestant translation, originally carried the deuterocanonical books in a separate section between the Testaments, labeled the Apocrypha — not treated as Scripture with the same authority as the other books, but not stripped from the edition either. It was only in 1826 that the British and Foreign Bible Society decided to stop funding editions with that section, mostly over the cost of printing, not a new theological decision. From the following generation onward, most printed Protestant Bibles came out without the Apocrypha — the format that became standard by today.
Among the 66 books, Psalms is the longest by chapter count — 150, more than double the runner-up, Isaiah, at 66. By word count, the shortest is usually 3 John, at a little over 200 words in the original Greek, with 2 John close behind, nearly tied. Neither one is a fragment — both are complete letters, just short enough to fit on a single page.
How Terra Gospel organizes the 66 books
Terra Gospel follows the 66-book Protestant canon across all three languages on the site. In English, the text used is the Berean Standard Bible; in Portuguese, the Bíblia Livre (ebible.org/porbr2018); in Spanish, the Reina Valera Antigua of 1909. All three are openly licensed translations, and all three follow the same 66-book list — not because it is the only possible list, but because it is the one this site can publish transparently, without depending on commercial licensing. For readers coming from a Catholic or Orthodox tradition, it is worth saying plainly: the 66 books here are a genuine subset of yours, not an edited or shortened version of them.
Reading any of the 66 books, tracking progress by book, taking notes, and getting the verse of the day are free on Terra Gospel, in English, Portuguese, and Spanish. If you are deciding where to start, the page on how long it takes to read the Bible gives a sense of how much time each of the 66 asks for — from two minutes in Philemon to more than three hours in Genesis.