How many books are in the Catholic Bible compared to the NIV?

Answer 1

Roman Catholic AnswerThere is no "Catholic" Bible, there is just the Bible. The Bible, which has been zealously guarded by the Catholic Church ever since it put it together. The Old Testament contains 73 books of which Martin Luther disagreed with the doctrine in seven of them so he threw them out of his translation of the Bible. But all 73 were in the Septuagint which was the Greek Bible that Our Blessed Lord used, and St. Jerome faithfully translated all of them. Well over a thousand years later, Martin Luther strongly disagreed with a number of books in the Old AND New Testament and tried to throw them out. He succeed with the Old Testament, but he did not succeed with the New Testament. So, for instance, the letter of Saint James is still there, which contains the *only* reference to faith alone, unfortunately for Martin Luther it says "NOT BY" right in front of it. The Old Testament books that he threw out including the beautiful books of Wisdom and Tobit which support the fact that we (as St. James points out) need works as well as faith to be saved. And the book of 2nd Maccabees contains the fact that it is a good and holy thing to pray for the dead. And we know that Maccabees should be in there as it is the only book in the Old Testament that has the reason for Hanukah in it. The NIV is the result of Martin Luther's mutilation of the Old Testament missing those seven books and large portions of at least two others. Some of the verse numbering is different as well, as the Septuagint is a much older Bible than the one that M. Luther used for his translation.