The Christian Bible exists in several versions because different branches of Christianity recognize different books as scripture. While the Protestant, Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox churches share the same New Testament, they differ in the number of books included in the Old Testament. Many of these differences stem from early translations of the Bible, including the Septuagint and the Latin Vulgate. Over time, Christian traditions adopted different views on which writings should be considered divinely inspired. The books accepted by Catholics but generally excluded from Protestant Bibles are known as the Deuterocanonical books by Catholics and the Apocrypha by Protestants. Early Protestant Bibles often included these writings in a separate section rather than treating them as part of the biblical canon. During the Protestant Reformation, Protestant leaders emphasized the principle of sola scriptura and based the Old Testament primarily on the Hebrew Bible. As a result, Protestant Bibles came to contain 39 Old Testament books, compared with 46 in the Catholic canon. The Apocrypha gradually disappeared from many Protestant editions for both theological and practical reasons. In 1826, the British and Foreign Bible Society stopped printing the Apocrypha in its Bibles to reduce production costs, accelerating the practice of omitting them entirely. Today, Protestants generally recognize 66 books in the Bible, Catholics recognize 73, and Eastern Orthodox churches recognize even more. Although they differ over the Old Testament canon, all three traditions share the same 27 books of the New Testament. historydefined.net/the-apocr…