[NorthMountain]

There were other writings rejected in the AD 300s (but often 'resurrected' today by feminists, queers, and other nutjobs). THOSE are "apocrypha". Just reminding that the OT canon isn't universally agreed upon.

The larger point, that the Bible is really a library, I think anyone familiar with it would agree with regardless of how many "books" they say the library contains.

[robroys woman]

I’m a member at this site: https://www.christianforums.com/threads/the-bible-73-or-66-books.8006170/

And I like this from the thread I linked:

“But of course we are not talking about Catholic books or even books written by NT Christians in the first century - we are talking about Jewish books... we are talking about the Hebrew Bible and whether the content of it which we have in 39 books... should have been 39 or 50. The Jews say 39 and that was the Bible that Christ had - the one that was kept in the Temple in Jerusalem.

“As Josephus points out the Jews had not changed their Bible in over 300 years. IT is not the Bible of Christ’s day to add 11 books to the Hebrew Bible.

“They ‘knew’ about the 11 books - but they did not add them to the scriptures. The canonized set that had been fixed for over 3 centuries.”

[robroys woman]

The larger point, that the Bible is really a library, I think anyone familiar with it would agree with regardless of how many “books” they say the library contains.

---

The reason I bring that up is that most people don’t really think about that as they read it. I’ve been a Christian since 1981, and for most of that time I just saw the bible as “the bible”. Though I knew the bible was 66 separate writings, I didn’t really think about the implications, especially in my “spiritual milk” days, which lasted way too long. When you “take owenership” of it being 66 dissimilar books, you don’t take all the books as equal in value and/or authority.

i.e. the stuff in red is much more critical than III John.