Scripture & Authority
The Seven “Extra” Books
Catholic Bibles include seven books Protestant Bibles dropped: Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach (Ecclesiasticus), Baruch, and 1 & 2 Maccabees, plus portions of Esther and Daniel. These were in the Bible of the apostles and stayed in every Christian Bible until the Reformation.
The apostles' Bible — the Septuagint — included them
The Greek Old Testament (Septuagint) used across the first-century world contained these books, and the New Testament quotes the Septuagint far more than the Hebrew. When the apostles said ‘Scripture,’ this was the collection in their hands.
The New Testament echoes them
Hebrews' ‘roll of faith’ praises those ‘tortured, not accepting their deliverance, that they might obtain a better resurrection’ — a direct echo of the martyrs of 2 Maccabees 7. Wisdom 2 reads like a script for the Passion. The apostles knew these texts.
The Church settled the canon early — and kept it
The councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397), following Pope Damasus (382), listed these books as Scripture. That canon stood for over a thousand years until Luther moved them out, following the later rabbinic canon rather than the apostles' Bible. Trent simply reaffirmed the ancient list.
Common objections
“The Jews rejected these books, so they can't be Scripture.”
The Jewish canon wasn't fixed in Jesus' day — different groups used different collections, and the diaspora used the Septuagint. The narrower Hebrew canon was settled by rabbis around AD 90, after Christianity had begun and partly in reaction to it. Christians take their Old Testament from the apostles, not from post-Christian rabbinic decisions.
“Jesus never quotes them, so he didn't accept them.”
Jesus never quotes Ecclesiastes, Esther, Ezra, or several other undisputed books either — nobody drops those. Absence of a quotation proves nothing; and the New Testament does allude to the deuterocanon (see Hebrews 11:35).
Scripture quoted verbatim from the World English Bible (public domain).