Protocanonical books Protocanonical books The protocanonical books are those books of the Old Testament that are also included in the Hebrew Bible (the Tanakh) and that came to be considered canonical during the formational period of Christianity. The term "protocanonical" is often used to contrast these books to the deuterocanonical books or apocrypha, which "were sometimes doubted" by some in the early church, and are considered non-canonical by most Protestants. There are typically 39 protocanonical books in most Christian bibles, which correspond to the 24 books in the Jewish Tanakh. The list of protocanonical books is Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua,
On the Reliability of the Old Testament the Old Testament. The book opens with an introductory chapter surveying the history with which it intends to deal, the continuous narrative in the Hebrew Bible from the Genesis creation narrative to the return of the Jews to Jerusalem from the Babylonian captivity in the early days of the Persian Empire in the 5th century BC. The author claims that this history was written at the same time as the events it describes in its various sections, and that this can be confirmed by comparing the Old Testament with non-Biblical sources, both written and archaeological. He clarifies by stating that