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,
Old Testament account for the many different Old Testaments which exist today. Timothy H. Lim, a professor of Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism at the University of Edinburgh, identifies the Old Testament as "a collection of authoritative texts of apparently divine origin that went through a human process of writing and editing." He states that it is not a magical book, nor was it literally written by God and passed to mankind. By about the 5th century BC Jews saw the five books of the Torah (the Old Testament Pentateuch) as having authoritative status; by the 2nd century BC the Prophets