I attended a talk once where the speaker said that the Orthodox Bible is actually longer than the Catholic Bible. I remember something about Maccabees having more ‘books’, and there was some other thing that was longer.
Did I get this right? What does the Orthodox Bible have that the other does not?
The question of the difference between the “Catholic” and the “Orthodox” bibles is fairly complex. To simplify:
1. The early Church generally accepted the existing Greek translations, done previously as valid.
2. Early translations of the Greek into Latin were done.
3. When Jerome did his works, culminating in the Latin Vulgate, he referenced the Greek Septuagint texts and the existing Latin translations to existing Hebrew translations. Jerome came to the opinion that the Hebrew texts better testified to Christ than the Greek and, parting from tradition, favored them in his translations.
4. Jerome was criticized for this at the time (e.g. by Augustine) but over time his translations replaced the older Latin ones as that accepted by the Western Church. The Eastern Church continued to accept the Greek translations. Since Latin never became their main scholarly language, they were largely removed from the question of acceptance of the Latin Vulgate.
5. Today in the West, most critical translations of the Old Testament start with the Masoretic text, which is generally viewed as more ancient. However, the Greek Septuagint and other texts are consulted to resolve questions.
6. The Orthodox Church still considers the Greek Septuagint to be its “benchmark”, as I mentioned before, and prefers to use it as a starting point when developing new translations.
I hope this helped.