Why does the Protestant Bible have less books in it than the Catholic Bible?
There is an incorrect accusation that the Catholic Church added the seven “apocrypha” or deuterocanonical books to the Old Testament during the Council of Trent that was held between 1545 to 1563. The Council of Trent actually only officially confirmed and canonized which books were already being used long before even the Council of Hippo (393 AD) and Council of Carthage (397 AD).
Before Christ, there were two collections of sacred books that were accepted and used by the Jewish community. One was called the Masoretic or Palestinian, which was in Hebrew. The other one was called the Septuagint or Alexandrian, which included some books in Greek and Aramaic, as well as others translated from Hebrew, so it was larger. Since the New Testament was written in Greek, the common language Christians of Jewish and gentile origin in the Mediterranean world, the early (Catholic) church used the Septuagint for the Old Testament.
The Masoretic text was set by Jewish scholars probably during the Jewish Council of Jamnia in 90 AD, which was in reaction to the Christian use of the Greek text. They did this also because the books in the Septuagint text helped to affirm that Jesus was the messiah, which they did not want to accept.
Since the time of Jesus, all Christians used the same canon of 73 books of the Septuagint until the early 16th century when Martin Luther left the Catholic Church. When he did, he decided to use the Masoretic text for the Old Testament, which would make his version 7 books shy (a total of 66) of the original Catholic Bible.
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