>>1307304
>Why were the books of Sirach, Tobit, Wisdom, Judith, 1 and 2 Maccabees, and Baruch, which are in the Catholic and Orthodox bibles, taken out of the Protestant Old Testament?
Because the Bible is not infallible, Luther is.

>Why also did the Jews leave out some of these books during the compilation of the current Hebrew Bible in the first centuries AD?
From the Jewish Study Bible:

Despite such major uncertainties in our un
derstanding of the process of canonization,
however, several points seem fairly certain.
First, it is likely that the fin al stages of canon
ization were a reaction to the destruction of
the Second Temple in 70 CE and its aftermath.
This crisis intensifi ed a development which
had begun over half a millennium earlier,
with the destruction of the First Temple (586
BCE). Through this development Israel gradu
ally became the People of the Book (a term
first found in the Quran in reference to Jews
and Christians). Second, it is unlikely that
canonization represents a purely top-down
process, through which a small group of lead
ers (Rabbis) determined the canon; instead,
the designation of certain works as canonical
was more like the official recognition of the
works that a large segment of the community
had already held to be central, holy, or author
itative. Finally, the act of canonization was re
markably inclusive, creating a body of works
richly textured by a wide variety of genres,
ideologies, and theologies. This is, fundamen
tally, a typical ancient Near Eastern process:
Instead of creating a small, highly consistent
text, as we perhaps would now do, those
responsible for the process made efforts to in
clude many of the viewpoints in ancient
Israel, in corporating differing and even con
tradictory traditions into this single, and sin
gular, book.

>>1307347
, some
evidence suggests that by the 2nd century CE
the text had largely stabilized-this is re
flected in the (few) manuscripts we have from
this period, as well as the development of
early rabbinic midrash, much of which pre
supposes a stable text. The destruction of the
Second Temple and the Hadrianic persecution
of the early 2nd century CE may have also
caused a type of conservatism which was re
sponsible for establishin g "the" biblical text.
These were gradual processes. It is important
to remember that other groups, too, had their
ideas about the canon; for instance, it is un
likely that the Qumran community, most of
whose texts date from a century or so imme
diately before and immediately after the
Common Era, viewed Esther as canonical,
since no manuscript of that biblical book has
been found among the thousands of frag
ments discovered. In contrast, many manu
scripts of Jubilees, a work similar to Genesis
and Exodus, have survived, and given this
work's affinities with the practices of the
Dead Sea community, it was probably a
canonical text for them. Within rabbinic litera
ture, the Wisdom of Jesus ben Sirach (Sirach
or Ecclesiasticus) is sometimes cited with the
same formula used for biblical texts and was
thus, in some sense, canonical for some Rab
bis. Therefore, although we may speak of
"the" canon forming in the 1st century CE,
there was a certain amount of flexibility or
variability around the fringes.

>>1307349
This flexibility may also be seen in the ex
tensive divergence with respect to the word
ing of the biblical text as shown in manu
scripts from Qumran, in translations of the
Bible in the Septuagint and elsewhere, and
to a lesser extent in early rabbinic citations
(see "Textual Criticism of the Bible," pp. 2067-
72). These differences are not just small, such
as a variant spelling here or there, but are
often major, and affect the meaning of the text.
There are cases where the text is found in two
or more different recensions-identifiably dif
ferent versions, revisions, or critical texts, not
merely two different copies of the same original with minor variants-which may simply
vary the order of materials or may exhibit
fundamentally different text-types (for exam
ple, short types versus expansive types, as
with the text of Jeremiah; see the introduction
to Jeremiah). This evidence suggests that, at
least in the early stages of the canonization
process, it was quite acceptable for a book to
circulate in different versions and that differ
ent communities may have canonized differ
ent versions of the same book.

Surprisingly honest answer by these Jewish scholars. The Jews don't even attempt to hide that they don't believe in a word of the bible and they use religion as a political tool.

*plot twist*

conservative Christians should do the same and give up trying to argue that the bible is true, embracing cultural Christianity instead.