Catholic vs Protestant Ten Commandments

Ask a Catholic and a Baptist to name the fourth commandment and you will get two answers. The Catholic says “Honor your father and your mother.” The Baptist says “Remember the Sabbath day.” Neither has a different Bible. They are counting the same words differently.

The Bible says there are ten: the Hebrew of Exodus 34:28 calls them “the ten words,” and Deuteronomy repeats the number (4:13; 10:4). What it never does is number them. Exodus 20:2–17 runs to more than a dozen sentences with nothing marking where one commandment ends and the next begins, so every tradition has had to decide where the lines go. Three answers have lasted, and all three are ancient.

The short answer: Catholics and Lutherans treat “no other gods” and “no idols” as one commandment and split coveting into two. Most Protestant and Orthodox churches count “no idols” as a separate second commandment and keep coveting as one. Jewish tradition makes “I am the LORD your God” the first. Nothing is left out of anyone’s list.

Here are the three counts in full, worded the way each tradition usually teaches them. Behind every list is the same Exodus 20.

Catholic (and Lutheran)

1. I am the LORD your God: you shall not have strange gods before me.
2. You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain.
3. Remember to keep holy the Lord’s Day.
4. Honor your father and your mother.
5. You shall not kill.
6. You shall not commit adultery.
7. You shall not steal.
8. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
9. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife.
10. You shall not covet your neighbor’s goods.

Lutherans use the same numbers but keep the order of Exodus for the last two: the ninth is your neighbor’s house, the tenth your neighbor’s wife, workers, animals and anything else that is theirs.

Protestant and Orthodox

Used by the Orthodox churches, Anglicans, Reformed and Presbyterian churches, Methodists, Baptists and most evangelicals. It is also the count used in The Ten Commandments in Order.

1. You shall have no other gods before me.
2. You shall not make for yourself an idol.
3. You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain.
4. Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.
5. Honor your father and your mother.
6. You shall not murder.
7. You shall not commit adultery.
8. You shall not steal.
9. You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.
10. You shall not covet.

Jewish

1. I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt.
2. You shall have no other gods before me, and you shall not make an idol.
3. You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain.
4. Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.
5. Honor your father and your mother.
6. You shall not murder.
7. You shall not commit adultery.
8. You shall not steal.
9. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
10. You shall not covet.

A quick way to convert: from the name commandment to false witness, the Catholic number is one lower than the Protestant one. The Catholic third commandment is the Protestant fourth; the Catholic fourth is the Protestant fifth. Jewish and Protestant numbers match from the third commandment on.

The first place the counts part company is the opening of the list:

I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourselves an idol, nor any image of anything that is in the heavens above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: you shall not bow yourself down to them, nor serve them.

Exodus 20:2–5

Read one way, verses 3 to 6 are a single command: an idol is a false god, so the ban on images spells out what “no other gods” means in practice. Augustine read it that way around AD 400. Catholics and Lutherans still follow him, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church says so openly (§2066).

Read the other way, the ban on images is its own command, because you can break it while worshiping the right God. The golden calf is the case in point. Aaron did not announce a new religion when he set it up; he announced, “Tomorrow shall be a feast to the LORD” (Exodus 32:5). Israel was not trading the LORD for another god; they were trying to picture the one who had just rescued them. Philo and Josephus, two Jewish writers of the first century, counted the images clause separately, and the Greek Fathers followed them. So do the Orthodox, the Reformed churches and most Protestants.

The rabbis, whose count became standard in Judaism, call these the ten statements rather than ten commands, so the first can be a statement: “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt.” “No other gods” and “no idols” then join to make the second. The count puts the rescue before the rules, which is where Exodus puts it too, and where The Ten Commandments: What Each One Means begins.

The second place the counts differ is the end of the list. Exodus and Deuteronomy word the last commandment slightly differently:

You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor’s.

Exodus 20:17

You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife. Neither shall you desire your neighbor’s house, his field, or his male servant, or his female servant, his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor’s.

Deuteronomy 5:21

In Exodus the house comes first and one verb, “covet,” covers everything. In Deuteronomy the wife comes first and gets a sentence of her own, and the rest of the list takes a different Hebrew verb, “desire.” Catholics follow Deuteronomy: the ninth commandment is about wanting another person’s spouse, the tenth about wanting their goods. Lutherans split the verse in the order of Exodus instead. Everyone else reads both verses as one commandment about wanting what belongs to someone else.

Each count protects something. Two commandments make sure desire for a person is never filed as one more kind of shopping. One commandment traces every kind of wanting back to the same heart. For what the command asks of us, see What Does ‘You Shall Not Covet’ Mean?

Because the Catholic short list has no line about images, you will sometimes hear that the Catholic Church removed the second commandment. It did not. Every Catholic Bible prints Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5 in full, idols and all. The short list is a teaching summary, and it shortens every commandment, not only the first. The Catechism deals with images directly, under the first commandment (§2129–2132).

There is a real disagreement underneath: Christians differ over whether images belong in worship. But that argument does not follow the numbering. The Orthodox count “no idols” as its own commandment and are the church most devoted to icons. Lutherans share the Catholic count and kept their crucifixes and altar paintings. Reformed churches count it separately and have traditionally kept images out of worship altogether. Both counts were settled centuries before the great church arguments over images, so neither side invented its numbering to win one.

In practice, the difference matters most in conversation. When someone mentions “the fourth commandment,” ask which list they learned, or name the commandment instead of the number. If you are teaching children, teach the count your church uses, but make sure they know the commandments by their words. Jesus never cited one by number; he quoted what it said (Matthew 19:18–19). There are child-sized wordings in The Ten Commandments for Kids.

Did the Catholic Church change the Ten Commandments?

No. Catholic Bibles contain the full text of Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5. The Catholic Church numbers the commandments the way Augustine did around AD 400, joining “no other gods” and “no idols” into one and splitting coveting into two. The words are the same; only the lines between them differ.

What is the second commandment in the Catholic list?

“You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain.” In most Protestant and Orthodox lists that is the third commandment, and the second is “You shall not make for yourself an idol.”

What is the fourth commandment for Catholics?

“Honor your father and your mother.” For most Protestants, the Orthodox and Jewish readers, the fourth commandment is the Sabbath: “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.”

Do Lutherans number the Ten Commandments like Catholics?

Yes, with one small difference at the end. Following the order of Exodus 20:17, the Lutheran ninth commandment is about your neighbor’s house and the tenth about your neighbor’s wife and everything else.

Which numbering is correct?

The Bible gives the number ten (Exodus 34:28; Deuteronomy 4:13) but not the divisions. Each count has ancient support: Philo and Josephus in the first century for the Protestant and Orthodox list, Augustine for the Catholic and Lutheran one, and the early rabbis for the Jewish one. The text allows more than one reading, and the content is identical in all three.