Tuesday, Oct 27, 2026 The claims desk. Receipts included. POWERED BY LENZ ↗
IsThis

The Council of Trent reaffirmed the Bible’s canon without deleting reincarnation passages.

The Claim

Statements about reincarnation were removed from the Roman Catholic Bible in the 16th century.

Verified by Lenz ·

The Short Version

Historical and textual evidence provides no basis for a 16th-century removal of reincarnation statements from the Catholic Bible. The Council of Trent reaffirmed the existing canon rather than excising such material, and no alleged reincarnation passage has been shown to exist in an earlier Catholic Bible and disappear afterward. Vulgate textual revisions do not establish doctrinal deletion.

Caveats

  • No specific reincarnation passage has been identified in a pre-16th-century Catholic Bible and shown to have been removed.
  • Textual variants among Vulgate editions are not evidence of systematic doctrinal deletion.
  • The claim may conflate the Council of Trent with unsupported stories involving earlier church councils.

The Receipts

  1. Schlesinger, Dan R. (2016) Did Origen teach reincarnation? A response to neo-Gnostic theories of Christian reincarnation with particular reference to Origen and to the Second Council of Constantinople MPhil(R) thesis

    theses.gla.ac.uk

  2. What the Early Church Believed: Reincarnation | Catholic Answers Tract

    catholic.com

  3. Belief in Reincarnation and Some Unresolved Questions in Catholic Eschatology

    mdpi.com

  4. Reincarnation

    web.archive.org

  5. "Was Reincarnation Ever in the Bible?" - Probe Ministries

    probe.org

  6. Does reincarnation occur in the Bible? - Protestant Theological ...

    pthu.nl

  7. Did Origen teach reincarnation? A response to neo-Gnostic theories of Christian reincarnation with particular reference to Origen and to the Second Council of Constantinople (553) - Enlighten Theses

    theses.gla.ac.uk

  8. General Council of Trent: Fourth Session - Papal Encyclicals

    papalencyclicals.net

  9. ewtn.com

    ewtn.com

  10. The Canonization of the New Testament

    rsc.byu.edu

+ 11 more sources — see the full list on Lenz

Filed Under

Roman Catholic Bible