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Notes -
Does anyone have a simplified explanation of why the Protestant Bible is shorter/different than the Catholic Bible? I know a lot of the difference is Masoretic Text vs. Septuagint, but I've read other facts like Martin Luther considering ditching Revelations. I imagine other early reformers like Calvin had their own opinions of Canon. Was there a point where, at least for least Mainline Protestants, the Canon was stabilized and a justification given for the choice?
@urquan's comment was great. Some additional complications:
In the early church, not everyone agreed. If you look at canon lists, most (but not all) of the fathers who wrote in Latin included deuterocanonical books. But the fathers who wrote in Greek tended instead to exclude those books, and follow more closely the Hebrew canon as their exemplar for the old testament (at least, with regard to what they considered canonical; some of them put the deuterocanonical books into a "profitable but not fully scripture" category, if I remember correctly). They'll often say that there are 22 or 24 books of the old testament (numbering things fairly differently from the current 39 in a Protestant OT canon.)
That said, when we're talking about a Greek-style list, that doesn't mean that it exactly matches the Protestant canon. The book most likely to be included that Protestants do not accept is Baruch (though it can be hard to tell whether it's included or not, as some authors treated it just as part of Jeremiah). Esther was the OT book that was most likely to be left out.
And yes, on the whole the Greek fathers mostly followed the Septuagint (the book of Daniel excepted), but Jerome's translation was from the Hebrew. (And I believe Syriac Christianity tended also to use translations derived from the Hebrew instead of the Septuagint.)
In the New testament, early canon lists would sometimes say that some books were canonical, others not, and some were disputed, with some churches receiving them, and others not. The books that took the longest to be received were, in the west, Hebrews, and in the east, Revelation, but you also had authors questioning some other books earlier on. But eventually everyone in both places accepted both.
As urquan mentioned, Jerome, despite being a Latin father, followed a Greek-style list. Jerome was extremely influential, due to being the author of the vulgate. His preferred list is in at least one of the prefaces to the books of the Vulgate. Accordingly, there are a number of theologians in the Latin tradition over the next millenium who follow Jerome in holding to a shorter list of what is canonical (and of course, others who disagree). This continued to be the case up to and subsequent to Luther. The famous cardinal Cajetan, for example, a contemporary of Luther (and one who argued against Luther's views on other issues), held to what would later become an exclusively Protestant position on the deuterocanon—that the deuterocanon is profitable to read, but not part of the canon proper, nor inspired.
At the time of the Reformation, Luther (if I remember correctly), thought the shorter list was better. He also questioned four NT books—all ones that had had some level of dispute in early Christianity: James, Revelation, Hebrews, Jude. These were still published in his translation of the bible, but they had prefaces indicating his doubts about them. For some of these, his doubt about them were due to theological or aesthetic concerns. (I find his comment on Revelation ridiculous: "For me this is reason enough not to think highly of it: Christ is neither taught nor known in it.") Subsequent Lutherans were mostly more moderate, but Lutherans continued to distinguish between more and less disputed books of the New Testament—typically accepting both as canonical, but recognizing that some's canonical status might be more doubtful.
Among the Reformed churches (Calvin etc.) it was standard to adhere to what is still the standard Protestant canon, that is, the Hebrew canon for the OT, and the standard Christian NT canon.
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