The Protestant Bible is different from the Catholic one. Looking at the index of books that the Bible contains, we count 66 books, whereas the Catholic Bible and the Orthodox Bible contain seven more books. The Protestant Bible is missing 1 and 2 Maccabees, Tobias (or Tobit), Judith, Baruch, Wisdom, and Ecclesiasticus (or Sirach), known as “deuterocanonical” [1]. Non-Catholic brethren call the seven deuterocanonical books “Apocrypha,” although it is not a very exact term for what is meant, since “apocryphal” etymologically means “hidden,” alluding to the author, who is “unknown” and usually “hides” behind a pseudonym. In this sense there are other “apocryphal” books that nonetheless form part of the inspired books (such as the Epistle to the Hebrews, which was not written directly by Paul, yet bears his name). In any case, the reality is that Protestants do not accept these books as inspired.
Why the difference?
It was only in the year 393 A.D. that the bishops joined with the priests and laity to discern which books are inspired, or also “canonical.” The Church had the power to do this because Jesus gave her the power to bind and loose (Mt 18:18) and promised to send the Holy Spirit for the fullness of truth (Jn 14:26).
In the 15th century Martin Luther thought that the first Christians used the “Jewish canon of Palestine” (the books written in Hebrew), 39 books. But in reality the 46 books of the “Alexandrian canon” or “translation of the Seventy” (the Greek translation of the Hebrew books, since Greek was the international language of that time) were accepted by the great majority of the Jews dispersed throughout the world (the “diaspora”). Alexandria was the largest and most important Jewish center in the Greek-speaking world.
Around the years 90–100 A.D. some Jewish leaders gathered to deal with the question of the canon (known as the canon of Palestine), removing the seven books; their aim was to return to the Hebrew canon and thus distinguish themselves from the Christians.[2] They thought that whatever was not written in Hebrew was not inspired (although Ecclesiasticus and 1 Maccabees were originally written in Hebrew and Aramaic.[3]) However, the discussion among them continued for many years, and their decisions were not universally recognized. There was much disagreement among the different Jewish groups and sects. The Sadducees trusted only in the Torah; the Pharisees could not decide about Esther, the Canticle of Canticles, and Ecclesiastes. Only in the second century did the Pharisees decide on 39 books[4]. The apostle Paul, who traveled throughout the Greek-speaking world, used the version of the LXX.
When Saint Jerome was asked to translate the Bible into Latin (in 382 A.D.), he chose to follow the decision of the Jews and rejected the seven books, calling them “apocryphal.” This decision of Jerome was rejected by the councils already mentioned, and Jerome accepted the decision of the councils.
After all, the Jews expelled the Christians from the synagogue and did not let them take part in the decision about the canon. Nowadays many rely on the Jewish decisions about the canon. Now then, those same Jews had already decided to reject Jesus as the Messiah: why give them authority over the canon of the OT?
Martin Luther and the other reformers decided to follow the Jewish decision to base the canon of the OT on the Hebrew language, and they took the seven books out of their Bible. They called them “apocryphal,” following the idea of Saint Jerome. Thus the Protestant Bible began. At the time of the Reformation, Luther (1534) introduced the idea of ranking the various books of the NT according to what he considered their authority. He assigned a secondary rank to Hebrews, James, Jude, and the Apocalypse, and placed them at the end of his translation. He did the same with the seven books of the OT, but did not remove them from the Bible. He said they are not equal to the Sacred Scriptures, but they are useful and good to read (Article VI of the 39). In 1643 Professor John Lightfoot called them “wretched Apocrypha.” In 1827 the British and Foreign Bible Society omitted them entirely from its Bible. Then other publishers did the same.
Some brethren say that the Catholic Church added these seven books at the Council of Trent (16th century), but Luther could not have rejected these books if they had not already been in the canon.[5] Others say that they are not cited in the NT. But the New Testament does not cite Esther, Abdias, or Nahum either, and yet the brethren accept them in their Bible.
The Christians used the large scroll more than the small one because it was written in Greek. Greek, the universal language of that time, was the language of the NT. Justin Martyr wrote that the Church had an OT different from that of the Jews. Nevertheless, out of consideration for the Jews, especially in the controversies, some isolated representatives of the Church, at least in practice, did not from the very beginning place the seven on the same level as the other 39.
The Jews of Palestine decided the canon of the OT around the years 90–100, as was said, rejecting the seven books written in Greek. Some brethren rely on Rom 3:1-2 to say that the Christian must acknowledge this Palestinian Jewish decision: “What advantage then hath the Jew? First indeed, that the words of God were committed to them” [6]. However, it does not follow from this that they have more authority than the Church of the New Testament to approve the sacred books. How can it be that they reject the Messiah, if to them precisely had been entrusted the Word of God? The fact that God gave them the Word of God does not guarantee that they are infallible in their interpretation or discernment; if they had been, they would never have rejected the Messiah. Moreover: Who were to decide the canon? Which Jews? What authority? Who gathered at Jamnia for that decision? Is there any document?
The oldest manuscripts of the OT (by a thousand years) contain the Deuterocanonicals. Except for the absence of Maccabees in the Codex Vaticanus, the oldest Greek text of the OT, ALL THE OTHER manuscripts contain the seven books.
“Of the 850 documents of which remains have been found at Qumran, some 223 are copies of various books of the Old Testament; almost all the books of the Hebrew Bible (except Esther) are represented, and some deuterocanonicals (Tobias, and Ben Sira or Ecclesiasticus)… As is well known, the present Hebrew Bible is based on a Leningrad manuscript copied in the year 1008 A.D., and represents the official rabbinic consonantal text (Masoretic Text), fixed with all precision in the 2nd century A.D., and transmitted without variants down to our own days. Over against it, the Christians of the East and the non-reformed Westerners habitually used the books and the text represented by the ancient Greek version of the LXX…When the first biblical manuscripts of Qumran were published—specifically, two scrolls of Isaias found in cave 1—it was found that these texts—a thousand years older than the medieval manuscripts on which the Hebrew Bibles are based, and prior to the Masoretic unification—were practically identical to the known text.” The documents of Qumran: What do they contribute to Christianity, by Eulalio Fiestas Le-Ngoc in Palabra, October 1994, p. 71.
“The Fathers of the Council (of Trent) knew that the African councils (Hippo, Carthage) of the 4th century had accepted the deuterocanonical books; it is curious that Trent, in accepting a longer canon, seems to have preserved an authentic memory of the earliest days of Christianity, while other Christian groups, in their avowed attempt to return to primitive Christianity, settled for a shorter Jewish canon which, if some Protestant researchers such as A.C. Sundberg and J.P. Lewis are correct, was a creation of a later period.” These Protestant researchers discovered that the primitive Church used the large scroll!
When the authors of the NT cite something from the OT, they cite it according to the Greek translation of the Seventy 86% of the time. Some brethren admit this but try to say that the seven books were a “supplement” to the large scroll, and that is why Christ and the apostles did not cite them. But the authors of the NT did not make this distinction. To cite the scroll was to admit that all of it is inspired. If they were false, adding them as a “supplement” would have made the whole scroll impure (and the worship in which it was used). We know the reverence of the Jews toward the Sacred Scriptures. When Jesus entered the synagogue to read from the book (Lk 4:16-17), it would have been an opportune moment to say that among the books there were seven that were not inspired.
Moreover, the seven are indeed cited in oral Tradition, as the Apostolic Fathers demonstrate. And they are cited directly or indirectly in the following: Mt 6:7 alludes to Sir 7:14. Mt 6:14 alludes to Sir 28:2; Rom 1:19-32 alludes to Wis 12:24 to 13:9; Eph 6:14—the idea is in Wis 5:17-20, and Jas 1:19 is influenced by Sir 5:13. 1 Pet 1:6-7 is seen in Wis 3:5-6. Compare Heb 1:3 and Wis 7:26-27; 1 Cor 10:9-10 with Jdt 8:24-25; 1 Cor 6:13 and Sir 36:20, etc.
It is important to remember that the brethren accept books of the OT that are never cited in the NT, such as Ruth, Ecclesiastes, and the Canticle of Canticles, and that the Epistle of Jude (vv. 14 and 9) cites 1 Enoch and the “Assumption of Moses”!
Why accept some books but not all, when it was the same Church that decided to accept the whole Bible at once, as the Catholics have it?
After all, the debate over whether the seven books are apocryphal or not is a debate about how we know whether they are inspired. And we saw that without the Church we cannot know this. The Catholic knows with certainty that the Bible is inspired because the Catholic Church said it was, the last time at the Council of Trent.
Martin Luther, in his Commentary on Saint John, said: “We are obliged to concede to the Papists that they have the Word of God, that we received it from them, and that without them we would have no knowledge of it at all.” This Church declared that ALL of the 73 books that make up the Old and New Testament are revelation.
In 1615 the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury proclaimed a law that carried a penalty of one year in prison for anyone who published the Bible without the seven deuterocanonical books, since the original version of the King James had them.
“It has been decided that nothing be read in the Church apart from the divine Scriptures. The canonical Scriptures are the following: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Josue…Tobit, Judith,… the two books of Maccabees, two books…” (Canon No. 3).[7]
Brother, let us imagine that a Christian has only the Gospel of Mark; he would be missing much in his knowledge of Jesus Christ, he would know nothing of his infancy, because this is found only in Luke and Matthew; nothing of the Our Father (it is not in Mark), the parable of the prodigal son, the wedding of Cana, etc. If a brother had only one page of the Bible, could he think that he knows all of God’s revelation?
Without the Catholic Bible a brother would hardly know all of God’s revelation about the departed and purgatory (2 Mac 12:45; Wis 3:5-6), about the soul (Wis 3:1), the good use of wine (Sir 31:25-27), Mary, the mother of Jesus (Jdt 13:18-20), the intercession of the Saints for us (2 Mac 15:13-14), and many other things. Why not ask God for light on this important matter?
What did the primitive Church say?
Among the Fathers of the Church, Clement cites Judith, Tobias, and Esther. In his Letter to the Corinthians (27:5) he cites Wis 12:12.
The Didache cites Sir 4:31 (in 4:5) and Wis 12:5 (in 5:2).
The Epistle of Barnabas cites Wis 2:12 (in 6:7).
Polycarp, in his Letter to the Philippians (10:2), cites Tobias 4:10.
The seven “deuterocanonical” books also provided the ancient Christian artists with material to decorate the catacombs.
The scholars speak
From the book Gospel and Tradition of Israel. Matthieu Collin & Pierre Lenhardt, EVD, Spain, 1991.
“The Acts also make Paul say: ‘I have done nothing against our people or against the customs received from our fathers’ (Acts 28:17). Here it is clearly seen that what is at issue is no longer, in the first place, Scripture—the written Torah—but the way of life transmitted by the fathers, which is exactly the oral Torah of the Pharisees. Moreover, Flavius Josephus uses the same expression as the Acts: ‘strict formation,’ to speak of the Pharisaic study of the Law” (p. 11).
Under the heading Written Torah and Oral Torah: “The first anecdote highlights the fact that Scripture cannot dispense with a minimum of orality. For the word of God to be understood, one must read it, and therefore, above all, learn to read. Reading presupposes learning the alphabet with a trustworthy teacher. To gain access to the written word of God, an authorized teacher is needed, which allows the conclusion that the written Torah is transmitted through the oral Torah. How could a teacher lead to the written word of God if his oral word, however elementary it might be, were not the beginning of the word of God? On the other hand, can it be conceived that the written word of God, when it is received and transmitted orally, could cease to be the word of God? Moreover, it must be recognized that the oral Torah precedes the written Torah in teaching, just as it preceded it at the moment of the revelation of Sinai, where God spoke to Moses before writing his commandments on the tablets of stone…. Let us note here: the expression ‘the whole Torah’ means, for a Pharisee, the written Torah and the oral Torah (cf. Paul in Gal 5:14)” (p. 18).
The necessity of authorized interpretation and translation
“The coherence of the Torah consists in its teaching that it itself cannot be received as the word of God except within the controlled and authorized tradition transmitted by the sages” (p. 19).
“The sages gathered at Yabneh did no more than confirm the oral Torah of the Pharisees. By the year 100 A.D. at the latest, it is evident that it was taught in Israel that there is a Torah under two forms: the written Torah and the oral Torah” (p. 29).
“The starting point is reception: the Torah is not the work of men, but Moses transmitted it after receiving it from God. It is the Torah in its full breadth that is transmitted here, and it is the oral Torah that evidently has priority here, since it depends on the legitimacy of the succession of the teachers” (p. 29). Jesus followed the same line when he implemented the rule of Apostolic Succession.
“According to the model of the Pharisaic tradition, living oral Torah, the apostolic tradition never replaces the teacher who remains in the midst of his own and is the sole ‘transmitter’ of the gospel of God. Just as the Pharisaic teachers speak from ‘the chair of Moses’ (Mt 23:2), that is, with their own authority, so too the ‘apostles’ speak in the name of Christ Jesus, with their own authority: it is through his Spirit that he continues to guarantee the authentic fidelity of the tradition and of the apostolic chain of the Disciples within the communities gathered in his name and structured around the authentic successors of his ‘apostles’” (p. 35).
Analyzing the first Christian historian—Eusebius of Caesarea (Hist. Eccl.)—where he speaks of Polycarp, the authors say: “From the very beginning the vocabulary of tradition is recognized: ‘they did not transmit these opinions…,’ but what is most significant is what is said about Polycarp’s teaching. Indeed, Irenaeus indicates that Polycarp reported at the same time the facts and works of the Lord transmitted by the eyewitnesses of the life of Jesus, and his teachings transmitted from memory; Polycarp received all this and taught it in conformity with the Scriptures, which are here evidently the Scriptures in the strict sense, the written Torah; Irenaeus observes that he in turn also memorized that tradition in his heart and not in a notebook, ruminating on it ceaselessly.
“Irenaeus will later insist on the legitimate succession of the ‘preachers of the gospel,’ who are the bishops in each of the Churches of God spread throughout the whole world…. To this order many barbarian peoples who believe in Christ give their assent: They possess salvation, written by the Spirit without paper and ink in their hearts, and they scrupulously guard the ancient tradition, believing in one God,… Those who without letters have embraced this faith are barbarians as regards language… Thanks to the ancient tradition of the apostles, they reject even the thought of any lying invention of the heretics (Irenaeus, Adv. haer., III, 4, 1-2)” (pp. 45-46).
Author: Various
Source: Apologetica.org
Notes
- Deutero means “second” and not “false.” “Deuterocanonical” is the second canon: the books accepted after others. The NT also has “deuterocanonical” books—that is, they were accepted by the Catholics—for example 1 and 2 Peter, Hebrews. These were not universally recognized at the beginning. ↩
- New archaeological findings, including the Dead Sea Scrolls, Qumran, indicate that there were other lists of books accepted as inspired besides these. The Jews did not explicitly define the canon until the second century after Christ. See “Apocrypha” by Robert Dentan, The Oxford Companion to the Bible, New York: Oxford Univ Press, 1993, p. 37. ↩
- Archaeology and the Bible, Edwin Yamauchi. The Oxford Companion to the Bible, p. 53. Also Hall and Lloyd, p. 153. ↩
- See the arguments of Rabbi Akiba in the Mishnah “Yadaim.” ↩
- Martin Luther argued that the historian Josephus did not recognize the seven books, but this is not true. He did recognize the book of Judith, something that the brethren do not always mention in their arguments against the seven books. Moreover, Josephus was not a Christian, to be relied upon as a norm. ↩
- Another book, whose author is anonymous, cites the year 1547 as the date on which the Church added the seven books. Un católico Investiga el Evangelio y Halla la Verdad de la Vida, (p. 8). But in any case it is after Luther. This same book contradicts itself by saying that the Church did not have the seven books in its Bible until the 16th century, while at the same time saying that the seven books were included in the Vulgate Bible of Saint Jerome (of the 4th century). Being in Latin, the language of the Church, in the West this Bible was used until the present century. ↩
- Canonicity by James Turro and Raymond Brown in Comentario Bíblico San Jerónimo, Ediciones Cristiandad, 1972, 1990, p. 70. ↩
