Obviously, New Testament quotation cannot be a criteria of exclusion for canonicity of a particular Old Testament book. This weeks podcast we discuss King David’s desire to give to the Lord. Maybe people should get a Byzantine or Oriental Orthodox Bible instead to get “ALL of the Scriptures.” , The issue of the Eastern Orthodox canon is a complicated one, namely because there isn’t a singularly agreed upon canon among them. Luther then moved seven books from the Old Testament out of what he considered the authorized canon, and into a separate section he called “apocrypha” meaning “disputed.” He also took chapters out of Esther and Daniel and moved them into this same apocrypha section. You have reached the end of this Article Preview To continue reading, subscribe now. Jerome and Augustine are saints, but like every saint, they are only human, so their different conclusions should not scandalize us. [public domain / Wikipedia ] The Old Testament in Catholic Bibles contains seven more books … His aversion toward the doctrine of Purgatory leaves us with a pretty obvious clue. The fact is, the apostles and bishops of the early Church believed BOTH CANONS were authoritative — both the Hebrew/Aramaic Tanakh (Protocanon), and the Greek Septuagint (Deuterocanon). There is no difference at all. Rejection of the Christian claim of Jesus of Nazareth as the promised Messiah. Every Christian, regardless if Catholic or Protestant, deserves access to ALL of the Scriptures. That’s how the Protestant Old Testament was shortened. In fact, these same Ethiopian Jews still use the forty-six (46) book Septuagint (Deuterocanon) as their Bible to this very day. Books of the Bible were originally recorded in Aramaic, and mostly Greek and Hebrew, depending on their authorship. Catholics have 73 books of the Bible; Protestants have 66. The short answer is simply this. The Greek Septuagint Bible contained the deuterocanonical books. For starters, let’s all get on the same page. The Catholic Bible contains a total of 73 books, 46 in the Old Testament (Protestant Bibles have 39) and 27 in the New Testament (the same as Protestant Bibles). Historically, you can see the Catholic Church was neither trying to “pull a fast one” on Christians just to back-up an arbitrary theology, nor is there any historical sentiment that the deuterocanonical books are in some way not salutary to read. I assert that all of the scholarly academic opinions in the world do not justify removing books from the Old Testament that all Christians had used for fifteen centuries! In defense of the Catholic canon, St. Augustine wrote On Christian Doctrine, which compares all the (pre-Reformation) churches, especially those known to be established by the apostles, and found the books used there. Response: The Catholic Bible contains all the books that have traditionally been accepted by … On behalf of our ancestors before us, you’re welcome for the Church’s part in preserving and passing down Sacred Scripture through Sacred Tradition, having councils seeking the Holy Spirit’s will in the canon, and providing us a solid canon with faith and logic to back it up. Catholics have 73 books of the Bible; Protestants have 66. Chronologically, Protestants took books out, not Catholics putting books in. For Catholics and Protestants, the New Testament is the same, but Catholics have seven more books in the Old Testament: Tobit, Judith, 1 and 2 Maccabees, Wisdom, Ben Sira, and Baruch. Next Why Doesn’t God Save Everyone? Crack open the history books and start reading. Apparently, it was the early Church fathers who heavily influenced what books would be in the Bible and what books would be rejected. Prior to Martin Luther (16th century), all Christians used the longer forty-six book Old Testament. Post was not sent - check your email addresses! Don’t believe me? People twist Scripture for their own agenda too often, but this is not just in canon-picking but also in the various translations and interpretations of Sacred Scripture. There are many English Bible versions on the market today. However, to other Christians, the issue of the Biblical canon is of key importance when it comes to their understanding of the Catholic Church. Lastly, we close out talking about another podcast to watch out for in the coming months from us here at The Wayfinder Network. They do make mistakes sometimes. The real question is, who has the authority to determine the Christian canon? However, recent discoveries of the Dead Sea Scrolls in Qumran reveal some of the seven books from the Deuterocanon were originally written in Hebrew. It is true that there are some additional books (such as 3 & 4 Maccabees) which are commonly (but not necessarily formally) found in modern, published Eastern Orthodox Old Testaments. It consisted of forty-six (46) books, and translated the commonly accepted meaning of the text as well as the text itself. Protestant Bibles have only 39 books in the Old Testament, however, while Catholic Bibles have 46. Thus, before Luther, there was a widespread consensus among the Christians of both east and west about the status of the collection found in the Vulgate. They can cite a whole host of academic reasons why they shouldn’t use the longer Greek Septuagint (Deuterocanon) as their Christian Old Testament, but they can’t cite a single apostolic authority that agrees with them. This is my first message I hope you can help me with this : My husband is Catholic and he has the Catholic Bible but he could not answer this question I have been reading it and I have a question. Protestants have shorter Old Testaments because the leaders of the Protestant Reformation removed books from the Old Testament. The term was applied to books taught only to those who were considered wise or learned. The first Protestant to remove books from the Old Testament canon was none other than Martin Luther, the “father” of the Reformation himself. They themselves are not infallible, and that is why we have a whole Church community to guide us to God. We use it at the beginning and end of…. Or does that authority belong to the apostles and the bishops of the early Church? Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. Protestants) were hiding underground. That’s it! Typo? Watch Later Remove Cinema Mode. It didn’t take but a couple history books to learn that much of what I believed as “solid doctrine” will riddled with holes. So that was the canon of Scripture that came to be the Christian Old Testament. However, this ignores the historical fact that, in the first century AD, Jews were in disagreement about the size of the Jewish canon depending on what party they belonged to. Don’t you feel like you’re missing something, especially considering the history and theology? We can speculate about Martin Luther’s reasons. This is because Roman Catholics have 7 additional books in their Old Testament: Tobit, Judith, 1-2 Maccabees, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, and Baruch. BQSA Can a Christian Be Perfect? Try your local Christian bookstore first, but if you can’t find one there, let them know that you might have to shop online if they can’t get one for you. The contents of this blog are not necessarily the opinions of any Catholic parish, diocese, jurisdiction, priest, bishop, cardinal, pope or King Jesus himself. Catholic-Link YouTube Channel Subscribers Needed! If, however, you just can’t wait, you can find excellent English translations of COMPLETE Bibles here, here, here and here. The word apocrypha comes from Greek and originally meant "hidden" or "esoteric." Why do Catholics have more books in their Bible? The truth is the truth, so we might as well just face it. The purpose of this Greek translated Deuterocanon, was the same purpose that all translations serve — to make the text more available to a larger number of people. The following list is the 7 books that the Catholics include that the Protestants do not. I think that’s a fair accommodation. Roman Catholic Bibles have 73 books rather than 66. The Church uses both faith and reason, in both Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition, which have preserved and guided us to stable, absolute truths throughout the centuries. Greek was, after all, the language of law and commerce at the time, especially in the Eastern half of the Roman Empire. Suffice it to say, late first-century Judaism was in chaos. So the Protestants compiled a version of the Bible that lacked the deuterocanonicals, while the Catholic Church explicitly affirmed their status as sacred scripture at the Council of Trent. It is no publisher’s business to determine which books some Christians should, or should not, read by excluding them from their printed Bibles. Why do Catholic Bibles have a longer Old Testament than Protestant Bibles? – uCatholic 6 Saints Who Could Fly – Philip Kosloski, Aleteia Take a Virtual Tour of […] Even some of the academic reasons they cite implode after closer examination. While all 66 books found in Protestant Bibles are also found in the Catholic Bible, the Catholic Bible also contains other books, and additions to books. … How about other objections to the Catholic canon, like those commonly used by some preachers to lead people to distrust the Catholic canon? By what authority do you base your Old Testament canon? Jesus however, did not look down upon them, and considered them just as much his people as any local Aramaic-speaking Jew (John 10:16). The Pharisees looked down upon Greek-speaking Jews, and used the reference “Hellenist” in a rather derogatory way toward them. : A Guide to Evangelical Questions about the Catholic Church, Catholics and Evangelicals Together in the 21st Century, http://www.catholicbridge.com/orthodox/why-orthodox-bible-is-different-from-catholic.php, Follow Complete Christianity on WordPress.com. Why do Catholic Bibles have a longer Old Testament than Protestant Bibles? However, that doesn’t make it true. The result is that these versions of the Bible have more Old Testament books than most Protestant versions. Do NOT follow this link or you will be banned from the site! The Catholic bible has 73 books, the Protestant only 66. So why does the Catholic Bible have 73 books, while the Protestant Bible has only 66 books? Broken link? My best advice on how to respond when asked why did Catholics add books to the Bible is to ask a more accurate question: Why don’t all Christians have them? Let’s just get that straight right away. Permission to copy and redistribute can be obtained simply by contacting the blogger. Why?" The Protestant Reformers took them out. The longer Old Testament script is simply to “cover all the bases” which isn’t a bad thing at all, but in the West, Rome likes to settle these issues definitively. As Fr. If it is, we’ve all got some editing to do, because every Protestant has these books in his/her Bible. For more on this topic, see Christian History Issue 43: How We Got Our Bible. Catholic and Protestant Bibles both include 27 books in the New Testament. Unfortunately, many Christians uncritically accept the lie that the Catholic Church added 7 books, which doesn’t square with the evidence. View all posts by Shane Schaetzel, Thank you for this post. Why does the Catholic Bible have more books than the Protestant Bible? Did Catholics 'add' seven extra books to the Bible or did Protestants remove them? I write this not only in defense of the Catholic position on the length of the Old Testament canon, but also in genuine concern for my Protestant brethren in Christ, many who have been denied seven books from the Old Testament and additional chapters of Esther and Daniel. We have clear historical evidence of Septuagint (Deuterocanon) books not only written in Hebrew, but also quoted as Scripture in early Jewish writings. We can be confident that the books in the bible, as ratified by the Catholic Church, are truly inspired by the Holy Spirit for our salvation. Only the apostles and bishops of the early Church had the authority to determine the Christian Old Testament canon, and the modern Catholic Church has authoritatively affirmed this in the Council of Trent (AD 1545-1564) by continuing to use the same Septuagint (Deuterocanon) the apostles preached from in their sermons and quoted from in their writings. which consisted roughly of the thirty-nine (39) books Western Jews use today, as well as what we see in the Protestant Old Testament. Well actually, when you know the history, it’s a bit more complicated than that. At that council, and likewise at previous councils before 1054,there was no dissent regarding the Vulgate selection of books still used by the Catholic Church now and also already at the time of St. Jerome. So the typical Bibles used by Jews in Palestine were not sufficient. St. Jerome was asked to translate the Christian Bible into Latin, and – knowing Hebrew – he chose to translate from the Hebrew Bible, which by that time excluded the deuterocanonical books, so Jerome left them out of his translation. Update : "kashikoi" those books in the catholic bible were removed cause a lot of them were just stories told by people of those days lik ethe book of Tobit and Judith. Bible means “book,” and it is a collection of books from different lands, authors, languages and historical periods, a text by which to pass on our faith. Meanwhile the Pharisee Party, consisting of mostly rabbis, was by far the largest and most influential Jewish party in first century Palestine. Jesus was a Jew who spoke Aramaic and lived in Palestine, but his ministry was not limited to Palestinian Jews alone. The books in the Roman Catholic Bible not included in most Protestant Bibles are called the books of the Apocrypha. Anti-Catholics would have you to read certain historical tracts of booklets that they have prepared for you in advance. Catholic-Link is a Catholic portal full of resources for the New Evangelization. Why the Catholic Bible has More Books. All in all, well before the Council of Trent, the Church was reviewing and defending the canon it used based on apostolic tradition and the scholarly inquiries of leaders. Catholic Old Testaments include 1st and 2nd Maccabees , Baruch , Tobit , Judith , The Wisdom of Solomon , Sirach (Ecclesiasticus), additions to Esther, and the stories of Susanna and Bel and the Dragon which are included in Daniel. It was called the Septuagint (meaning “seventy” in reference to the alleged seventy rabbinical elders who translated it). The church was able to discern which of the books were indeed inspired by God, and which did not belong in the Bible, so how did they know which ones belonged and which ones didn’t? It would be impossible for a human to record—or even to know as a finite being—everything about an infinite God. I say go down to your nearest library, and find some books on the development of the Christian canon of Scripture. Why does the Catholic Bible have a different number of books than the Protestant or King James version of the Bible. Not me! The last link is the Original 1611 King James Version. Today, St. Jerome’s Vulgate does include them. My question is, if the Septuagint (Deuterocanon) was good enough for the apostles and early Church, with its additional seven books and all, then why is it not good enough for us today? Each Jewish “Bible” depended on what kind of Jewish persuasion we are talking about. I can say that with confidence because I know my history, and I know history will back up what I’m saying. There is something else about this Septuagint (Deuterocanon) that was also unique. I’m not going to direct you to certain booklets or tracts. 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