Protecting God’s Word From “Bible Christians”

“Stand firm and hold fast to the traditions that you were taught,
either by an oral statement or by a letter of ours.”
~ St. Paul to the Thessalonians

A former student of mine is thinking of becoming a Catholic, and she had a question for me. “I don’t understand the deuterocanonical books,” she ventured. “If the Catholic faith is supposed to be a fulfillment of the Jewish faith, why do Catholics accept those books and the Jews don’t?” She’d done her homework, and was troubled that the seven books and other writings of the deuterocanon had been preserved only in Greek instead of Hebrew like the rest of the Jewish scriptures—which is part of the reason why they were classified, even by Catholics, as a “second” (deutero) canon.

My student went on. “I’m just struggling because there are a lot of references to those books in Church doctrine, but they aren’t considered inspired Scripture. Why did Luther feel those books needed to be taken out?” she asked. “And why are Protestants so against them?”

The short answer sounds petty and mean, but it’s true nonetheless: Luther jettisoned those “extra” Old Testament books—Tobit, Sirach, 1 and 2 Maccabees, and the like—because they were inconvenient. The Apocrypha (or, “false writings”), as they came to be known, supported pesky Catholic doctrines that Luther and other reformers wanted to suppress—praying for the dead, for instance, and the intercession of the saints. Here’s John Calvin on the subject:

Add to this, that they provide themselves with new supports when they give full authority to the Apocryphal books. Out of the second of the Maccabees they will prove Purgatory and the worship of saints; out of Tobit satisfactions, exorcisms, and what not. From Ecclesiasticus they will borrow not a little. For from whence could they better draw their dregs?

However, the deuterocanonical literature was (and is) prominent in the liturgy and very familiar to that first generation of Protestant converts, so Luther and company couldn’t very well ignore it altogether. Consequently, those seven “apocryphal” books, along with the Greek portions of Esther and Daniel, were relegated to an appendix in early Protestant translations of the Bible.

Eventually, in the nineteenth century sometime, many Protestant Bible publishers starting dropping the appendix altogether, and the modern translations used by most evangelicals today don’t even reference the Apocrypha at all. Thus, the myth is perpetuated that nefarious popes and bishops have gotten away with brazenly foisting a bunch of bogus scripture on the ignorant Catholic masses.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

To begin with, it was Luther and Calvin and the other reformers who did all the foisting. The Old Testament that Christians had been using for 1,500 years had always included the so-called Apocrypha, and there was never a question as to its canonicity. Thus, by selectively editing and streamlining their own versions of the Bible according to their sectarian biases (including, in Luther’s case, both Testaments, Old and New), the reformers engaged in a theological con game. To make matters worse, they covered their tracks by pointing fingers at the Catholic Church for “adding” phony texts to the closed canon of Hebrew Sacred Writ.

In this sense, the reformers were anticipating what I call the Twain-Jefferson approach to canonical revisionism. It involves two simple steps.

Step one: Identify the parts of Scripture that you find especially onerous or troublesome. Generally, these will be straightforward biblical references that don’t quite square with the doctrine one is championing or the practices one has already embraced. Mark Twain is the modern herald of this half of creative textual reconstruction: “It ain’t those parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me,” Twain wrote, “it is the parts that I do understand.”

Step two: Yank the vexing parts out. It’s what Thomas Jefferson literally did when he took his own Bible and cut out the passages he found offensive—a kind of “scripture by subtraction” in the words of religion professor Stephen Prothero.

The reformers justified their Twain-Jefferson humbug by pointing to the canon of scriptures in use by European Jews during that time, and it did not include those extra Catholic books—case closed! Still unconvinced? Today’s defenders of the reformers’ biblical reshaping will then proceed to throw around historical precedent and references to the first-century Council of Jamnia, but it’s all really smoke and mirrors.

The fact is that the first-century Jewish canon was pretty mutable and there was no universal definitive list of sacred texts. On the other hand, it is indisputable that the version being used by Jesus and the Apostles during that time was the Septuagint—the Greek version of the Hebrew scriptures that included Luther’s rejected apocryphal books. SCORE: Deuterocanon – 1; Twain-Jefferson Revisionism – 0.

But this is all beside the point. It’s like an argument about creationism vs. evolution that gets funneled in the direction of whether dinosaurs could’ve been on board Noah’s Ark. Once you’re arguing about that, you’re no longer arguing about the bigger issue of the historicity of those early chapters in Genesis. The parallel red herring here is arguing over the content of the Christian Old Testament canon instead of considering the nature of authority itself and how it’s supposed to work in the Church, especially with regards to the Bible.

I mean, even if we can settle what the canon should include, we don’t have the autographs (original documents) from any biblical books anyway. While we affirm the Church’s teaching that all Scripture is inspired and teaches “solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings” (DV 11), there are no absolutes when it comes to the precise content of the Bible.

Can there be any doubt that this is by God’s design? Without the autographs, we are much less tempted to worship a static book instead of the One it reveals to us. Even so, it’s true that we are still encouraged to venerate the Scriptures, but we worship the incarnate Word—and we ought not confuse the two. John the Baptist said as much when he painstakingly distinguished between himself, the announcer, and the actual Christ he was announcing. The Catechism, quoting St. Bernard, offers a further helpful distinction:

The Christian faith is not a “religion of the book.” Christianity is the religion of the “Word” of God, a word which is “not a written and mute word, but the Word is incarnate and living.”

Anyway, with regards to authority and the canon of Scripture, Mark Shea couldn’t have put it more succinctly than his recent response to a request for a summary of why the deuterocanon should be included in the Bible:

Because the Church in union with Peter, the pillar and ground of the truth (1 Timothy 3:15) granted authority by Christ to loose and bind (Matthew 16:19), says they should be.

Right. The Church says so, and that’s good enough.

For it’s the Church who gives us the Scriptures. It’s the Church who preserves the Scriptures and tells us to turn to them. It’s the Church who bathes us in the Scriptures with the liturgy, day in and day out, constantly watering our souls with God’s Word. Isn’t it a bit bizarre to be challenging the Church with regards to which Scriptures she’s feeding us with? “No, mother,” the infant cries, “not breast milk! I want Ovaltine! Better yet, how about some Sprite!”

Think of it this way. My daughter Margaret and I share an intense devotion to Betty Smith’s remarkable novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. It’s a bittersweet family tale of impoverishment, tragedy, and perseverance, and we often remark how curious it is that Smith’s epic story receives so little attention.

I was rooting around the sale shelf at the public library one day, and I happened upon a paperback with the name “Betty Smith” on the spine. I took a closer look: Joy in the Morning, a 1963 novel of romance and the struggles of newlyweds, and it was indeed by the same Smith of Tree fame. I snatched it up for Meg.

The other day, Meg thanked me for the book, and asked me to be on the lookout for others by Smith. “It wasn’t nearly as good as Tree,” she said, “and I don’t expect any of her others to be as good. But I want to read everything she wrote because Tree was so wonderful.”

See, she wants to get to know Betty Smith because of what she encountered in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. And all we have are her books and other writings; Betty Smith herself is gone.

But Jesus isn’t like that. We have the book, yes, but we have more. We still have the Word himself.

Prior to their rejection of Christ the Jews read the Septuagint, that is, the Deuterocanon as well as the Hebrew canon.

Nope. As Josephus pointed out --- they did not accept the so-called deuterocanon, including the Maccabean works, and likely set the writings of Ben Sirach aside as something akin to early Targum -- not to be confused with Holy Writ itself.

Try A survey of the Old Testament in this review, pages 490, 492-494.

As found some synopsis of here http://www.coptic.net/articles/thestoryofthebible.txt the Jamnia idea, as to claims the Jews "ripped out" parts of THEIR OWN "bible" as it were simply because of Jesus and his followers;;

When the destruction of the Jerusalem and the Temple was imminent, a great rabbi belonging to the school of Hillel in the Pharisaic party--Yochanan ben Zakkai by name--obtained permission from the Romans to reconstitute the Sanhedrin on a purely spiritual basis at Jabneh (Jamnia), between Joppa and Azotus (Ashod). Some of the discussions which went on at Jamnia were handed down by oral transmission and ultimately recorded in the rabbinical writings. Their debates focussed on whether canonical recognition should be accorded to some books (Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs and Esther). The upshot of the Jamnia debates was the firm acknowledgement of all these books as Holy Scripture

with the footnote there leading to F.F. Bruce, as noted in "The Books and The Parchments", Rev. ed. Westwood: Fleming H. Revell Co., 1963.

The so-called deuterocanon wasn't even discussed there(!), as best can be pieced together. It was a non-issue. Coming so close to what Josephus had publicly outlined as to what Hebrew holy writ was to the Greco-Roman world in his own effort to explain the Hebrews to the rest of the world, it is simply impossible that the Hebrews would do such a thing.

Melito -- surviving through Eusebius found the Hebrews did not regard what would centuries later be called deuterocanon as part of their own Holy Writ -- drawing a line from Josephus (A.D. 70) to himself (A.D. 180 or thereabouts).

As daniel1212 made mention of -- Philo, writing just previous to time of Christ

Timothy was a native of Lystra and his father was Greek, a strong indication that his exposure to scripture was through Septuagint and therefore "all" in St. Paul's writing is a reference to the complete Catholic Canon, not to the Protestant redaction.

Mere assertions won't cut it, not in the face of the abundant evidence to the contrary -- some of which I just touched upon in the note to which you here gave reply, and in the notes of many others on this thread who again and again cite factual evidences to the contrary of your own suppositions, assumptions and opinions (as to alleged contents of Septuagint having been considered canonical to the Jews).

Which Septuagint version would be the "right" one? As I pointed out to another here already also -- the oldest pair of extant Greek Septuagint do NOT agree as to their contents -- and those two are from the late second century (or thereabouts).

In the lower potions of this #121 there is much well enough documented info that has a bearing upon the discussion here, in how it once again has turned to OT canon issues, with those as afar as I can tell be attempted to be used as some sort of sick leverage against those pesky "Protestants" -- whom you more or less condemn (possibly to hell?).

I'm not sure why all this goes on, other than it appearing to me a bunch of bluffing to try and hold onto the Romanist apologetics which are used in some quarters to 'bash' Protestant views in general -- thus giving succor and reassurance to [Roman] Catholics.

Well guess what?

It is BACKFIRING on you, big-time. At least for those who dig into the history of these sort of things and understand what they read -- and do not simply apply a "the Church is inerrant" type of thinking at each juncture where the going may get rough.

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WARNING!!!!

Simple yes or no will suffice.

... St. Augustine would NOT recognize what calls itself the Roman Catholic church today.

Mary is DEAD!