I'm pretty sure that St. Jerome's Vulgate had the same so-called "non canonical" books* in it that modern Catholic Bibles have. We have 73 books in ours, your truncated-by-Luther version has 66, and 73 minus 66 is still 7, not 18, even under new math.
*Protestants have no grounds on which to judge the canonicity of a single book in the Bible, so for a Protestant to call anything "non canonical" is for him to engage in "non sense". The very word "canon" means "rule," and if all of your rules are supposed to come from the Bible, that leaves you no source for a rule by which to judge the Bible.
The 1452AD The Gutenberg Bible was a reproduction of the Jerome Latin Vulgate, and it had 18 apocrypha books listed before Pope Sixtus made his Bible, and then a little later the Sixtus-Clementine removed all but 7 of them, and 5 additions, and they discarded 6 that had been in it.
These were not in Jerome’s Bible, and he'd have rolled over in his grave if he had known what they did to his Bible.
JH :)
Your right, Protestants, or non-Catholics have no right to judge the Catholic Churches decision on which books they wanted in their Bible. On the other hand the Catholic Church has no right to judge them for trusting the Hebrew Scripture, since it was the Jews who were given the responsibility for the oracles of God.
How could God find fault with that decision?
The term ”canonical scripture” had meant those books that were read and accepted as Gods inspired words to Israel for hundreds of years. Christians were given the New Testament for their inspired word of God. Why did the Catholic Church feel it had the right to mess with the Old Testament of the Jews?
Jerome refused to continue translating the Old Testament from the Greek LXX, because it had become so corrupted it couldn’t be used for proof text. Jerome understood the only pure translation was the Hebrew text, but then after all the work he put in to it, at his own expense, your Church corrupted it by adding seven extra deuteros and 4 additions that had never been approved for inclusion in the Bible.
The Greek Orthodox uses all 18 apocrypha books, you use 12, and we NC’s chose to use none of them for the same reason your Church threw out 6 that had originally been slipped into Jerome’s Bible after he died. It was because you didn’t believe they were inspired, and that’s also our belief about all of them.
All the problems these books have caused over the years, for your Church, and with those who dissented, and there isn’t one thing in any of them that have anything to do with our Salvation. And on top of that they were in the Old Testament. Go figure. :)
The reason I defend my belief is in hopes of getting through to Catholics, that you have no monopoly on God, or the Bible, or on truth. Christ is the living head, and we are all members of His body, and we all need each other to function properly.
JH :)