>> I think the Jews at Jamnia rejected the Septuagint primarily because it was GREEK, and the Jews in post-revolt mode were EXTREMELY bigoted and racist, and rejected anything that wasn't Hebrew as unacceptable (even though the Jews themselves didn't actually SPEAK Hebrew themselves anymore, and hadn't for centuries). <<
That was one Protestant argument which was shot to hell when the Dead Sea scrolls unearthed HEBREW versions of all but one book of the Deuterocanonicals.
But, yes, Luther did move to remove the Deuterocanonicals (as well as the "Catholic Letters" of Revelations, 1-2-3 Petr, 1-2 John, James, and Hebrews*) after losing an argument in which it was proven to him that the doctrines he most hated were biblical. Luther also struck portions of Daniel (the hymn in the furnace was seen as a prophetic allusion to purgatory.)
(*Luther's controversy over these is nothing at all to do with the label, "Catholic letters." The label simply refers to the fact that they were not addressed to a specific person or church.)
That is a great point, Dangus. You don't see it come up very often, if at all, in discussions of the Deuterocanonicals.
"That was one Protestant argument which was shot to hell when the Dead Sea scrolls unearthed HEBREW versions of all but one book of the Deuterocanonicals."
I wasn't really making a Protestant argument, or trying to argue.
There were indeed Dead Sea Scrolls, from the Essenes, which were Hebrew versions of the Deuterocanonicals. In the case of the books of the Maccabees, those were probably a case of retrotranslation of the Greek into Hebrew.
And this doesn't matter. The originals of several of the Deuterocanonicals were inspired by God to Greek speakers. There is nothing "holy" about Hebrew, or Greek or English for that matter. A Jewish scripture isn't "holier" because it was written in Greek as opposed to Hebrew. Nobody spoke Hebrew by the time of the Maccabbees for God to be there inspiring them in Hebrew. What gives a writing authority or not is whether or not it was inspired by God, not the language it was inspired in. God has inspired Church Councils and saints over the years, and he has done so in many, many languages. Hebrew isn't holy. It's old.
The Jews of the Hellenistic and Roman period didn't see it that way. They saw their culture itself as being holy and "Chosen". This was the problem of the Pharisees - not simply that some of them were hypocrites; they WEREN'T all hypocrites.
Consider Saul of Tarsus, the Pharisee, before his conversion. He hated Christians and pursued them up and down the Levant, but there is no indication that he was a hypocrite. He really BELIEVED Christians were b;lasphemers worshipping a false god, and therefore believed that Christians deserved to die the death prescribed by the Bible for blasphemers. He was WRONG, but he was no hypocrite. Other Pharisees' (and Sadduccees', and Essenes') problem wasn't just that they hated the Christian "blasphemy". It was that they worshipped Jewish CULTURE ITSELF as being holy, chosen and divine. Thus, anything that wasn't JEWISH, specifically, anything tainted with the Goy, was bad, wrong, infected with evil. Thus the Essenes desire to translate even later works, from ages when nobody actually spoke Hebrew, into Hebrew: Hebrew, according to them, was the language of holiness and racial purity.
There certainly ARE Hebrew texts of the Deuterocanonica, but they are probably translations of original Greek texts. To a Christian, that the texts were in Greek originally, as opposed to Hebrew, matters not a jot. Hebrew is not holy. But to the JEWS, their CULTURE ITSELF, including its ancient (and dead) language WAS holy. That was THEIR pretention. They lived according to that prejudice and translated texts INTO Hebrew, because foreign was BAD, while Hebrew was good.
Naturally, the whole attitude of the ancient Jews concerning the holiness of Hebrew is simply bigoted stupidity, and we need not argue against it or for it.
The Protestant issue was a bit different. THEIR pretention was what was seen above in the posts immediately preceding yours: that Catholic traditions are, by the fact that they are traditions, evil. After all, didn't Jesus condemn traditions as the works of men?
No, Jesus did not condemn traditions. He condemned the JEWISH tradition of elevating JEWISH tradition over HIS OWN authority, as Son of God. And he condemned his Jewish adversaries for asserting their traditions AS the law of God when they were not.
The key example of that was the law of divorce, which the Torah allows, but which Jesus said was a Jewish tradition contrary to the law of God. Note that by saying this, Jesus says that portions of the Bible itself are not inspired by God, but are Jewish traditions!
This is not a condemnation of traditions in general. It's explicitly directed at something that the Jewish authorities and scribes were doing at his time.
Protestants extend this accusation to apply to Catholic tradition in all aspects where Catholic tradition differs from Protestant tradition. Protestants, of course, would deny that their method of interpreting the Bible IS tradition, but of course it is.
Really, what this is about is people wanting to fight with each other, and it's not very edifying.
The language of the original texts is not very relavent considering we read it all in English. I am generally willing, in discussing Christianity with Evangelical Protestants, to use the King James Version of 1611, because the language of the translation is alright. The Protestant fathers of that age did not purposely mistranslate anything.
If using anything other than the KJV presents a stumbling block to Protestant-Catholic dialogue, the original KJV is fine (note that the original KJV contains the Deuterocanonica.
And for that matter, because the Deuterocanonica don't contain much (the matter in 2 Maccabbees excepted) that is really contested between Catholics and Protestants, there isn't a whole lot of reason to contend over these books.
If we just drill straight into Biblical substance that Protestants recognize, Catholicism still emerges as the religion of God, that is unless one takes the crucial step of Protestant religion and asserts that PAUL is the final authority in any conflict between biblical texts.