Well this should be a fun thread once the short-canon protestants show up.
Indeed. This might have been a better thread if the more polemical parts of the article (and there are only a few) had been edited out before posting. The thread would then have qualified for "caucus" status, and a calm, informational discussion could have ensued for the benefit of those Catholics and Orthodox for whom the Deuteros are inherently not problematic. As it is, this is likely to develop into the usual three-ring-circus that winds-up getting hijacked into one of several irrelevant alleyways.
That's too bad. Our holy Scriptures will be dragged through the polemical swamp yet again, and the "Christian example" that we give to the many lurking non-Christians and honest seekers out there will be only too evident in ways that all of us "Christians," Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant, surely do not intend to convey.
Here's a Protestant's thought...
By the 4th century, a number of heterodox sects were peddling false gospels and epistles that they claimed were authentic. In order to prevent the faithful from being tricked and confused, the church, in council, set the body of Scripture. Thus what we now call the New Testament was created. The councils never addressed what was "Old Testament Canon" because there was no desperate need to do so.
Fast forward to the 16th century.
The invention of the printing press and the desire to better educate the flock in matters of the faith led the Protestants to the novel idea of putting a copy of the Scriptures in every church (many paid for this idea with their lives). This led to a problem. The New Testament was set, but the Old Testament was not. Most scholars used the Septuagint when reading and studying the Old Testament. In fact, when Christ quotes the OT in the Gospels, the wording is out of the Septuagint. BUT, when St Jerome assembled the Vulgate, he included what we now call the deuterocanonical books or apocrypha. The books were also used by other saints (although I do not believe St John of Damascus mentioned them in "Exposition of the Orthodox Faith").
When Martin Luther translated the Old and New Testaments into German, he addressed the "deuterocanonical problem" by translating them as well and including them in a third section. The Anglicans did the same. To Anglican and Lutheran theologians, the Apocrypha contains good and wholesome readings (some of which are in the lectionary) but does not tell us anythign that isn't found elsewhere. In another words, they're redundant (this was the rationale used at Carthage for not including I Clement, II Clement and the Shepherd of Hermas in the New Testament). This approach is spelled out in the 39 Articles of Religion.
It was the more radical of the Reformers- Calvinists and Anabaptists- rejected the Apocrypha outright because it conflicted with their view of predestination.
It seems ironic to me that the basis for Hanukah (in Maccabees) is not in the Jewish recognized Scripture.