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“Welcome to Free Republic! Free Republic is the premier online gathering place for independent, grass- roots conservatism on the web. We’re working to roll back decades of governmental largesse, to root out political fraud and corruption, and to champion causes which further conservatism in America. And we always have fun doing it. Hoo-yah! have fun doing it. Hoo-yah!”

Posts like this one are disrespectful, hurtfull, and arrogant.

Just show a little respect please. We are not all Catholic here and I have my own opinion of your religion which I choose to not post.

To say that the Orthodox do not consider the apocrypha to be canonical is not accurate. The Orthodox consider the Greek Septuagint to be their “benchmark” Old Testament; it is only that this was assumed from the beginning of the Church, so it was not enshrined in a canon. It is true that the Orthodox understand various portions of Scripture to have different levels of importance, but they see both the Greek Septuagint and the Received Text of the New Testament as Divinely inspired. The Apocryphal books are not used Liturgically in the Orthodox Church, but then neither is the book of Revelation, which is directly a part of the Orthodox canonical scripture.

On the other hand, I don't think it is fair to state that the Masoretic text of the Old Testament (The “Hebrew” OT) was developed solely out of antagonism towards the young Christian Church. There was also a strong desire to preserve Jewish culture at that time (remember that the Temple had been destroyed in 69-70AD). One strong influence in the selection of books for the Masoretic text was that they had been written originally in Hebrew. This automatically eliminated many of the more recent writings, which were originally in Greek.

One telling comparison between the two is in their rendition of the prophet Isaiah. The Masoretic text states that “a young woman” will conceive, while the Septuagint says “a virgin” (parthena) will conceive. Quite a difference!

Although I am Orthodox, I have absolutely no problem with Roman Catholic postings to this site, or with Protestant ones. We should all be willing to accept other points of view. Reading them is always optional. Let us remember that angry, ad hominem attacks are traditional liberal refuges, not of conservatives.