[Conservative til I die]

Christ did not leave us a Bible. He left us a living Church. I thought the RCC accepted the Bible as the Word of God

Of course we do. Hell, we wrote the New Testament, compiled it, codified it, and canonized it. You Protestants just took it and tore 7 books right out of it. Thankfully someone stopped Martin Luther before he tore Revelations and some of the Epistles out too.

[winstonchurchill]

Hell, we wrote the New Testament, compiled it, codified it, and canonized it. You Protestants just took it and tore 7 books right out of it. Thankfully someone stopped Martin Luther before he tore Revelations and some of the Epistles out too.

I know Biblical literacy is not highly valued within the RCC, but the last book of the Bible is named "Revelation" (singular), not "Revelations" (plural). Sorry about that.

Your claim that the RCC "wrote the New Testament" is amusing. Is no arrogance too much? Did the RCC, like the Soviet Union of old, also invent the telephone and the telegraph? Since Al Gore is gone from the national stage, you could probably also claim that the RCC invented the Internet. That would fool the masses, wouldn't it?

Now a few facts.

Even under the RCC's view, the apocryphal books were never in the NT (the RCC puts them in the OT. The reason that when the Council of Trent added them -- 29 years AFTER the Reformation had begun -- they called them "deuterocanonicals" is because they were never part of the Jewish OT. [BTW, the RCC's Council of Trent also uncritically picked up (and made mandatory on RCC adherents) three of the least manuscript-supported portions of the NT (including the disputed ending of Mark and the pericope of John). As ever, they were politicians, not scholars.]

Because Jerome translated his Bible from the intervening Greek translation of the Septuagint, not the original Hebrew manuscripts, he inadvertently picked up the deuteros which the Septuagint translation had included. [Although Jesus and the NT writers occasionally quoted from the Septuagint and quoted from the Hebrew version of most of the OT books, neither Jesus nor the writers ever quoted from any of the deuteros.] When, as a result of the Reformation, the RCC found itself scurrying to try to defend its accretionist doctrines for the first time in the marketplace of ideas (with millions of people reading the Bible for the first time as a result of Luther), the deuteros became important in trying to provide a basis for accretionist concepts like 'purgatory.'

So, even though the apocryphal books were not in the Hebrew canon, the Council of Trent added them to the RCC Bible for defensive reasons. In sum, Luther didn't 'rip them out' of the OT, he merely refused to follow the later RCC decision to add them. Just another evidence of RCC accretionism.