“If you think i have erred then produce the evidence, as i want to know, and failing that or in addition, be sure to note where a Catholic is teaching contrary to your church.”
Your assertion that there were no 66 book bibles produced before the 16th century is false.
Codex Amitianis was produced in the 7th century, and we still have it today. So there is actually extant evidence that your assertion is false. Vulgates were published as early as the early 5th century, although we no longer have any from that period.
“If you think i have erred then produce the evidence, as i want to know, and failing that or in addition, be sure to note where a Catholic is teaching contrary to your church.”
The issue was i was misrepresenting what is taught within Roman Catholicism, which is not the case.
Your assertion that there were no 66 book bibles produced before the 16th century is false.
Codex Amitianis was produced in the 7th century, and we still have it today. So there is actually extant evidence that your assertion is false. Vulgates were published as early as the early 5th century, although we no longer have any from that period.
Apparently you are not reading this exchange carefully, as that there were no 66 book bible produced before the 16th century was not my assertion, but that of my opponent. Perhaps you are arguing against there being no Bibles produced with the apocrypha before the 16th century, but which is not what i claimed. In addition, historically, what a Bible contains and what the canon consists are not always the same thing.
My position is that the 66 book bible corresponds to the Hebrew Palestinian canon and the ancient 27 book canon, but you need to read my previous responses more fully before jumping in here.
Protocanonical (protos, "first") is a conventional word denoting those sacred writings which have been always received by Christendom without dispute. The protocanonical books of the Old Testament correspond with those of the Bible of the Hebrews, and the Old Testament as received by Protestants. (Catholic Encyclopedia>Canon of the Old Testament; http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03267a.htm)
I do comment on the Latin Vulgate (first produced in the 4th century) in post #940, to which should be added,
Amiatinus is the earliest existent copy of a complete Vulgate, but is from the 8th century, and as it is missing Baruch, it is still not identical to that of Trent, while as the Catholic Encyclopedia (Codex Amiatinus) notes, it also contains the Prologus Galeatus of Jerome and his prefaces to individual books, of which it states,
In his famous "Prologus Galeatus", or Preface to his translation of Samuel and Kings, he declares that everything not Hebrew should be classed with the apocrypha, and explicitly says that Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Tobias, and Judith are not on the Canon. These books, he adds, are read in the churches for the edification of the people, and not for the confirmation of revealed doctrine...
to which it protests,
the inferior rank to which the deuteros were relegated by authorities like Origen, Athanasius, and Jerome, was due to too rigid a conception of canonicity, one demanding that a book, to be entitled to this supreme dignity, must be received by all, must have the sanction of Jewish antiquity, and must moreover be adapted not only to edification, but also to the "confirmation of the doctrine of the Church", to borrow Jerome's phrase...(http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03267a.htm)
Other Vulgate manuscripts included prologues that clearly identified certain books of the Vulgate Old Testament as apocryphal or non-canonical (Prologues of Saint Jerome, Latin text )
“At the end of the fourth century Pope Damasus commissioned Jerome, the most learned biblical scholar of his day, to prepare a standard Latin version of the Scriptures (the Latin Vulgate). In the Old Testament Jerome followed the Hebrew canon and by means of prefaces called the reader's attention to the separate category of the apocryphal books. Subsequent copyists of the Latin Bible, however, were not always careful to transmit Jerome's prefaces, and during the medieval period the Western Church generally regarded these books as part of the holy Scriptures.” — Introductory material to the appendix of the Vulgata Clementina, text in Latin
Luther produced his own Bible in 1534 but following ancient precedent he placed the non-Hebrew books into a section called the Apocrypha, and likewise questioned some others. The page to see on Luther as regards his Bible is here Trent also departed from Carthage by including Baruch (it also included the Prayer of Manasseh in an appendix to the Vulgate).
Nor did Trent settle the question as to which version of the varying Vulgate editions it affirmed, thus requiring a thorough revision, as there was no single authoritative edition at that time, and resulting in the embarrassing Sistine Vulgate. Correction of its many errors resulted in the first edition of the Clementine Vulgate (official version till 1979) which was presented as a Sixtine edition (with a preface in which Bellarmine charitably attributed the problem of the previous version to being that of copyist errors, rather than being the fault of Sixtus). In 1592, Pope Clement VIII published this revised edition of the Vulgate, referred to as the Sixto-Clementine Vulgate. He moved three books, 3 and 4 Esdras and the Prayer of Manasses (commonly found in medieval MSS of the Vulgate, immediately after 2Chronicles, and not found in the canon of the Council of Trent) from the Old Testament into an appendix "lest they utterly perish" (ne prorsus interirent). — (http://sacredbible.org/vulgate1861/scans/817-Apocrypha.jpg)
And then there is the confusing and contentious issue of non-canonical Second Esdras (there are two by that name) also known as 3rd (or Esdras A) or 4th Esdras (as in the Vulgate), also called Apocalypse of Ezra.
But that there was no indisputable canon before Trent is the main issue.
In the Latin Church, all through the Middle Ages [5th century to the 15th century] we find evidence of hesitation about the character of the deuterocanonicals. There is a current friendly to them, another one distinctly unfavourable to their authority and sacredness, while wavering between the two are a number of writers whose veneration for these books is tempered by some perplexity as to their exact standing, and among those we note St. Thomas Aquinas. Few are found to unequivocally acknowledge their canonicity. The prevailing attitude of Western medieval authors is substantially that of the Greek Fathers. The chief cause of this phenomenon in the West is to be sought in the influence, direct and indirect, of St. Jerome's depreciating Prologus. (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03267a.htm)
For more on that, and the dissent by Roman Catholic scholars as regards the extra books right into Trent, see my previously referenced page here. And here for a page against the inclusion of the apocrypha
And again if you find before arguing the same things, see my previous responses:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/religion/2811552/posts?page=1867#1867
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/religion/2811552/posts?page=2297#2297
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/religion/2811552/posts?page=2373#2373
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/religion/2811552/posts?page=2866#2866
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/religion/2811552/posts?page=2935#2935
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/religion/2891087/posts?page=906#906
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/religion/2891087/posts?page=940#940
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/religion/2891087/posts?page=965#965
