Protecting God’s Word From “Bible Christians”

“Stand firm and hold fast to the traditions that you were taught,
either by an oral statement or by a letter of ours.”
~ St. Paul to the Thessalonians

A former student of mine is thinking of becoming a Catholic, and she had a question for me. “I don’t understand the deuterocanonical books,” she ventured. “If the Catholic faith is supposed to be a fulfillment of the Jewish faith, why do Catholics accept those books and the Jews don’t?” She’d done her homework, and was troubled that the seven books and other writings of the deuterocanon had been preserved only in Greek instead of Hebrew like the rest of the Jewish scriptures—which is part of the reason why they were classified, even by Catholics, as a “second” (deutero) canon.

My student went on. “I’m just struggling because there are a lot of references to those books in Church doctrine, but they aren’t considered inspired Scripture. Why did Luther feel those books needed to be taken out?” she asked. “And why are Protestants so against them?”

The short answer sounds petty and mean, but it’s true nonetheless: Luther jettisoned those “extra” Old Testament books—Tobit, Sirach, 1 and 2 Maccabees, and the like—because they were inconvenient. The Apocrypha (or, “false writings”), as they came to be known, supported pesky Catholic doctrines that Luther and other reformers wanted to suppress—praying for the dead, for instance, and the intercession of the saints. Here’s John Calvin on the subject:

Add to this, that they provide themselves with new supports when they give full authority to the Apocryphal books. Out of the second of the Maccabees they will prove Purgatory and the worship of saints; out of Tobit satisfactions, exorcisms, and what not. From Ecclesiasticus they will borrow not a little. For from whence could they better draw their dregs?

However, the deuterocanonical literature was (and is) prominent in the liturgy and very familiar to that first generation of Protestant converts, so Luther and company couldn’t very well ignore it altogether. Consequently, those seven “apocryphal” books, along with the Greek portions of Esther and Daniel, were relegated to an appendix in early Protestant translations of the Bible.

Eventually, in the nineteenth century sometime, many Protestant Bible publishers starting dropping the appendix altogether, and the modern translations used by most evangelicals today don’t even reference the Apocrypha at all. Thus, the myth is perpetuated that nefarious popes and bishops have gotten away with brazenly foisting a bunch of bogus scripture on the ignorant Catholic masses.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

To begin with, it was Luther and Calvin and the other reformers who did all the foisting. The Old Testament that Christians had been using for 1,500 years had always included the so-called Apocrypha, and there was never a question as to its canonicity. Thus, by selectively editing and streamlining their own versions of the Bible according to their sectarian biases (including, in Luther’s case, both Testaments, Old and New), the reformers engaged in a theological con game. To make matters worse, they covered their tracks by pointing fingers at the Catholic Church for “adding” phony texts to the closed canon of Hebrew Sacred Writ.

In this sense, the reformers were anticipating what I call the Twain-Jefferson approach to canonical revisionism. It involves two simple steps.

Step one: Identify the parts of Scripture that you find especially onerous or troublesome. Generally, these will be straightforward biblical references that don’t quite square with the doctrine one is championing or the practices one has already embraced. Mark Twain is the modern herald of this half of creative textual reconstruction: “It ain’t those parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me,” Twain wrote, “it is the parts that I do understand.”

Step two: Yank the vexing parts out. It’s what Thomas Jefferson literally did when he took his own Bible and cut out the passages he found offensive—a kind of “scripture by subtraction” in the words of religion professor Stephen Prothero.

The reformers justified their Twain-Jefferson humbug by pointing to the canon of scriptures in use by European Jews during that time, and it did not include those extra Catholic books—case closed! Still unconvinced? Today’s defenders of the reformers’ biblical reshaping will then proceed to throw around historical precedent and references to the first-century Council of Jamnia, but it’s all really smoke and mirrors.

The fact is that the first-century Jewish canon was pretty mutable and there was no universal definitive list of sacred texts. On the other hand, it is indisputable that the version being used by Jesus and the Apostles during that time was the Septuagint—the Greek version of the Hebrew scriptures that included Luther’s rejected apocryphal books. SCORE: Deuterocanon – 1; Twain-Jefferson Revisionism – 0.

But this is all beside the point. It’s like an argument about creationism vs. evolution that gets funneled in the direction of whether dinosaurs could’ve been on board Noah’s Ark. Once you’re arguing about that, you’re no longer arguing about the bigger issue of the historicity of those early chapters in Genesis. The parallel red herring here is arguing over the content of the Christian Old Testament canon instead of considering the nature of authority itself and how it’s supposed to work in the Church, especially with regards to the Bible.

I mean, even if we can settle what the canon should include, we don’t have the autographs (original documents) from any biblical books anyway. While we affirm the Church’s teaching that all Scripture is inspired and teaches “solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings” (DV 11), there are no absolutes when it comes to the precise content of the Bible.

Can there be any doubt that this is by God’s design? Without the autographs, we are much less tempted to worship a static book instead of the One it reveals to us. Even so, it’s true that we are still encouraged to venerate the Scriptures, but we worship the incarnate Word—and we ought not confuse the two. John the Baptist said as much when he painstakingly distinguished between himself, the announcer, and the actual Christ he was announcing. The Catechism, quoting St. Bernard, offers a further helpful distinction:

The Christian faith is not a “religion of the book.” Christianity is the religion of the “Word” of God, a word which is “not a written and mute word, but the Word is incarnate and living.”

Anyway, with regards to authority and the canon of Scripture, Mark Shea couldn’t have put it more succinctly than his recent response to a request for a summary of why the deuterocanon should be included in the Bible:

Because the Church in union with Peter, the pillar and ground of the truth (1 Timothy 3:15) granted authority by Christ to loose and bind (Matthew 16:19), says they should be.

Right. The Church says so, and that’s good enough.

For it’s the Church who gives us the Scriptures. It’s the Church who preserves the Scriptures and tells us to turn to them. It’s the Church who bathes us in the Scriptures with the liturgy, day in and day out, constantly watering our souls with God’s Word. Isn’t it a bit bizarre to be challenging the Church with regards to which Scriptures she’s feeding us with? “No, mother,” the infant cries, “not breast milk! I want Ovaltine! Better yet, how about some Sprite!”

Think of it this way. My daughter Margaret and I share an intense devotion to Betty Smith’s remarkable novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. It’s a bittersweet family tale of impoverishment, tragedy, and perseverance, and we often remark how curious it is that Smith’s epic story receives so little attention.

I was rooting around the sale shelf at the public library one day, and I happened upon a paperback with the name “Betty Smith” on the spine. I took a closer look: Joy in the Morning, a 1963 novel of romance and the struggles of newlyweds, and it was indeed by the same Smith of Tree fame. I snatched it up for Meg.

The other day, Meg thanked me for the book, and asked me to be on the lookout for others by Smith. “It wasn’t nearly as good as Tree,” she said, “and I don’t expect any of her others to be as good. But I want to read everything she wrote because Tree was so wonderful.”

See, she wants to get to know Betty Smith because of what she encountered in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. And all we have are her books and other writings; Betty Smith herself is gone.

But Jesus isn’t like that. We have the book, yes, but we have more. We still have the Word himself.

Every single New Testament book was written in Greek, used the Greek name: Ἰησοῦς Iesous, Aramaic: ܝܫܘܥ‎ Isho; 7–2 BC to 30–33 AD) and referred to the Son of God, Almighty God incarnate.

It's even better than that. Iesous appears 223 times in the Greek Septuagint, which was written a couple of centuries before Christ, and by Jewish scholars who would certainly know they were invoking some sort of curse by that name. ES, I respect you, bro, but that claim is utter, unsupportable feldercarb.

Iesous is a Greek transliteration of Yeshua. Each phoneme in ιησους corresponds approximately to the phonemes (pronounceable chucks) of יהושׁע (Yehoshua) or as it sometimes appeared in contracted form later on, ישׁוע (Yeshua) . The transliteration, BTW, appears to have favored the contracted form.

But in transliterating there were two problems introduced by the Greek. First, that menorah-like character in the middle is a "shin," and it served as the diphthong "sh," as in "YeSHua." But Greek apparently has no equivalent, either in a single letter like shin, or in a diphthong. So they used the sigma, simple "s" sound, which was the most logical choice for transliteration purposes. Greek readers would not be expected to know the fine point of Hebrew pronunciation.

The other problem is that Greek is a highly inflected language, which means that most words take on a variety of endings depending on the grammatical context. The result is that the final sigma ("s") was added where grammatically appropriate, just to make the name fit the grammatical pattern of the Greek. Nothing nefarious to it. And the version with the final sigma is apparently what caught on as the name migrated into less inflected languages such as German and English.

The upshot is, when you say "Iesous," you are saying His name well enough, just with a heavy Greek accent. I am sure He has no problem recognizing it, especially because He Himself inspired the Greek text of Scripture by which we have received it.

Peace,

SR

I know for a fact that Paul did not include the Apocrypha

Fact? LOL.

For more than one reason. One, Paul was a Jew, a Pharisee, and knew the Hebrew Scriptures IN Hebrew probably better than any of the other Apostles - he didn't NEED to refer to the Greek. Second, he never mentions any of the Apocryphal books in his epistles either directly or as inspired like he did nearly every one of the 39 actual inspired OT books. He obviously WROTE his letters in Greek, but there is nothing to prove he only had the Septuagint to go by when speaking of the Law and the Prophets. Not to mention, there is NO proof that the Greek Septuagint EVER included the seven books (or the other EIGHT) in any section at all associated with the non-contended OT books that Jews and Christians hold as divinely inspired works. There is even a question of what books even WERE part of the Septuagint, seeing as it began only containing the Pentateuch (first five books of Moses) and went through development over centuries, its history is clouded with legend and myth.

I would think seeing that several of those Apocryphal books overtly testify to NOT being the word of God but thoughts of men, contain outright errors - which God would NOT have made, come right out and admit that there WERE no prophets of the Lord in that intertestament period, it should be more than adequate proof that the Apostle Paul, nor any of the others, would have thought of, much less relied upon such writings for anything.

It would be refreshing to see a Roman Catholic just come right out and admit what we already know that the ONLY reason they argue in favor of those seven books is because their magesterium at Trent declared them to be God-breathed Scripture so that they could settle the question of the canon in the face of the challenges of the Reformation. They're basically stuck with having to defend them - not all that different from many of the other invented dogmas over the years.

First off let me remind you --- that I had set an array of evidence against your contention, and a direct challenge to the central premise, with a set of (2) questions pertaining to that, presented in an either/or fashion, doing so while also stating that mere repetition of your own assertions would not suffice.

Now, days latter you bring reply --- in mere re-assertion of that which has just been well enough falsified.

I stand my my succinct statement.

After it was just blown to smithereens...utterly destroyed, shown to be the grossly ill-founded opinion that it is -- even after on this thread alone it has been shown how some portions of the "ill" of the foundations for it came about.

Those whom you would likely identify as of your own church, including Jerome, the very man Benedict XV is attributed [9.] to have spoken of as St. Jerome, the greatest Doctor of the Sacred Scriptures -- refutes you.

That leaves more than a few in support perhaps -- but those chiefly since the 16th Century -- with even there the very word itself deuterocanon indicating secondary status even as in the minds of some they took that to mean "equal to" all the rest of actual OT Scripture, cementing there the error of mistaking what had previously been regarded as "ecclesiastical" writings (which could be read from in church) with Holy Writ, Scripture itself.

How so very "Catholic" --to make such errors while using wording which 'splits the difference' so to speak, during the last stages of the fuller transition into ERROR.

It the way the skids are greased, the better for it to slide downhill.

The Holy Ghost inspired all Scripture and all its translations, except of course the Protestant mistranslations and obfuscations.

The Apocrypha (in it's beginnings) was never "Scripture", not in the same sense as the rest of what Melito of Sardis termed Old Testament.

Would you care to try again, and this time actually address the issues --- such as the BIG problem (to your own contention/position) of all the now-ancient witnesses arrayed against your expressed opinions?

Yet you say of Scripture generally "inspired all it's translations" now too? "Inspired", other than those which you vaguely allude to while spitting at those...

So tell me --- which English language translation is the "inspired" one?

The Challoner version of Douay-Rheims?

How about what the USCCB have on their own web pages? Is that the one?

I hate to ask those last two above questions, for they will just lead further away from the very questions which you have been avoiding, thus enlisting myself in the oh, so typical on these pages, FRoman squirming and wiggling away from THE LIGHT of TRUTH.

Perhaps (if you reply) I will again set the previous matter before you, regardless if that not be possible to be "succinct".

For we all know by now it is much easier to say a few words which are or could be in error, than it is to take erroneous statements fully apart, and examine them in light of critical evidences in order to determine the truth of the matter.

See Roger Beckwith here (also see his book, “The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church: and its Background in Early Judaism”)

THAT BOOK!

Yes.

That's one for the library (I would like to have). Can we copy and paste here book reviews from Amazon.com? I gave the like above in the [above] exclamative. yes, I was yelling...though if I could come across a hardbound copy (some place other than Amazon), I do think I would prefer that. ;^')

Linking to the book itself as offered on Amazon, and to the reviewer also [as follows] I'm helping Mr. Bezos in doing so, perhaps?

Here we go, from Fr. Charles Erlandson;

Roger Beckwith's "The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church" is a magisterial work on the issue he pursues. He has a masterful command of the material at hand and along the way provides the reader with an education in the fallacies of other works dealing with this issue; witnesses to the Canon; the facts of the Canon; the structure of the Canon; and the identity of the Canon. It's not an easy read, but if you're interested in issues related to how we got the Bible, the Canon, the Apocrypha, and the early Church's use of the Old Testament, then this is an important work that should be consulted. Canonical studies are making a comeback, and so revisiting Beckwith's work is a very worthwhile pursuit
As a matter of fairness, I should state that Roman Catholic readers will not agree with all of his conclusions, especially regarding the Apocrypha (even though I find his arguments persuasive on this point). Both Protestants and Catholics, however, should welcome Beckwith's work on account of its careful scholarship, even if one doesn't agree with all of his conclusions.
Other reviewers have covered some of Beckwith's material in detail, so I'll conclude with a list of his major conclusions:
1. Standard titles in the canon, a standard structure, a standard order and two standard counts (these are all interrelated) can probably be traced back to the second century B.C.
2. Disputes about 5 of the Old Testament books were only of limited scale and significance and probably arose out of exegetical work on books already ranked as canonical.
3. There was no wider Alexandrian (Greek) canon which accepted the Apocrypha, and even if there had been a distinct Alexandrian canon, it is the Palestinian one the first Christians would have taken over and used.
4. Pseudepigrapha were placed in a separate category from canon.
5. The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha were only included later, and not in an agreed way, by Christian Gentiles after the church's breach with the synagogue, among those whose knowledge of the primitive Christian canon was becoming blurred.
6. The three Jewish schools of interpretation all essentially agreed about the canon.
7. There is a general correspondence between the Christian canon and the Jewish. Christian evidence from New Testament endorses the Jewish titles for canon, their 3-fold structure, the traditional Jewish order, and possibly one or two standard Jewish numerations of the books. 8. On the question of the canonicity of the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha the truly primitive Christian evidence is negative.

While Beckwith's word on the Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church may not be the last word, it is a very weighty one that any serious scholarship will have to contend with.

I notice there in the next review yet another "Catholic" (likely not a priest?) disparaged the work with vague allegation, then changed the subject! How so very typical of the fearful...

I have the immense luxury of having had my own faith built up supernaturally -- by the Author and finisher of our faith.

If that were not so, then no earthly 'authority' could do so, including Scripture itself (if we can call that earthly...being as it is in physical form, so to speak) even though I do more than hold that the Scriptures are true --

Here's a blurb mentioning a few statements of Beckwith's outside of his writings per se;

After dinner, Dr. Roger Beckwith continued with a second session on The Bible and Higher Criticism, showing why human reason cannot be made the measure of all things. Dr Beckwith spoke of how Essays and Reviews published in 1860, shook Britain by introducing Liberalism and destructive Higher Critical theories, but its message was penned by men whose strength did not lay in source and text critical studies and was condemned by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Church of England Synod. Nevertheless, Essays and Reviews sold 22,000 copies in two years, which was more than Darwin’s Origin sold in twenty years. However, many complained that the national church ought not to proscribe doctrinal belief and the Bible was subject to individual scrutiny. The cry went up that Moses had never existed but one of equal powers must have done his work. Such ‘rationalism’ brought scholarship nowhere. Dr. Beckwith showed how Biblical prophesy cannot be dated after the events as Liberal theology supposes. Many prophesies extend beyond even the late dates given them by Liberal critics. His conclusion was that archaeological evidence overwhelmingly supports the Biblical accounts. The day’s sessions were closed by Evening Prayer.
[bolding added]

The Septuagint had fifteen additional books besides the 39 universally acknowledged books

Which leads to the problem of which LXX mss.

Edward Earle Ellis writes, “No two Septuagint codices contain the same apocrypha, and no uniform Septuagint ‘Bible’ was ever the subject of discussion in the patristic church. In view of these facts the Septuagint codices appear to have been originally intended more as service books than as a defined and normative canon of Scripture,” (E. E. Ellis, The Old Testament in Early Christianity [Baker 1992], 34-35.

Manuscripts of anything like the capacity of Codex Alexandrinus were not used in the first centuries of the Christian era, and since in the second century AD the Jews seem largely to have discarded the Septuagint…there can be no real doubt that the comprehensive codices of the Septuagint, which start appearing in the fourth century AD, are all of Christian origin.

Nor is there agreement between the codices which the Apocrypha include...Moreover, all three codices [Vaticanus, Sinaiticus and Alexandrinus], according to Kenyon, were produced in Egypt, yet the contemporary Christian lists of the biblical books drawn up in Egypt by Athanasius and (very likely) pseudo-Athanasius are much more critical, excluding all apocryphal books from the canon, and putting them in a separate appendix. (Roger Beckwith, [Anglican priest, Oxford BD and Lambeth DD], The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church [Eerdmans 1986], p. 382, 383; http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2008/01/legendary-alexandrian-canon.html)

Likewise Gleason Archer affirms,

Even in the case of the Septuagint, the apocryphal books maintain a rather uncertain existence. The Codex Vaticanus (B) lacks [besides 3 and 4] 1 and 2 Maccabees (canonical, according to Rome), but includes 1 Esdras (non-canonical, according to Rome). The Sinaiticus (Aleph) omits Baruch (canonical, according to Rome), but includes 4 Maccabees (non-canonical, according to Rome)... Thus it turns out that even the three earliest MSS or the LXX show considerable uncertainty as to which books constitute the list of the Apocrypha.. (Archer, Gleason L., Jr., "A Survey of Old Testament Introduction", Moody Press, Chicago, IL, Rev. 197 4, p. 75; http://www.provethebible.net/T2-Integ/B-1101.htm)

The German historian Martin Hengel writes, “Sinaiticus contains Barnabas and Hermas, Alexandrinus 1 and 2 Clement.” “Codex Alexandrinus...includes the LXX as we know it in Rahlfs’ edition, with all four books of Maccabees and the fourteen Odes appended to Psalms.” “...the Odes (sometimes varied in number), attested from the fifth century in all Greek Psalm manuscripts, contain three New Testament ‘psalms’: the Magnificat, the Benedictus, the Nunc Dimittis from Luke’s birth narrative, and the conclusion of the hymn that begins with the ‘Gloria in Excelsis.’ This underlines the fact that the LXX, although, itself consisting of a collection of Jewish documents, wishes to be a Christian book.” (Martin Hengel, The Septuagint as Christian Scripture [Baker 2004], pp. 57-59)

Also,

The Targums did not include these books, nor the earliest versions of the Peshitta, and the apocryphal books are seen to have been later additions, and later versions of the LXX varied in regard to which books of the apocrypha they contained. “Nor is there agreement between the codices which of the Apocrypha include. (Eerdmans 1986), 382.

And Cyril of Jerusalem, whose list rejected the apocrypha (except for Baruch) exhorts his readers to “read the Divine Scriptures, the twenty-two books of the Old Testament, these that have been translated by the Seventy-two Interpreters,” the latter referring to the Septuagint but not as including the apocrypha. (http://www.bible-researcher.com/cyril.html) ^

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