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To: boatbums
Learning to read and understand the written matter.

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.

So that is the short answer. Of course we all know that reformation was a rather slow process of decay. So here's the long answer:

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.

The phrase "Luther jettisoned them" by itself might be misunderstood by some five-year-old as if Luther personally went and ripped pages out of Bibles. But literate people tend to read in complete paragraphs and tend to understand phrases in context.
144 posted on 10/04/2014 4:44:26 PM PDT by annalex (fear them not)
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To: annalex
“Literate” people understand what the word “jettisoned” means. Are you literate or do I need to post the Webster's dictionary definition? Here are a few synonyms they give: discarding, disposition, dumping, disposal, junking, removal, riddance, scrapping, throwing away. It's a nautical term, too, it means a voluntary sacrifice of cargo to lighten a ship's load in time of distress. So, NO, Luther did not jettison the Apocryphals because they were “inconvenient”. The teacher LIED to the student and you aren't faring much better.
248 posted on 10/04/2014 8:17:35 PM PDT by boatbums (God is ready to assume full responsibility for the life wholly yielded to Him.)
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