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Today is All Soul’s Day, in which Catholics pray for the faithful departed. And this practice of praying for the dead has clear Scriptural roots: it’s encouraged in 2 Maccabees 12:43-45. The only catch is that this citation comes from the Deuterocanon, the set of seven Books accepted as Scripture by Catholics but rejected by most Protestants (who tend to refer to these books, erroneously, as “Apocrypha”). It’s also in the Deuterocanon (specifically, 2 Maccabees 15:12-16) that we find the clearest example of praying to the Saints. We can go so far as to say that if Catholics are...

Every word of God is flawless; he is a shield to those who take refuge in him. Do not add to his words, or he will rebuke you and prove you a liar.—Proverbs 30:5-6, NIV The canon of scripture—that is, the official list of what’s in the Bible—is not revealed to us by any saying of Jesus, nor does scripture itself contain any list. The canon of scripture is determined by the Church, and there are differences among the various church bodies. Before We Begin… But first a little clarification, because the word “apocrypha” has a second, relatively obscure...

[This article is based on the book, 'Restoring the Original Bible' by Dr. Ernest L. Martin, ASK Publications, Portland, Oregon, 1994] Our Bibles Are Different You may be not be surprised to learn that the Bibles that the Christians use today (also in the past centuries) are not the same as the original Bible known to the Jewish world and to the early Christians. First, we use translations, not the original tongues (Hebrew and Greek); second, there are minor textual variations; and third, we do not have the original autographs.What should surprise you (unless you have read on Bible's...

Tales continue to circulate about how the Catholic Church opposed translating the Bible into the vernacular. But the Church has never opposed that. After all, the Vulgate was originally translated by St. Jerome to make the Bible available in the vernacular of the day, Latin, which continued to be the lingua franca of educated Europe up to the late 18th century and beyond. Nor were the Reformers the first to translate the Bible into more modern European languages. The Catholic Church approved of Gutenberg's German Bible in 1455. The first printed Flemish edition came out in 1477. Two Italian...

People don't talk much about the deuterocanon these days. The folks who do are mostly Christians, and they usually fall into two general groupings: Catholics — who usually don't know their Bibles very well and, therefore, don't know much about the deuterocanonical books, and Protestants — who may know their Bibles a bit better, though their Bibles don't have the deuterocanonical books in them anyway, so they don't know anything about them either. With the stage thus set for informed ecumenical dialogue, it's no wonder most people think the deuterocanon is some sort of particle weapon recently perfected by...

A manuscript containing the oldest known Biblical New Testament in the world is set to enter the digital age and become accessible online. A team of experts from the UK, Europe, Egypt and Russia is currently digitising the parchment known as the Codex Sinaiticus, believed originally to have been one of 50 copies of the scriptures commissioned by Roman Emperor Constantine after he converted to Christianity. The Bible, which is currently in the British Library in London, dates from the 4th Century. "It is a very distinctive manuscript. No other manuscript looks like this," Scot McKendrick, the head of the...

When Catholics and Protestants talk about "the Bible," the two groups actually have two different books in mind. In the sixteenth century, the Protestant Reformers removed a large section of the Old Testament that was not compatible with their theology. They charged that these writings were not inspired Scripture and branded them with the pejorative title "Apocrypha." Catholics refer to them as the "deuterocanonical" books (since they were disputed by a few early authors and their canonicity was established later than the rest), while the rest are known as the "protocanonical" books (since their canonicity was established first).Following the Protestant...