That is not to say that Catholics do not believe the Bible, But the Catholic faith is based upon what the Catholic Church establishes as true doctrine. If I am misinformed here then I stand corrected.
Hi.
I've only skimmed the thread (I'm battling a summer cold and I'm full of OTC drugs and a shade punchy, so if anything I'm mentioning here has already been covered, I apologize.
Your statement above is
sort of correct; maybe I can help clarify. As anawim mentioned above, Catholics believe in the Word of God---but whereas to Protestests this means the Bible, to Catholics this means the Bible and
Sacred Tradition.
The Apostles originally taught by word of mouth, since there was no Christian Bible for half a century after Christ was born---the first couple books of the New Testament were Galatians and James, both of which were written around the year 49 A.D.; by that time, the Apostles had been spreading the Gospel by word of mouth for sixteen years. Over time, some of the things they said were written down and became Scripture. Some of the things they said were not, and became Sacred Tradition. Both of them date from the same period, and as we believe, both of them are the inspired Word of God, both of them carry the same amount of authority, and both of them complement and interpret one another.
We know which things Tradition consists of because the writings of the earliest Church Fathers (Clement, Athanasius, Ignatius, etc., etc.) list them out for us.
Catholics interpret Scripture and Tradition in light of
each other, while Protestants interpret Scripture in light of
itself; this is why Catholics and Protestants can take the same verse of Scripture and come up with completely different interpretations.
Now, the authority of the Church does define for us what Scripture and Tradition both consist of, to be sure; but the Catholic Faith is built upon the twin pillars of God's Word, being Holy Scripture on the one hand and Sacred Tradition on the other.
Interesting, so what do you do with the scripture that has not been dogmatically interpreted? You meaning all the Catholic people.
I'm not sure what you mean by "dogmatically interpreted". Can you clarify?
I keep hearing this about how if it were not for the Catholic Church we would not have a Bible. What was this first Bible called? If you know.
Sure. For Christians, it was called the Septuagint, which was the Greek translation of the Jewish Scriptures, or basically the Old Testament. It contains the same books as you find in your 1611 King James, along with the books of 1st and 2nd Maccabees, Judith, Sirach, Wisdom, Tobit, Baruch, and some additional chapters in both Esther and Daniel. (These are what Protestants refer to as "The Apocrypha"; they are the books that Martin Luther removed from one of his German editions of the Bible because he didn't like the doctrine in a couple of them, and every Protestant Bible published since has followed suit.)
Incidentally, we know that the Septuagint was the edition of the Scriptures used by Christ, because He quoted from the "Apocrypha" all the time.
During the first 400 years of Christian history, there was no clear-cut "canon" for Biblical books; the list which we now have was finally settled on by Pope Damasus at the Council of Rome in 382 A.D.; a couple of years later Damasus' list was confirmed at the Council of Hippo in 393 A.D. The same list was reconfirmed at the Councils of Carthage (397 and 418 A.D.), Florence (1441 A.D.), and Trent (1546 A.D.) In addition, Pope Innocent I declared that the list of the biblical books was closed and no longer open to additions or subtractions in 405 A.D.
Insofar as what the first Bible was called, if you mean the complete collection such as what we have now, it was the Latin Vulgate, published in 400 A.D., and translated by St. Jerome from the Henrew Masora, the Greek Septuagint, and the
Vetus Latina. There were of course earlier editions, but they either added books that we now reject, or left out books that we now accept. The edition of Marcion (c. 140 A.D.), for example, held a heavily-edited form of the Gospel of Luke and ten of Paul's epistles, and it left out the Old Testament entirely.
Have any of you heard of the Waldensians Bible of 120 AD
Yes. The story, as it was popularized by writers like Benjamin Wilkinson, is that the Waldensians had an ancient version of the Scriptures dating from 120 A.D., and which was handed down to the "Italic Church" by the Apostles, and it alone remained free of later "corruptions" added by the Catholic Church. The whole thing is largely speculative balderdash and is not even considered by any serious scholar outside the Seventh-Day Adventist denomination.
