- Jun 23, 2011
- 18,910
- 3,646
- Faith
- Catholic
- Marital Status
- Married
- Politics
- US-Constitution
It is very easy to say Protestants this and Protestants that and for the reply to be 'well not all protestants...' That's because, other than proclaiming and acknowledging that Jesus Christ is Lord and Savior, all Protestants agree on very little.CLAIMS THAT PROTESTANTS DELETED BOOKS FROM THE BIBLE?
Protestants didn't delete any of the books from the bible. They just assigned a different status to some of the books. The Old Testament books they disagree with are called by Catholics deuterocanonical—the secondary canon—and by Protestants apocryphal, not part of the canon. To Catholics they're as theologically valid as anything else; to Protestants, they're supposedly valid for instruction and whatnot, but ‘inferior’ in authority to the primary canon. Yet many Bibles aimed at Protestant audiences include the apocrypha, so they're hardly deleted.
As for the criterion of discrimination: the ‘Old Testament’ is basically the Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh; but when Christians first developed an official canon, Jews didn't have one—the ‘official canon’ concept was kind of novel. When Jews did get around to settling on a canon, they considered roughly the same set of books, but accepted only ones written in Hebrew. The ‘Catholic’ canon also includes some scriptures from Jewish diaspora communities originally composed in other languages (generally or maybe universally Greek, the scholarly lingua franca of the Roman Empire). Protestants excluded the ‘Old Testament’ texts that weren't included by the Jews (so, disregarding compilation and translation choices, the standard Protestant OT is exactly the same material as the Tanakh).
So Protestants did not remove any books from the Bible at all. At the time of the Reformation, Protestants recognized as canonical books of the Bible the 39 Hebrew books recognized by the Jews and called by Christians the Old Testament, and the 27 Greek books universally accepted by Christians as the New Testament.
In dispute were 12 books or parts of books written in Greek and referred to by Protestants as the Apocrypha, because their origins were “hidden”, that is, unknown.
The fundamental difference is that the books of the Apocrypha is that there not in the Hebrew Bible. The books of the Apocrypha only exist in Greek; there are no Hebrew texts of these books. Obviously they do not belong to the Old Testament, but also, neither do they belong to the New Testament.
Hope this helps
So I will put it a different way, based on your article. Catholics formulated the canon of Scripture, and it included the Deuterocanonical books. The Reformationists decided some to include them as "Apocrypha", which means, shortly,
biblical or related writings not forming part of the accepted canon of Scripture. Wiki says
"The word apocrypha, like many other words, has undergone a major change in meaning throughout the centuries. Concerning these ancient books, the word apocrypha originally meant a text too sacred and secret to be in everyone's hands. Christians today say that apocrypha are works, usually written, of unknown authorship or of doubtful origin.
Catholics agree with the meaning of "apocrypha". but not what books belong in that category. Also from Wiki: "Deuterocanonical is a term coined in 1566 by the theologian Sixtus of Siena, who had converted to Catholicism from Judaism, to describe scriptural texts considered canonical by the Catholic Church, but which recognition was considered "secondary". For Sixtus, this term included portions of both Old and New Testaments (Sixtus considers the final chapter of the Gospel of Mark as 'deuterocanonical'); and he also applies the term to the Book of Esther from the canon of the Hebrew Bible. The term was then taken up by other writers to apply specifically to those books of the Old Testament which had been recognised as canonical by the Councils of Rome (AD 382) of Hippo (AD 393), Carthage (AD 397 and AD 419), Council of Florence (AD 1442) and Council of Trent (AD 1546), but which were not in the Hebrew canon.
So the term was coined during the time of the Reformation. Prior to that, they are, simply, canonical. What I am curious about, regarding the Canon of Scripture of Protestants, why would you rely on the Jewish definition of the canon, which actually came after the Catholic definition?
I realize that's another topic, but these claims that Catholics changed Scripture are patently false. We did no such thing. We canonized Scripture. Others changed it.
Upvote
0