Apocrypha

I'm not an expert at this, so bear with me....

Yes, we include the Apocrypha. Remember that Luther took books or parts of books out of the Bible. The more experienced apologists can enlighten you further - with greater detail.

Here is a cut from the Council of Carthage link of the Catholic Encyclopedia.


At the Synod of Hippo (393), and again at the Synod of 397 at Carthage, a list of the books of Holy Scripture was drawn up. It is the Catholic canon (i.e. including the books classed by Protestants as "Apocrypha"). The latter synod, at the end of the enumeration, added, "But let Church beyond sea (Rome) be consulted about confirming this canon".

Here is a good link for the Canon of Scripture

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03267a.htm

God bless,

Neal

Here is an old archived post of mine; you might find it helpful.

The Jewish Bible contains the same 66 books as the Protestant Old Testament, for reasons I'll address in a minute. The Catholic Old Testament, on the other hand, contains 73 (with some additional chapters to both Daniel and Esther). The Orthodox Old Testament has the same 73 books as the Catholic version, and some Orthodox bodies have 75.

The reason for these discrepancies has to do with linguistic, theological, political, and historical concerns. (As LilyLamb can tell you from my posts on other boards, I tend to be long winded, and people's eyes glaze over reading my babblings, so I'll try to be brief. )

In the 2nd century B.C., Ptolemy, the king of Egypt, decided he wanted to build the greatest library in the world, which would contain a copy of every book ever written, all of them translated into Greek, which was the dominant language in that part of the world at the time. This would include, of course, the Jewish Scriptures. In Alexandria, there was a huge diasporic Jewish community, and seventy Jewish scholars were hired from that community to locate, gather, and translate every last book of Jewish Scripture that could be found. This was accomplished, and the name of this Greek translation of the Jewish Scriptures was the Septuagint, after the Latin word septus, meaning seventy---since seventy scholars worked on it. This Greek translation carried the 73 books currently found in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles.

By the time of Christ, the Septuagint had become accepted by many diasporic Jews throughout the ancient world; it was, however, not held in favor with the "legalistic" factions in Jerusalem, which would include the Pharisees and the Sadducees. To these folks, Hebrew was a sacred language, and in their way of thinking, if God wanted us to know something, then He'd see to it that it remained in the sacred language of Hebrew; and if God didn't care enough about a book remaining in Hebrew, then apparently it wasn't terribly important to begin with. Accordingly, they put together their own collection of the Jewish Scriptures, made from only the books still extant in the original Hebrew. (Another reason for rejecting the Septuagint books had to do with the fact that the Books of Maccabees contained evidence of friendship treaties between the Jews and the Romans---and by this time, the Jews had come to hate the Romans so much that they didn't want anything to do with them.) This Hebrew collection was called the Masoretic text, or sometimes the Masora. It contained the 66 books now found in all Jewish Bibles, since it rejected the Greek books found in the Septuagint.

It should be mentioned at this point that many copies of the Hebrew Scriptures had become lost or destroyed in the years between 300 B.C. and 200 A.D.; and Hebrew originals for some of these rejected books were impossible to find. Since the late 19th century, however, archaeological finds have uncovered copies of nearly all these books, or parts of them, in Hebrew, which were hidden by various people to protect them from being destroyed. So to use the reasoning of the Masoretic faction, God did preserve these books in Hebrew---it's just that they couldn't find them at the time.

By this time, the Christians had come along, and they tended to use the Septuagint, rather than the Masora. As time went on, they added their own writings (Gospels, epistles) to the corpus, and by the time of Pope Damasus, the whole works was translated into Latin by Jerome. Since Jerome was usuing regular street Latin instead of high-falutin' classical Latin, the Latin version was called the "Vulgate", after "vulgar" Latin. This became "the" Bible for Christians right up into the 16th century.

It must be borne in mind that during the first 400 years of Christian history, there was no clear-cut "canon" for Biblical books; there were many, many books produced during this period, some of them heretical (the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, for example), some of them unorthodox (like the "infancy narratives" such as the Gospel of Psuedo-Matthew and the Proto-Gospel of James), and some of them orthodox but incomplete (such as the Didache). Some of these books were held as divinely inspired Scripture by some Christian communities, while some of the books in our present canon were rejected. The list which we now have (for the New Testament) was finally settled 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.)

For a list of some of these extra-biblical books (both Jewish and Christian), go to www.bible2000.org/forgottenindex.htm or wesley.nnu.edu/noncanon/. You will be astounded at the number of ancient writings out there which never made it into the Bible (and usually for good reason). Some of the New Testament writers were familiar with these books, and even quoted them in our Bible; for example, Matthew 7:13 is an echo of the Epistle of Barnabas 18-20; Matthew 14:13-21 is an echo of 2nd Baruch 29:8. Jude loved the Jewish apocrypha---verse 6 can be found in the Book of Enoch, verse 7 in the Testament of the 12 Patriarchs, and verse 9 can be found in the Assumption of Moses. (Of course, on the other hand, Paul himself also quoted from the pagan Greek poets Epimenides, Aratus, Menander, and Cleanthes.)

Anyway, the Greek Septuagint/Latin Vulgate was used as the standard Christian Bible right up to the time of the Reformation. When Luther came along, as we all know, he had some serious problems with certain Catholic doctrines such as purgatory. He rejected this doctrine, and in order to reinforce that rejection, he also rejected the seven Old Testament books from the Septuagint, since one of them (2nd Maccabees) contained a passage which corroborated the concept of purgatory. (Luther also had a problem with the concept of "works", and wanted to throw out the Epistle of James as well ["faith without works is dead"], but his friend Philip Melanchthon convinced him that if he kept on tossing books at the rate he was going, he was going to end up with a pretty thin Bible.) The other Reformers picked up on Luther's German translation with its omissions and additions (again, to reinforce his idea of sola fide, Luther added the word "alone" to Romans 5:1, changing it from "justified by faith" to "justified by faith alone"), and thus, all Protestant Bibles to the present day have 66 books, with the omission of the seven Old Testament books from the Greek Septuagint.

Catholic Bibles still contain those seven books, which consist of Judith, Tobit, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, and 1st and 2nd Maccabees; Orthodox Bibles contain them as well, and some Orthodox churches also accept 3rd and 4th Maccabees, for a total of 75 books.

Originally posted by Wolseley
Here is an old archived post of mine; you might find it helpful.

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Wolseley = HELPFUL in message board talk.

I tend to be long winded, and people's eyes glaze over reading my babblings, so I'll try to be brief. )

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Hey! My eyes have NEVER glazed over while reading your posts, Wolseley!
I followed you here from "The OTHER Message Board That Shall Not Be Mentioned" and I think I'm going to start a Wolseley Fan Club.

Annabel

Ooo! Ooo! ::: waving arm, a la Horshack :::

I wanna be in the Wolseley Fan Club!


And To Hoonbaba:

There's some beautiful stuff in the deuterocanonicals, so wade through what you consider to be "fiction." The story of Tobit can get a little odd, but the marriage between Tobias and his bride touches the heart!

And I LOVE the book of Wisdom!


Peace be with you,
~VOW

To Hoonbaba:

Aha, Purgatory!

We've had some interesting threads on that topic!

Purgatory isn't so much a PLACE as a PROCESS. When kids were taught by the nuns from the old Baltimore Catechism, Purgatory was made to sound like detention after school. The more you screwed up, the more detention time you had to serve. I will say that trying to explain things which exist after death are difficult for mere mortals, because the dimensions we understand will cease to be.

We do know that nothing unclean can enter into God's presence. And try as we might, we have the possibility of dying, while still "saved", with some stain of sin upon our souls. Purgatory is the process of purification, to remove this stain, to permit us to enter into God's glory.

Paul talks about our works being burned up. Isaiah (I think) had his lips purified by a burning coal before he could speak the word of God. Finally, in one of the Deuterocanonicals, prayer for the dead is said to be a holy and wholesome thing. Luther didn't agree with Purgatory, and that is partly the reason why he pitched the Deuteros from his translation of the Bible.


Peace be with you,
~VOW

Here's one for ya, Hoon. Did you know that the original 1611 King James Bible (that some of the hard line Fundamentalists insist is the only Bible) contained the Apocrypha? This translation was done after the Reformation.

Ah, but Jukes!

The KJV-ites are QUICK to point out that the Apocrypha was placed at the BACK of the King James Bible, and were not (supposedly) considered to be scripture.

(we won't discuss the KJV-ites here, okay?)


Peace be with you,
~VOW

Thank you for sharing that. I really appreciate it. However, I'm a bit concerned with the extra biblical texts (particularly 1 Enoch). Jude 14-15 quotes directly from Enoch, yet Enoch is not found in scripture. And as you said there are other passages that apostle Paul quotes. So why aren't those books, like epistle of Barnabus in the canon? Do they contradict scripture?

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True, Enoch is not found in Scripture, but you must remember that Enoch was quite familiar to 1st-century Jews like Jude. The early Apostles sometimes used these old stories as didactic texts, even though they might not have been considered canonical Scripture. Also, bear in mind that sometimes these books were thought of as canonical, but were later rejected---it took four hundred years for the Church to decide what was going to be in the Bible and what wasn't, remember.

Usually, a book was rejected because it had some passage somewhere that didn't jibe with Apostolic Tradition or Scripture already known to be inspired. Sometimes a book that probably should have been included wasn't, because we didn't have a full copy of it, such as the Didache, which breaks off abruptly in the last sentence, and the remainder has been lost for eternity. We have to trust that the Holy Spirit knew what He was doing when He persuaded the Church to accept the books we have now, although it certainly does not hurt to be familiar with the ones that weren't included.

Also, I do not agree with the doctrine of purgatory. Since I believe all 'end time' prophecies were fulfilled in the first century, including Revelation 20:14 (which speaks of Hades thrown in the lake of fire) I don't see how purgatory could exist. Unless I've made some false assumption on purgatory.

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I'm not quite sure how Purgatory fits in with eschatology, but I'll be happy to discuss it if you like. In the meantime, you can also do a "Search" function on the top of your screen for this board for "Purgatory" and you'll find a couple of long threads where it was discussed at length.