Additions to the Bible?

throughfierytrial said:

I’ll point out that I Maccabees 9:27 states there were no prophets in the land… the silent years between OT and NT. The Apocryphal books the Catholics continue to carry in their Bibles are viewed as not inspired Scripture by Protestants and as such are not included in Protestants Bibles. Some Protestants read them as a separate set and view them as historical books, but some of the writings appear questionable… in the view of many.

The actions taken by the early popes as pertains to the Bible and you outlined does not carry weight with Protestants. Because, as I stated above, Protestants use those inspired Scripture known to have been preached and practiced by the very early/ancient church and in accordance with those manuscripts.

There is much more to be said on the topic to be sure, but the Protestant Bible should not be looked upon as suspect because it omits the Apocryphal books.

As a point in fact and in defense of these actions taken by Protestants, the OT names books which are not/were not recorded in OT such as the books containing the acts of kings.

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throughfierytrial said:

I believe the original Hebrew manuscripts do not include the apocrypha. Fact remains that through consensus they were removed by Protestants because they are not inspired texts. There were no prophets in the land as Maccabees itself states.
I’ll leave the greater “ research” to those who wish it.

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PloverWing said:

Some of the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical books appear to have been written in Greek, others in Hebrew or a related language. Being written in Greek shouldn't in itself be a reason to exclude a book from the Bible, as most of the New Testament was written in Greek.

"There were no prophets in the land" is an interesting description of the situation in I Maccabees, but I wouldn't apply it too broadly to all of the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical books. Several of the stories feature Daniel, for example, and he is normally recognized as a prophet by Protestants.

Determining whether the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical books should be in the canon is not easy. As @Valletta notes, they were in the Septuagint; that's a reason to include them. They were not, in the end, accepted by rabbinical Judaism; that's a reason to exclude them. Are they inspired texts? Depends on what you mean by "inspired". If you mean "verbally inspired", in the Evangelical sense of God directing the writing -- I doubt that we can ever know whether (for example) the Prayer of Manasseh or the Greek texts of Esther and Daniel are inspired in that sense.

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