I need some help. A friend mentioned something called the Council Cinea which gave us the Jesus a lot of us know. He said that Jesus was actually a man named Jeshua. This makes me concerned. I want to be right with God and know that I know what is true and what He intended for us to know. How can I be right if man has molded our Father's words and teaching so much? Also, I know that the Vatican took 14 books out of the Bible. How do we know we're not missing some vital information pertinent to our salvation? Please help.
Finally concerning the "14 books out of the Bible". I'm going to avoid talking about the New Testament since 1) All Christian churches agree today on the 27 books of the New Testament and 2) it's not relevant to this question.
There are discrepancies between different churches on how many books are recognized as accepted Scripture, that is, which make up the Bible. The reason for this is, as you might guess based on my last two posts, about some complicated history:
So the earliest Christians didn't quite have a Bible to speak of. There were books recognized as Scripture, but in Judaism there was not in the time of Jesus or of the earliest Christians a definitive set of books accepted by all Jews. The Jews, in effect, recognized three levels of Scripture:
Torah (the five books of the Law or Pentateuch) was accepted universally and without question by all Jews, and it was the most important.
The Prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the 12 Minor Prophets) were accepted by the Pharisees but not by the Sadducees.
The Writings (the Psalms, Song of Songs, Proverbs, etc) these were the debated books among Jewish scholars, some were accepted pretty well and easily such as the Psalms, but others weren't accepted so easily such as the Song of Songs and the book of Daniel.
But it gets more complicated than that, because a couple hundred years before Jesus a group of Jewish scribes in Alexandria in Egypt had made a translation of Jewish holy books into the Greek language; this translation became known as the Septuagint (Greek meaning "Seventy" because legend has it that seventy scribes worked independently of each other and had the exact same translation) or LXX (Roman numerals for the number 70). The Septuagint was pretty convenient for early Christians who themselves mostly spoke Greek, and were preaching their message to a Greek speaking populace; in fact every quote from the Old Testament in the New Testament is often quoted verbatim from the Septuagint.
In Judaism, with the destruction of the Temple the Sadducees basically died off because they depended on the Temple, which by and large left the Pharisees. And there was also an emphasis among the Pharisees to distance themselves from Greek works and so only Hebrew and Aramaic works were ultimately taken seriously as the Jewish Bible took on its final form in the centuries after Jesus; but this happened independently of the formation of the Christian Bible.
For Christians the Septuagint was often used as-is, and that meant Christians often used books which Jews increasingly did not use, such as Sirach, Wisdom, Judith, Baruch, etc. But those questions did exist in the early Church, and so there were different opinions about some of these books found in the Septuagint, but not used by the Jews; these books are known as the Deuterocanonical Books.
The discrepancy I mentioned in the beginning is something that happens because of events which unfoled in the 1500's, only 500 years ago. As I mentioned there were discussions and debates on some of these books of the Old Testament, but nothing was ever cemented once and for all. Then in the 1500's Martin Luther, the father of the Protestant Reformation, called into question the authority of the Deuterocanonicals. In spite of what some say, Luther didn't despise these books, and didn't have the same opinion about all of them (he liked some more than others); but ultimately he made a decision to place the Deuterocanonical Books in a separate appendix between the Old and New Testaments in his German translation of the Bible, he named that appendix "The Apocrypha". Protestant Bible translators continued this tradition began by Luther, and so English Protestant Bibles (most famously the King James Version) included these books in their own appendix until very recently; it was only around 1875-1880 that English Bible publishing companies began to not publish Bibles with the Deuterocanonicals.
Getting back to the 1500's, when the Roman Catholic Church convened for the Council of Trent, in part to address the Protestant issue, they settled the Biblical Canon for themselves once and for all. Not all the Deuterocanonicals remained in the Catholic Bible, but most did. And this is the chief difference today between Catholic and Protestant Bibles.
The Orthodox Churches in the East continue to have all the Deuterocanonical Books.
So, in reality, there was no removing of books or adding of books,
per se. Or at least it's more complex than that. One could argue that Protestants did remove books from the Bible, but that's not really true either it would be more accurate to say that Protestants shuffled some books around--though it was Protestant Bible publishers in the late 19th century that did remove them, which is why you won't find them in your KJV or NIV today (well, you can still find a KJV with them, but you have to go out of your way to find one). Ultimately it's about a small selection of books--the Deuterocanonicals--which had been debated and disputed and discussed on and off throughout Christian history, and it ultimately became part of a larger dispute in Western Europe between Catholics and Protestants.
(Bonus fact: While most Protestants agree with Luther that the Deuterocanonicals aren't Scripture the same way as the other books are Scripture, the Lutheran churches have never had an official opinion one way or the other, which is somewhat ironic given we're named for Luther).
And if your friend was talking about something else entirely than the Deuterocanonicals, then well that would be straight up wrong. There is another discussion to be had about the New Testament, but without getting into that history it suffices to say that no books were removed from the New Testament either.
Long story short: There are no "missing books" of the Bible.
-CryptoLutheran
