Good Day,
Just a bit more in formation as it relates to the Roman Catholic Scriptures and the Jewish Scriptures which would be the OT that Protestants use, seeing the Oracles of God were given to the Jews.
"
1.
In Judaism
There are differences between the Jewish canon of Scripture30 “Law”,
Nebi'im, “Prophets”, and
Ketubim, other “Writings”. The number 24 was often reduced to 22, the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet. In the Christian canon, to these 24-22 books correspond 39 books, called “protocanonical”. The numerical difference is explained by the fact that the Jews regarded as one book several writings that are distinct in the Christian canon, the writings of the Twelve Prophets, for example.] and the Christian canon of the Old Testament.31 To explain these differences, it was generally thought that at the beginning of the Christian era, there existed two canons within Judaism: a Hebrew or Palestinian canon, and an extended Alexandrian canon in Greek — called the Septuagint — which was adopted by Christians.
Recent research and discoveries, however, have cast doubt on this opinion. It now seems more probable that at the time of Christianity's birth, closed collections of the Law and the Prophets existed in a textual form substantially identical with the Old Testament. The collection of “Writings”, on the other hand, was not as well defined either in Palestine or in the Jewish diaspora, with regard to the number of books and their textual form. Towards the end of the first century A.D., it seems that 2422 books were generally accepted by Jews as sacred,32 but it is only much later that the list became exclusive.33 When the limits of the Hebrew canon were fixed, the deuterocanonical books were not included.
Many of the books belonging to the third group of religious texts, not yet fixed, were regularly read in Jewish communities during the first century A.D. They were translated into Greek and circulated among Hellenistic Jews, both in Palestine and in the diaspora."
The Jewish People and their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible
As to the historical view and Luther we see his contemporary Cajetan writing:
Cajetan wrote a commentary on all the canonical books of the Old Testament which he dedicated to the pope. He stated that the books of the Apocrypha were not canonical in the strict sense, explaining that there were two concepts of the term 'canonical' as it applied to the Old Testament. He gave the following counsel on how to properly interpret the decrees of the Councils of Hippo and Carthage under Augustine:
Here we close our commentaries on the historical books of the Old Testament. For the rest (that is, Judith, Tobit, and the books of Maccabees) are counted by St Jerome out of the canonical books, and are placed amongst the Apocrypha, along with Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus, as is plain from the Prologus Galeatus. Nor be thou disturbed, like a raw scholar, if thou shouldest find anywhere, either in the sacred councils or the sacred doctors, these books reckoned as canonical. For the words as well of councils as of doctors are to be reduced to the correction of Jerome. Now, according to his judgment, in the epistle to the bishops Chromatius and Heliodorus, these books (and any other like books in the canon of the bible) are not canonical, that is, not in the nature of a rule for confirming matters of faith. Yet, they may be called canonical, that is, in the nature of a rule for the edification of the faithful, as being received and authorised in the canon of the bible for that purpose. By the help of this distinction thou mayest see thy way clearly through that which Augustine says, and what is written in the provincial council of Carthage.
The historical record:
Our analysis has shown that the vast weight of historical evidence falls on the side of excluding the Apocrypha from the category of canonical Scripture. It is interesting to note that the only two Fathers of the early Church who are considered to be true biblical scholars, Jerome and Origen (and who both spent time in the area of Palestine and were therefore familiar with the Hebrew canon), rejected the Apocrypha. And the near unanimous opinion of the Church followed this view. And coupled with this historical evidence is the fact that these writings have serious internal difficulties in that they are characterized by heresies, inconsistencies and historical inaccuracies which invalidate their being given the status of Scripture. New Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. I (Washington D.C.: Catholic University, 1967), p. 390.
In Him,
Bill
