CHALLENGE TO PROTESTANTS: Show Me One Quote of Deuterocanonical = Apocryphal

[MrS]

I hold in my formerly pagan-out-of-the-Catholic-Church-for-25-years hands

a copy of the newly released

"Why Catholic Bibles Are Bigger - The Untold Story Of The Lost Books Of The Protestant Bible"

Arguments about 73 or 66 usually are either ended in confusion in trying to present all the evidence, because no one (until now) has really accumulated all that evidence.

Certainly a work like this would not come from a protestant camp, lest they find themselves in error.

Gary Michuta, the author, presents over 300 pages which any serious student can check and double check. There are many footnotes, many references, many proofs that once again the Catholic position is the correct one… and it is a fairly easy read.

handsonapologetics.com/ is the website of the author, and you can link on to Grotto Press to order… a $20 reference book every “66” proponent should now consider.

Thanks Gary… but where were you 500 years ago when Luther was playing his game?

seriously, if one can afford to pick this up… it is not only a great and long overdue reference on the deutrocanonicals, but you would be supporting a darn good ministry too.

 

[123rock]

I haven’t taken a great deal of time to study the arguments for and against the qualifications of the so-called Deuterocanonical books, when I’ve been trying to spend my time primarily defending the already severely scrutinized New Testament and some of the Old, which you as true Christians should be doing foremost instead of spending hours arguing with your Christian brothers over stupid things.

This should give you a reason why I personally reject any of the non-Protestant Old Testament books:

Josephus:

For we have not an innumerable multitude of books among us, disagreeing from and contradicting one another, [as the Greeks have,] but only twenty-two books, which contain the records of all the past times; which are justly believed to be divine; and of them five belong to Moses, which contain his laws and the traditions of the origin of mankind till his death. This interval of time was little short of three thousand years; but as to the time from the death of Moses till the reign of Artaxerxes king of Persia, who reigned after Xerxes, the prophets, who were after Moses, wrote down what was done in their times in thirteen books. The remaining four books contain hymns to God, and precepts for the conduct of human life. It is true, our history hath been written since Artaxerxes very particularly, but hath not been esteemed of the like authority with the former by our forefathers, because there hath not been an exact succession of prophets since that time; and how firmly we have given credit to these books of our own nation is evident by what we do; for during so many ages as have already passed, no one has been so bold as either to add any thing to them, to take any thing from them, or to make any change in them; but it is become natural to all Jews immediately, and from their very birth, to esteem these books to contain Divine doctrines, and to persist in them, and, if occasion be willingly to die for them. For it is no new thing for our captives, many of them in number, and frequently in time, to be seen to endure racks and deaths of all kinds upon the theatres, that they may not be obliged to say one word against our laws and the records that contain them; whereas there are none at all among the Greeks who would undergo the least harm on that account, no, nor in case all the writings that are among them were to be destroyed; for they take them to be such discourses as are framed agreeably to the inclinations of those that write them; and they have justly the same opinion of the ancient writers, since they see some of the present generation bold enough to write about such affairs, wherein they were not present, nor had concern enough to inform themselves about them from those that knew them; examples of which may be had in this late war of ours, where some persons have written histories, and published them, without having been in the places concerned, or having been near them when the actions were done; but these men put a few things together by hearsay, and insolently abuse the world, and call these writings by the name of Histories.

We know that the 22 books were scrolls that combined the 39 canonical Old Testament books of the Protestants.

 

[wmscott]

The only thing I know is that Jerome was the first one to call them the Apocrypha.

An excerpt from an article found at the link below 5 myths about 7 books. The excerpt comes form myth 5. the entire article is a good read.

But last and most interesting of all in this stellar lineup is a certain Father already mentioned: St. Jerome. In his later years St. Jerome did indeed accept the Deuter-ocanonical books of the Bible. In fact, he wound up strenuously defending their status as inspired Scripture, writing, “What sin have I committed if I followed the judgment of the churches? But he who brings charges against me for relating the objections that the Hebrews are wont to raise against the story of Susanna, the Son of the Three Children, and the story of Bel and the Dragon, which are not found in the Hebrew volume (ie. canon), proves that he is just a foolish sycophant. For I wasn’t relating my own personal views, but rather the remarks that they [the Jews] are wont to make against us” (Against Rufinus 11:33 [A.D. 402]). In earlier correspondence with Pope Damasus, Jerome did not call the deuterocanonical books unscriptural, he simply said that Jews he knew did not regard them as canonical. But for himself, he acknowledged the authority of the Church in defining the canon. When Pope Damasus and the Councils of Carthage and Hippo included the deuterocanon in Scripture, that was good enough for St. Jerome. He “followed the judgment of the churches.”

catholiceducation.org/articles/apologetics/ap0120.html