There are several books in amazon that explain the issue.
They were there in the original christian OT based on the Septuagint. Were taken out during the Reformation.
CC have them and the EOC have even more.
Before you get jumped all over, the claim will be that they weren’t taken out at the reformation, they were just put in a separate index and called the apocrypha…
That being said, separating them and calling them apocrypha, which is calling them non-Scriptural, is the exact same thing as taking them out. They did take them out of Scripture and just left them physically in the same book so let’s just put a rest to that claim before it even starts.
Historically it was some decades later that the books were physically removed from the Bible altogether.
Luther claimed that the books weren’t in the Jewish OT and weren’t written in Hebrew so he, by his own personal authority, justified his calling them non-Scriptural.
The fact is, that the Jews before and at the time of Christ had different sects and different canons of what we call the OT. Christ and the Apostles were using the Septuagint which was the Alexandrian Jewish version of the canon which did contain all the books that the Church uses.
The version of canon that Luther cited was the one from the Jewish council of Jamnia (sp?) which was called decades after Christ’s death and Resurrection to basically differenciate themselves from this new pesky sect called Christians. That is when they decided on that version of the canon.
The claim that these books weren’t written in Hebrew has since been found to be wrong with the discovery of the dead sea scrolls. I know that most of Baruch in Hebrew are in the scrolls, and others I can’t remember right now.
And another thing you might say to them…
Ask if they would reject any books that the Catholic Church added to the bible. So many are not very up on true Church history so they could very likely say that no, they wouldn’t accept any books added by the Catholic Church.
To that answer, just tell them that they don’t accept the entire NT then. Maybe that’ll inspire them to delve deeper into Church history.
