Differences in Western Bibles

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Really?

I thought the basis was that each book in the canon was accepted universally throughout the Church?

On the Calvin question: Why would students studying law also study some theology? Was it because moral theology would inform questions of human law?
 
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Michael16 said:
I thought the basis was that each book in the canon was accepted universally throughout the Church?
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I suppose it depends on one’s perspective: if you compare the Western Church and the Eastern Church, the latter has a number of OT books that we don’t have (e.g. Prayer of Manasseh).
Michael16 said:
On the Calvin question: Why would students studying law also study some theology? Was it because moral theology would inform questions of human law?
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Yes, but also that theology (along with other disciplines like philosophy and rhetoric) were considered basic skills that were required for professionals of many different stripes (lawyers, statesmen, other public officials, etc.). Primarily because religion was a public affair, and it was expected that the educated class would be able to engage somewhat intelligently with the Church.

This is very different to the present day in Western society where religion is a “private” thing that you do in your own time, and where most people don’t undertake further formal study about their religion.
 
I think I get it. If I’m understanding you right, educated laymen were expected to know theology as part of being trained to engage in public life. That, essentially; an educated layman had to know something about theology to know what he was talking about and dealing with in his public career.

Like in classical times, an educated man was expected to learn skills that would train him to be an eloquent and critically thinking man prepared for a public career.
 
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catholic03 said:
Luther wanted to remove the Apocalypse of St John (Revelation) as well as other NT books. I believe he even wrote that he wanted them removed because they conflicted with ‘by faith alone’. But even the reformers told him that he was going too far. But to this day Revelation and other books he didn’t like are at the end of German Protestant bibles.
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I just want to note that the Book of Revelation is at the end of Catholic Bibles too.

🙂
 
Sorry, my mistake. 🙂 I meant that all the books he didn’t like are at the end and I even think they might be in a special section.
 
I’m not sure why so many of us Catholics think that Protestants don’t like or don’t study the deuterocanonical books.

The two major (completed) Septuagint (including the deuterocanon) critical texts of the 20th century were made by Protestants: Henry Swete (Anglican) at the University of Cambridge and Alfred Rahlfs (Evangelische) at the University of Gottingen. Most contemporary Septuagint translations (Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant) are based on Rahlfs’ text.

The current Gottingen critical text is still (very slowly) being completed, and it has a highly eclectic editorial board. There’s a Southern Baptist scholar (Prof Peter Gentry) and a Canadian Evangelical scholar (Prof Robert Hiebert) amongst several Italian and Spanish scholars whom I presume are Catholic.
 
If ours isn’t the Septuagint; that what is our canon based on?
 
I think our Bibles include books unique to the Septuagint tradition but the Orthodox are much more true to what was in the Septuagint. For example I own the NETS or the New English Translation of the Septuagint and this is the table of contents. Clearly there are books in the Septuagint not in our Bibles.
(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)
 
Bithynian said:
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Michael16:
Why did the Protestants remove these 7 OT books from their canon?
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The Reformers removed these deuterocanonical books primarily because their individual canonical status was generally rather vague (or doubted), even from the early Church (cf. disagreements between Catholic and Orthodox). The protocanonical books (Genesis to Malachi), on the other hand, were all consistently recognised as canonical whether Jews or Christians.
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I would recommend a book called “Why Catholic Bibles are Bigger” by Gary Machuta. He says the deuterocanonical books were removed by Protestant Bible societies in the 17th and 18th centuries. His timeline goes (loosely) like this:
  1. Luther translates the Bible into German and moves the 7 books to his appendix and calls them “Apocrypha” (meaning “not inspired”). He did this under his own authority
  2. Before 1599, nearly all Protestant Bibles included the deuterocanon.
  3. From 1526 to 1631, Protestant Bibles with the deuterocanon were the rule and not the exception
  4. By 1831, the deuterocanonical books more mostly expunged from Protestant Bibles
  5. What happened was that in the 1700’s, there were Bible Societies who were printing Bibles for mass distribution (thank you Gutenberg!), but around the early 1800’s the British and Foreign Bible Society was formed and became embroiled in a controversy, when some of its members wanted to defund groups who printed Bibles containing the deuterocanon (some of the members: Edinburgh Bible Society & Glasgow Bible Society). Primary reason was that the groups felt those books spread “popery”…their word, not mine.
So Luther moved the deuterocanons to the appendix, called the “apocrypha” and Protestant Bible societies stopped printing Bibles with the 7 books in question
 
Bithynian said:
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Michael16:
How did the Church decide on the canon?
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In terms of a precise, line-by-line reasoning of why X book was rejected and Y book was accepted: it’s unclear. It was, to an extent, an issue of tradition: the books that were accepted were those that had accompanied a particular Christianity community since its inception.
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Jimmy Akin’s answer to this question was basically a 2 fold response: 1) books written after the 1st century were called into question rejected, and 2) books that conflicted with Tradition (the Oral Gospel) were also rejected.
 
KMC said:
in the 1700’s, there were Bible Societies who were printing Bibles for mass distribution (thank you Gutenberg!)
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Before Gütenberg, Bibles were copied by hand. This is mire significant than many think, particularly for uniformity. Today we look at a Bible and see something that has thousands of mass produced cooies identical in almost every respect.

In the Middle Ages, it was very different. Copies of the Septuagint were assembled, usually from several scribes. Traditions of what should be included were strong, but someone might decide to include 3 Esdras because it was quoted by a Church father. Or he might mistake 3 Esdras for one of the Esdras on the list of Canonical books. In the West, St Jerome’s Vulgate provided a basic template which limited changes. In the East, greater variation occurred because there was no such typical edition, only individual Bibles that were subject to changes. That we have agreement about so much of what belongs seems almost miraculous.

In the last centuries before Christ, Jews began moving into the major cities of the Greek and Roman empires. The Hebrew bible was translated into Greek to help them maintain their religious roots. In Israel, the Jews who remained fought to maintain their identity by adhering to the Hebrew text. This developed into the Masoretic text, and a rejection of the Greek texts. Both groups were trying to maintain their identities as Jews, but the culture around them influenced which strategy they used. Some accepted the foreign language, others tried to reject all foreign influence.
 
I am not always a fan of Wikipedia, but this article on medieval university sums up nicely how higher education worked.

@Bithynian already explained nicely why Calvin’s law training would have included at least some moral philosophy, and probably theology as well. One can also remember that universities were rooted in Christian institutions (monastic schools, cathedral schools).

Our modern education system, which pushes to early specialization, is just that : modern. In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the idea was prevalent that an educated man should have been taught in all fields of human knowledge. Theology was of course thought to be the most important of these fields.
 
Well 3 and 4 Esdras and the Prayer of Manasseh were in the Vulgate for centuries. They weren’t part of the Canon of Trent but nonetheless Pope Clement Vlll put them in an appendix of the Clementine Vulgate in 1592 where they always were printed and still are in reproductions. The Nova Vulgate doesn’t include them.
But this explains why the original KJV includes these three texts with the deuterocanonical books as the Apocrypha and is part of that list even to this day( though they call 3 and 4 Esdras confusingly 1 and 2 Esdras). Actually the Anglican Communion considers 1(3) Esdras,2(4) Esdras, and the Prayer of Manasseh the same authority as any of the deuterocanonical books.
Source- Anglican 39 Articles of Religion.

Of the Names and Number of the Canonical Books.
Genesis, The First Book of Samuel, The Book of Esther,Exodus, The Second Book of Samuel, The Book of Job,Leviticus, The First Book of Kings, The Psalms,Numbers, The Second Book of Kings, The Proverbs,Deuteronomy, The First Book of Chronicles, Ecclesiastes or Preacher,Joshua, The Second Book of Chronicles, Cantica, or Songs of Solomon,Judges, The First Book of Esdras, Four Prophets the greater,Ruth, The Second Book of Esdras, Twelve Prophets the less.
And the other Books (as Hierome saith) the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine; such are these following:
The Third Book of Esdras, The rest of the Book of Esther,The Fourth Book of Esdras, The Book of Wisdom,The Book of Tobias, Jesus the Son of Sirach,The Book of Judith, Baruch the Prophet,
The Song of the Three Children, The Prayer of Manasses,The Story of Susanna, The First Book of Maccabees,Of Bel and the Dragon, The Second Book of Maccabees.

All the Books of the New Testament, as they are commonly received, we do receive, and account them Canonical.
 
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Or they included 3 Esdras because at the time of the earliest Councils Ezra and Nehemiah which weren’t separated until the 9th century were considered one book and it is very plausible 3 Esdras does belong in out bible because it would have been the second book of Esdras? 3 Esdras, 4 Esdras, and the Prayer of Manasseh probably belong in our Bibles honestly. The Council of Trent decided to just pass over them silently along with the other Orthodox books like 3 and 4 Maccabees. In theory they could be declared scripture someday.
 
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With that said, Catholic Bibles stopped including the Catholic apocrypha following the Douay Rheims Challoner Revision in 1752…
 
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