Is the Catholic Bible correct?

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Paul1998 said:
I’ve noticed that the Catholic Bible has 14 more books than the Protestant one.
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How do you make it fourteen? I make it seven. Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach (Ecclesiasticus), 1 & 2 Maccabees, and Baruch. What are the other seven in your Catholic Bible?
 
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These books consist of 1 and 2 Esdras, Tobit, Judith, the Rest of Esther, the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, (also titled Ecclesiasticus), Baruch, The Letter of Jeremiah, Song of the Three Young Men, Susanna, Bel and the Dragon, The Additions to Daniel, The Prayer of Manasseh, and 1 and 2 Maccabees.

All but three which were traditionally in the Vulgate were reaffirmed by the Council of Trent. So Catholics agree with Protestants that 1 and 2 Esdras and the Prayer of Manasseh are apocrypha, that is useful to read but not scripture. Protestants think that regarding all of these books.
 
Yah that’s because in the Catholic Bible some are just inserted into other books.
  1. Tobit
  2. Judith
  3. Sirach
  4. Wisdom
  5. 1 Maccabees
  6. 2 Maccabees
  7. Baruch
  8. Letter of Jeremiah which is chapter 6 of Baruch.
  9. Prayer of Azariah and song of the Three Jews is inserted in between chapter 3: 23- 24 in Daniel.
  10. Susanna is chapter 13 of Daniel
  11. Bel and the Dragon is chapter 14 of Daniel
  12. Additions to Esther
The traditional apocrypha which was in the Latin Vulgate appendix following the Council of Trent and made it’s way into the Protestant Apocrypha as well are
13) Prayer of Manasseh
14 3 Esdras( most modern Bibles 1 Esdras)
15) 4 Esdras ( most modern Bibles 2 Esdras)
((The reason is in the Vulgate, Ezra and Nehemiah are 1 and 2 Esdras))
This is why it’s 14. If you don’t count the additions to Esther the Protestant apocrypha makes up 14 books.
Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, Letter of Jeremiah, Prayer of Azariah and Song of the Three Jews, Susanna, Bel and the Dragon, 1 Maccabees, 2 Maccabees are in the Catholic Bible. That’s 11. 1 Esdras, 2 Esdras, Prayer of Manasseh are in Vulgate but were not reaffirmed by the Council of Trent and moved to an appendix of the Vulgate starting with the Sixto Clementine Vulgate of 1592. But Protestants had already included these three into the traditional apocrypha before this.

With that said, Eastern Orthodox accept all of the books mentioned above and additionally add
  1. 3 Maccabees
  2. Psalm 151
  3. 4 Maccabees ( in an appendix to the Greek Bible)
The reason is the early Church used the Septuagint. Jerome distinguishes the differences. The additions are not found in the Hebrew Bible. Protestant reformers very influenced by Jerome decided not to accept these books as scripture but only as " useful to read" . Entire books have been written on the Canon. A Bible can have anywhere from 66 Books of a standard Protestant Bible to 81 of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, which includes other books such as 1 Enoch and Jubilees.
 
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Paul1998 said:
I’ve noticed that the Catholic Bible has 14 more books than the Protestant one.
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Don’t you mean seven? There’s:
  1. Judith
  2. Tobit
  3. Wisdom
  4. Sirach
  5. 1 Maccabee
  6. 2 Maccabee
  7. Baruch
Our versions of Daniel and Esther are also longer.
Paul1998 said:
Do you think that those books are worth being in the canon?
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There were some pretty major councils that declared them as canon by the end of the fourth century, and they were obviously seeing at least some widespread use in the Church well before that. Their ubiquity can continue being seen today in how both Catholics and Eastern Orthodox have maintained those books despite the Great Schism.

Ultimately, I think the burden of proof is on Protestants for why they removed those books. And personally I don’t find citing a Jewish canon made after Christ had already established the Church that convincing.
 
Onthisrock84 said:
  1. Tobit
  2. Judith
  3. Sirach
  4. Wisdom
  5. 1 Maccabees
  6. 2 Maccabees
  7. Baruch
  8. Letter of Jeremiah which is chapter 6 of Baruch.
  9. Prayer of Azariah and song of the Three Jews is inserted in between chapter 3: 23- 24 in Daniel.
  10. Susanna is chapter 13 of Daniel
  11. Bel and the Dragon is chapter 14 of Daniel
  12. Additions to Esther
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My point exactly. #1 to 7 in your list are books in the Catholic Bible. #8 to 12 are not separate books in the Catholic Bible. We have seven more books than the Protestant Bible, not fourteen more books.
 
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Roseeurekacross said:
Its more correct to ask why did our separated brethren, the Protestants, the protestors, take 7 books out of the Bible when they separated 🙂
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Martin Luther would have liked to also remove the Book of James from the Bible. He called it ’ a Book of straw ’ This is the Book where St.James teaches that ’ Faith without works is dead ’ .
 
Most of the time, folks don’t cite references for what they say. I try to do that. In regard to this subject I cite THE JEWISH STUDY BIBLE, 2ND EDITION (Oxford Univ Press). There are 400 pages of interesting essays appended to the study bible. The essay on the Dead Sea Scrolls points out that there were three separate traditions of Jewish writings found at Qumran. These would be the Samaritan Torah (which is all they recognized), the Hebrew text which was the precursor of the Masoretic text (this latter which Luther used for his German Bible), and ALL the Hebrew scrolls which were the basis of the Septuagint. (all this as best as I understand this reference)

Luther didn’t want translations of translations, so he didn’t use the Vulgate or the Septuagint. He also rejected the evidence of the Septuagint as to which books the Jews regarded as inspired as someone said above, prior to 132 BC

Luther CHOSE to use the Masoretic text, the oldest versions in existence dated to about 900 AD. Now this information I believe I obtained from Jaroslav Pelikan’s WHOSE BIBLE IS IT (as I recall).

The DSS wouldn’t come along until about 450 years after Luther translated the Bible. Now, logically, Luther would have had to use SOME Greek text for the New Testament, as it was written in Greek. But, he rejected the Septuagint.

Now, his rejection was inconsistent, since the New Testament refers so often to the Septuagint version of the Old Testament, or uses paraphrases of it.

My opinion: some say that the NT doesn’t ALWAYS use the Septuagint when quoting the OT. My response is, how do you know that? The Septuagint does not always disagree with the Masoretic text. So, I’m saying, there are texts that are the same in both sources. So, I tend not to give any credit to the Masoretic text.

Further, there was no dictionary of Hebrew when the OT was written, so the LXX becomes the next best thing to capture the meaning of the Hebrew.

Aramaic enters the Bible because that was the language adopted – politically – during the Babylonian captivity. Near the end of the book of Nehemiah, he complains that almost half of the Jewish children don’t know Hebrew because they were brought up with Aramaic. see next post
 
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When Cyrus allowed the Jews to return from Babylon, that was not a “return from captivity” because they were still a vassal state of Cyrus, and they spoke Aramaic. Jesus spoke Aramaic for this reason. got this in some other book (sorry).

The Catholic Bible is correct because the CC “canonized” it – that is to say, determined which books could be read during the liturgy.

The Orthodox have no canonized text, they simply follow the tradition that they recognize (from, The Orthodox Study Bible).
 
otrrl said:
Most of the time, folks don’t cite references for what they say. I try to do that. In regard to this subject I cite THE JEWISH STUDY BIBLE, 2ND EDITION (Oxford Univ Press). There are 400 pages of interesting essays appended to the study bible. The essay on the Dead Sea Scrolls points out that there were three separate traditions of Jewish writings found at Qumran. These would be the Samaritan Torah (which is all they recognized), the Hebrew text which was the precursor of the Masoretic text (this latter which Luther used for his German Bible), and ALL the Hebrew scrolls which were the basis of the Septuagint. (all this as best as I understand this reference)
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The Wikipedia Article, “The Dead Sea Scrolls,” has a list of OT books discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls. What is important in the present discussion is that among them were some of the deuterocanonical books and text (Tobit, Sirach and Baruch 6) that were excluded from the Jewish canon.

Hey Otrri, you seem to be a very good researcher yourself. Nice to meet you here.🙂
 
Gorgias said:
No.

There were seven books removed by Reformation denominations. 😉
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Hahaha. You are right. The Protestant Reformers removed them after the Church recognized the additional 7 as part of the Old Testament writings. However, the Jewish Rabbis also excluded them from their canon around A.D.100.
 
HolyBookEnds said:
Which, now thinking about it, is there any evidence that any of the Catholic Deuter-canon (Apocrypha (Prot.)) were ever in Hebrew/Chaldee or other than Greek?
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The evidence is in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Among the books in their original Hebrew / Aramaic languages, which were discovered with the Dead Sea Scrolls, are Tobit, Sirach, and Baruch Ch. 6 (aka the Letter of Jeremias). Unfortunately, Judith was not found, but that does not mean that it was only fabricated. Esther was not found either, and yet it was recognized by both the Protestants and the Jews as part of the OT. Therefore, the absence of evidence is not an evidence for the absence of the book in the Bible used by Christ and the early Christians.
 
HolyBookEnds said:
Well, to be balanced on that, the reason that they ‘removed’ them, is because the protestant Reformation believed that Rome added those additional Greek texts.
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Actually Rome (or the Catholic Church) did not add those books. They were already in the Septuagint, which was the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible composed by Jewish scholars (not Catholic Christian scholars).
 
HolyBookEnds said:
Could you post a link to those mss online (if available), I would like to see them, and the language itself. I pray you are not offended that I do not take your word, but I also do not always know where to look.
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I am not sure that there is a link to the actual manuscript, but here is one that speaks of four fragments in Aramaic ( # 4Q196-199) and one in Hebrew (4Q200) of the book of Tobit. You can find this in google books in the link provided below, footnote 84, p. 37.
Tobit Fragment Info
 
HolyBookEnds said:
They would basically say that Origen made up the Septuagint, in his Hexapla, or at least protestants do so now. They would state that the letter to Aristeas was a fake, or a fraudulent story (If you want, I will see if I can find and repeat what is stated).
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Dear HolyBookEnds (I like your username!)

I don’t exactly know what is meant when they say that Origen made up the Septuagint. If they meant that he composed the Septuagint circa A.D. 200, then they are wrong. The Hexapla of Origen is a book where he made parallel comparisons between the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint, and other Greek translations. (It is like an interlinear bible where you have text in different languages on parallel columns.) That means, the Septuagint was already existing, and he was using it to compare the translation with the Hebrew and other translations. He was commenting on the Septuagint, not composing it.

The letter of Aristeas proposed to give the origin of the Septuagint, but there are questionable details in his story. However, this does not mean that the writing of the Septuagint did not begin in the 3rd century and was finished in the middle of the second century. You see, when Alexander the Great rose to power, Greek became the language mostly spoken in his Empire, which included Egypt. In the third century, many of the Jews in Alexandria, Egypt, did not speak Hebrew anymore; they spoke Greek. This was the reason the Septuagint was composed – for the use of the Greek-speaking Jews in Alexandria and elsewhere at the east end of the Mediterranean Sea. If you deny (like the man in the video) that the Septuagint was finished by 132 BC, then you need to explain what Bible the Jews in Alexandria were using then, since they didn’t speak Hebrew.

I will not comment on the video because I do not want to get out of topic. But here is a link that gives the origin of the Septuagint.

Blessings!

Rom
 
In all such cases of doubt, it is very good to read the brief but profound book Where We Got The Bible by the Rev. Henry Graham. He goes back, even before the “reformation”(!) and details the extreme pains that the Church took throughout history to collect, canonize, propagate, maintain and yes, to disseminate the scriptures.

All Christians and aspiring Christians should read it.
 
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