Please tell me this is not true

[Roman_Catholic_1]

I was reading this web-site geocities.com/aprofaith/bible.htm “Abridging the Bible” and it was talking about why the Prostestants dont have the same amount of books in the Bible as Catholic Bibles do… Well I came across this:

“Initially the seven Books continued to be placed in a section called the Apocrypha. But since it was cheaper to print bibles without them, the seven books were slowly dropped altogether.”

…Since it was cheaper to print bibles without them? Please tell me this isnt the reasoning behind excluding them now.

 

[Mike_D30]

Roman_Catholic:

I was reading this web-site geocities.com/aprofaith/bible.htm “Abridging the Bible” and it was talking about why the Prostestants dont have the same amount of books in the Bible as Catholic Bibles do… Well I came across this:

“Initially the seven Books continued to be placed in a section called the Apocrypha. But since it was cheaper to print bibles without them, the seven books were slowly dropped altogether.”

…Since it was cheaper to print bibles without them? Please tell me this isnt the reasoning behind excluding them now.

Protestants don’t consider the books of the Apocrypha inspired after the reformation. However they used to include them anyway in an index type of section. But since they no longer considered them inspired, they just figured why bother printing the Bible with them in there?

So I think it’s basically they didn’t consider the Apocrypha inspired because of thier theology. They stopped printing what they found to be uninspired because of cost, and growing hatred for anything Orthodox.

That’s my take…

Luther wanted to ditch James from the Bible too, but I guess someone talked him out of it.

 

[flameburns623]

Roman_Catholic:

I was reading this web-site geocities.com/aprofaith/bible.htm “Abridging the Bible” and it was talking about why the Prostestants dont have the same amount of books in the Bible as Catholic Bibles do… Well I came across this:

“Initially the seven Books continued to be placed in a section called the Apocrypha. But since it was cheaper to print bibles without them, the seven books were slowly dropped altogether.”

…Since it was cheaper to print bibles without them? Please tell me this isnt the reasoning behind excluding them now.

Actually many Puritans wanted the Apocrypha expunged much earlier; they felt that including the Deuterocanonicals in Scripture lent them an air of respectibility they did not deserve.

The Apocrypha were left out not to save money, generally, but specifically to save printing and shipping costs for missionary editions of the Bible being sent overseas. Such editions also became widely available at low cost outside of the missions fields and this fed their popularity. Since the Apocrypha were already seen in a poor light by Protestants generally, the habit of leaving those books out gradually became commonplace.

Cost certainly is not a major factor today. If you have ever seen ‘study editions’ of Protestant Bibles you know that enormous amounts of ‘Bible Helps’ are bound into them: maps, graphs and diagrams, commentaries, biographies, Bible dictionaries, concordances, topical indexes, summaries of the various books of the Bible, reading plans, even abbreviated histories of the translation of the Bible, etcetera are often found in such Bibles. (I am mentioning the main features of two actual study Bibles I have close at hand at the computer as I type this. The two I am looking at are the Thompson Chain-Reference Bible and The Open Bible. Both have virtually all of the features I just named plus many I didn’t).

In case this isn’t clear: reference Bibles and study Bibles are simply Bibles of any translation whatsoever which include reference or study helps. The same study Bible or reference Bible is often available in many popular translations–for example one can get the ThompsonChain Reference Bible in either the King James Version, the New King James Version, the New American Standard Bible version (not to be confused with the Roman Catholic New American Bible translation), or the New International Version. I mention this because I have seldom or never seen anything in a Roman Catholic edition of the Scriptures which would be an equivalent to Protestant study Bibles. Reference Bibles tend to cost considerably more than Bibles with minimal ‘helps’, so cost is not a factor any longer either.

The reason that Protestant generally leave the Apocrypha out even today is that they deem the books of limited historical interest and devoid of any spiritual qualities which would commend them as being placed on a par with the inspired books. Protestants point out that even Catholics deem these books part of a ‘secondary Canon’ and not at all reliable historically or theologically.

 

[Crumpy]

I am not a scholar, and I don’t know where I picked this up.
But, anyway… I think when Martin Luther was reorganizing everything during his part of the reformation, he went back to the version of Hebrew scriptures that had been adopted by the Jewish Rabbis in the first century or so.

That version of the OT did not have the apocrypha (“hidden”) books which Catholics call the Deuterocanonical.

The Catholic Bible is based on the Septuagint, which did include the Deuterocanonicals. There are plenty of threads on that, and some excellent posts which show the citations in the NT of the Deutero books. It’s hard to get around them, although there are yet other quotes or references to other non-inspired books or writings in the Bible.

The other part of Luther’s “spin” on the bible is that he supposedly wanted to eliminate the books which contained specifically Catholic practices, such as prayers for the dead.

Undoubtedly, there is more to the story, as well.

 

[MariaG]

You obviously received some good answers on your question. Not to go off track too much…but to respond to your signature…

THE SEAHAWKS WERE ROBBED!!!

Even Rothlisberger admits he didn’t think he made it in the goal. Not to mention the commentators comments on the robbed touchdown. How many bad calls does it take to turn the tide of a game? Just count the ones in the Super bowl for your answer.

Okay, back to the intent of this thread.

God Bless,
Maria

 

[Gottle_of_Geer]

Roman_Catholic:

I was reading this web-site geocities.com/aprofaith/bible.htm “Abridging the Bible” and it was talking about why the Prostestants dont have the same amount of books in the Bible as Catholic Bibles do… Well I came across this:

“Initially the seven Books continued to be placed in a section called the Apocrypha. But since it was cheaper to print bibles without them, the seven books were slowly dropped altogether.”

…Since it was cheaper to print bibles without them? Please tell me this isnt the reasoning behind excluding them now.

Cheaper when and where ?​

Are we talking abolut 16th century Europe, or 19th century England, or where (and when ?) ?

To quote:

“Seven Old Testament Books, however, remained excluded from Protestant Bibles. Initially the seven Books continued to be placed in a section called the Apocrypha. But since it was cheaper to print bibles without them, the seven books were slowly dropped altogether. By the 19th Century, the vast majority of Protestant Bibles did not carry the seven Books at all.”

That first sentence gives the context

The “books called Apocrypha” - a slightly larger group than the books and parts of books in the RC deuterocanon - were dropped from the Bibles printed by the Bible Society for distribution in England & Wales in 1827. I think this is what led to the abandonment of the binding up of the Apocrypha with the OT and NT.

As the Bible Society had come about only in 1804, it probably lacked the funds to print books which were in any case not regarded as properly poart of Scripture in its Bibles.

Theologically, this is a not unreasonable position - most Catholic Bibles don’t include 3 and 4 Esdras and the Prayer of Manasseh, though the 1598 edition of the Vulgate included them. They are the books of the Apocrypha we do not regard as canonical - the sample of books rejected is smaller for us than for Anglicans, but the principle is largely the same. The PoM appears in a number of pre-Tridentine Bibles, mixed in with the rest of the OT books. Among the NT Apocrypha, the Gospel of Nicodemus was treated as semi-quasi-canonical before the Reformation. ##

 

[ClaudineJohnson]

Crumpy:

I am not a scholar, and I don’t know where I picked this up.
But, anyway… I think when Martin Luther was reorganizing everything during his part of the reformation, he went back to the version of Hebrew scriptures that had been adopted by the Jewish Rabbis in the first century or so.

That version of the OT did not have the apocrypha (“hidden”) books which Catholics call the Deuterocanonical.

The Catholic Bible is based on the Septuagint, which did include the Deuterocanonicals. There are plenty of threads on that, and some excellent posts which show the citations in the NT of the Deutero books. It’s hard to get around them, although there are yet other quotes or references to other non-inspired books or writings in the Bible.

The other part of Luther’s “spin” on the bible is that he supposedly wanted to eliminate the books which contained specifically Catholic practices, such as prayers for the dead.

Undoubtedly, there is more to the story, as well.

Having grown up Protestant (Baptist/Methodist), then married a Lutheran and spent about 30 years in the Lutheran Church (ELCA) before becoming RC in 1994, here’s what I picked up along the way:

I don’t even recall a discussion of OT books by the Baptists or Methodists although perhaps I was too young to pay attention to such things.

The Lutheran parishes we attended held some classes on the history of the Bible. There much was made of the fact that the OT, being the Jewish Scriptures, contained the same books as the Jewish Canon. Purged books, as stated earlier in this thread, “affirmed some practices that the Protestants denied”. Later when I started asking questions about why the Catholics really included those books and read a few books about this I began to understand the history of the Canon of Scripture. The Apocrypha/Deuterocanonicals were part of the Scripture of the Early Church. No distinction was made in any of the NT writings about distinguishing between some books in that collection. And the Deuterocanonicals are broadly quoted in the NT. Then I discovered the Jewish Canon (OT) was not established at the time of the Early Church. One book I read even claimed that the reason for the Jews establishing a canon of scripture which excluded the Deuterocanonicals was that these books were being put to great use by Christians who were evangelizing Jews (so if the Jews denied they were Scripture, then they sort of closed the door to that sort of evangelization).

As to the Protestant Bibles with all sorts of study helps, I think there’s a two-edged sword there. Certainly indices, etc. can be helpful for a Bible student! On the other hand some Protestants with particular “new” (or I might say “heretical”) teachings were able to gain much ground by publishing Bibles that drew the reader to the passages they used to support their thinking. Many divergent positions can be supported from Scripture, if one just gets things aligned “properly”.

Claudine

 

[sadie2723]

Roman_Catholic:

I was reading this web-site geocities.com/aprofaith/bible.htm “Abridging the Bible” and it was talking about why the Prostestants dont have the same amount of books in the Bible as Catholic Bibles do… Well I came across this:

“Initially the seven Books continued to be placed in a section called the Apocrypha. But since it was cheaper to print bibles without them, the seven books were slowly dropped altogether.”

…Since it was cheaper to print bibles without them? Please tell me this isnt the reasoning behind excluding them now.

Good news for you! That is not the reason that they do not use them now. It all goes back to Luther wanting to start his own thing. Simple really, he wanted to start his own denomination, and the easiest way to do that was to throw out some of the Catholic books so you could come up with doctrine that could contradict Catholic teaching. Because he did not like the Catholic teaching on certain subjects, he tried to remove all of the books that supported Catholic teaching.

The real reason, of course, is that he wanted to get married.

Have a great day!

Brad