The 80 books of Scripture

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Hmmm… From a Protestant site. There seems to be no credible argument against the Deutero-Canonicals (Apocrypha) anywhere. Does anyone know of a supporting source for the 1880’s date?

“Up until the 1880’s every Protestant Bible (not just Catholic Bibles) had 80 books, not 66! The inter-testamental books written hundreds of years before Christ called “The Apocrypha” were part of virtually every printing of the Tyndale-Matthews Bible, the Great Bible, the Bishops Bible, the Protestant Geneva Bible, and the King James Bible until their removal in the 1880’s! The original 1611 King James contained the Apocrypha, and King James threatened anyone who dared to print the Bible without the Apocrypha with heavy fines and a year in jail. Only for the last 120 years has the Protestant Church rejected these books, and removed them from their Bibles. This has left most modern-day Christians believing the popular myth that there is something “Roman Catholic” about the Apocrypha. There is, however, no truth in that myth, and no widely-accepted reason for the removal of the Apocrypha in the 1880’s has ever been officially issued by a mainline Protestant denomination.”

greatsite.com/timeline-english-bible-history/index.html

CDL
 
There are two commonly heard arguments against the dueterocanon.
  1. They aren’t written in Hebrew.
    Ans: Who cares. Perhaps we can arbitrarily decide that only books written by Moses are inspired. Then we need only point to this fact to discount the rest of the OT. Of course, I’m mocking them here, but the Pharisees (I think) themselves only accepted the Torah.
  2. The Jews didn’t believe them to be inspired.
    Ans: Well, this is a more worthy argument, and deserves at least the time to look into it. First, as I said above, the pharisees onlyl accepted the Torah as inspired, so why don’t we cast out everything else? Different groups of Jews accepted different books as inspired. Even today the Assyrian Jews accept our dueterocanon. So the thing we must concern ourselves with is what books did Jesus and the apostles accept as inspired. To determine this we look at the times the NT quotes the OT. About 90% of the time, the qoutes more directly line up with those found in the Septuagint (LLX), the Greek version of the Bible. The Septuagint contains the dueterocanon, so we can reasonably assume that Jesus did the same.
 
While Noah Webster, just a few years after producing his famous Dictionary of the English Language, would produce his own modern translation of the English Bible in 1833; the public remained too loyal to the King James Version for Webster’s version to have much impact. It was not really until the 1880’s that England’s own planned replacement for their King James Bible, the English Revised Version(E.R.V.) would become the first English language Bible to gain popular acceptance as a post-King James Version modern-English Bible. The widespread popularity of this modern-English translation brought with it another curious characteristic:** the absence of the 14 Apocryphal books.**
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Up until the 1880’s every Protestant Bible (not just Catholic Bibles) had 80 books, not 66! The inter-testamental books written hundreds of years before Christ called “The Apocrypha” were part of virtually every printing of the Tyndale-Matthews Bible, the Great Bible, the Bishops Bible, the Protestant Geneva Bible, and the King James Bible until their removal in the 1880’s! The original 1611 King James contained the Apocrypha, and King James threatened anyone who dared to print the Bible without the Apocrypha with heavy fines and a year in jail. Only for the last 120 years has the Protestant Church rejected these books, and removed them from their Bibles. This has left most modern-day Christians believing the popular myth that there is something “Roman Catholic” about the Apocrypha. There is, however, no truth in that myth, and no widely-accepted reason for the removal of the Apocrypha in the 1880’s has ever been officially issued by a mainline Protestant denomination.
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The Americans responded to England’s E.R.V. Bible by publishing the nearly-identical American Standard Version (A.S.V.) in 1901. It was also widely-accepted and embraced by churches throughout America for many decades as the leading modern-English version of the Bible. In the 1971, it was again revised and called New American Standard Version Bible (often referred to as the N.A.S.V. or N.A.S.B. or N.A.S.). This New American Standard Bible is considered by nearly all evangelical Christian scholars and translators today, to be the most accurate, word-for-word translation of the original Greek and Hebrew scriptures into the modern English language that has ever been produced. It remains the most popular version among theologians, professors, scholars, and seminary students today. Some, however, have taken issue with it because it is so direct and literal a translation (focused on accuracy), that it does not flow as easily in conversational English.
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worldbiblesociety.org/history_of_bible.html

google.com/search?hl=en&q=1880+Protestant+Bible+Society
 
Luther removed the books, because they refuted two of his beliefs - praying for souls of the dead, and the concept of purgatory.

I heard on CA Live that the book of Sirach was the standard book used for “RCIA” in the old days, and one of the books so was so grounded in the Church its name was change to Ecclesiastes.

History is pretty clear that the books were always there, since the Catholic Church first created the Bible, and Luther removed them as part of the reform movement.
 
If the books were part of Protestant bibles until 1880, why were they removed and wasn’t there an outcry?
 
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awalt:
Luther removed the books, because they refuted two of his beliefs - praying for souls of the dead, and the concept of purgatory.

I heard on CA Live that the book of Sirach was the standard book used for “RCIA” in the old days, and one of the books so was so grounded in the Church its name was change to Ecclesiastes.

History is pretty clear that the books were always there, since the Catholic Church first created the Bible, and Luther removed them as part of the reform movement.
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I was under the impression that Luther simply placed those books in the back of the bible in a sort of appendix. I might be completly wrong, though.
 
How could Luther have removed any books?
He was dead long before the 1880’s!!
 
There was a collection of Scripture “books” in use at the time of Jesus that Catholics use in our Old Testament which includes the books that we called Deuterocanonical (lesser books). This is the same canon of Scripture that Jews used until about the year 100 AD. They decided that since they could not find originals in Hebrew of certain books that they should removed from the revised collection of books. Therefore, the Jews after Jesus’s time started using the canon that was eventually adopted by most Protestants as the Old Testament.What is interesting is that within the last 50 years or so partial ancient copies of the disputed books have been found in Hebrew from a dig site, so the Jews in the 100’s were wrong. This is one of the reasons that I’m glad to trust in the teaching authority of the Catholic Church. The Holy Spirit protects her from error in this area, so we know that the books that she chose as inspired books to make up the complete Bible are correct.
 
Maybe it was his ghost. We really should put Jenfer Love Hewit on the case.

meant in good humor
 
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GregoryPalamas:
Does anyone know of a supporting source for the 1880’s date?
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I’ve heard they were removed following an order from the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1885, although some publishers had been printing Bibles without the deuterocanonicals/apocrypha before that date anyway.
 
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thistle:
How could Luther have removed any books?
He was dead long before the 1880’s!!
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Luther said the “apocryphal” books were merely “useful and good for reading” but were not inspired. Together with these he lumped James, Jude, Hebrews, and Revelation.

However, he did not rip them out of his editions, rather, he relegated them to an appendix.

(There are 72 books in the Catholic canon. If we split off The Song of the Three Young Men, Susanna, and Bel and the Dragon from Daniel, that makes 75. Then we split off the Letter of Jeremiah from Baruch, we get 76. Throw in 1 and 2 Esdras, the Prayer of Manasseh, and Psalm 151, that makes 80. The last four though are not part of the Catholic canon.)
 
Thanks porthos for posting that - I was scrolling down getting ready to post something very similar about the books of the Catholic canon vs the 80 that you find in for example the RSV Common Edition.

I was looking into the Orthodox Study Bible recently (not with a view to conversion, just study) and read an orthodox review of it that was very critical. Among other things it uses (I think) the New King James version (or was it the NRSV) which doesn’t have psalm 151. Since that psalm is part of orthodox scripture, the review moaned greatly. Anyway, that’s off topic, but the review totally put me off buying the book.
 
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buzzcut:
I’ve heard they were removed following an order from the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1885, although some publishers had been printing Bibles without the deuterocanonicals/apocrypha before that date anyway.
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“Contrary to common belief the Deuterocanonical books were NEVER really removed. Throughout the following centuries we find that in the KJV the Deuterocanonical books have appeared and disappeared in a apparent whirlwind of apparent confession, all depending on the whims of the individual printers. In 1880 the The American Bible Society voted to remove the books they called “Apocrypha” from there Bibles. The “Apocrypha” was officially removed from the English printings of the KJV by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1885 leaving only 66 books.”

spokanevalleybaptist.com/bible.html

google.com/search?hl=en&q=Apocrypha+Archbishop+of+Canterbury++1885&spell=1

Interrresting,
 
awalt said:
I heard on CA Live that the book of Sirach was the standard book used for “RCIA” in the old days, and one of the books so was so grounded in the Church its name was change to Ecclesiastes.
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Actually Sirach was called Ecclesiasticus, meaning ecclesiastical. Ecclesiastes is another book which is considered canonical by Protestants.
 
There’s not much difference between “Removing” and “moving to an appendix” - if “moving to an appendix” means denying the canonicity of the Apocrypha. He may as well have replaced them with the Sunday comics once he denied their canonicity.

Luther needed to hide behind something to get 2 Maccabees (especially) out of the canon. The fact they weren’t originally written in Hebrew was enough for him. The problem was, he desperately wanted James out as well, since it blatantly contradicts sole fide. But in that case, he had no cover. So it stayed in, and he resolved it by adding the word to “alone” in the German translation of Paul’s letter to the Roman’s (3:28) - man is justified by “faith”… ALONE.
 
tm30 said:
There’s not much difference between “Removing” and “moving to an appendix” - if “moving to an appendix” means denying the canonicity of the Apocrypha. He may as well have replaced them with the Sunday comics once he denied their canonicity.

Luther needed to hide behind something to get 2 Maccabees (especially) out of the canon. The fact they weren’t originally written in Hebrew was enough for him. The problem was, he desperately wanted James out as well, since it blatantly contradicts sole fide. But in that case, he had no cover. So it stayed in, and he resolved it by adding the word to “alone” in the German translation of Paul’s letter to the Roman’s (3:28) - man is justified by “faith”… ALONE.
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I guess that must be only in Luther’s German Bible translation. I don’t see “alone” in the English translations of Romans 3:28.

From the Douay-Rheims, “For we account a man to be justified by faith, without the works of the law.”

From the KJV, “Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law.”

From the RSV, “For we hold that a man is justified by faith apart from works of law.”

From the NASB, “For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the Law.”

From the NAB, “For we consider that a person is justified by faith apart from works of the law.”

From the NIV, “For we maintain that a man is justified by faith apart from observing the law.”

I don’t see “alone” in any of the most popular English translations, Catholic or Protestant.
 
Luther translated a bible into the German language which he failed [refused] to submit to his Bishop for approval. It would never have recieved approval because he added teh word ‘alone’ to the passage in Romans. HE may very well have removed James, Jude, Hebrews and Revelation from i=his original manuscript [don’t know]. What is relevent is that the relegation to appendix was Luther’s attempt to appease the other reformers, who did not care for Luther’s playing fast and loose with scripture. This was true even if they bought some of his 'new theolocial innovations.

The other reformers prevailed upon Luther and the books were restored. As far as tranlations go currently and the adding of words, much biblical scholarship has transpired since Luther’s time. While there are still some hoorible translations in vogue most bibles are fairly accurate translations.

As for the septuagint texts not being in hebrew, that b=may be true for some but the book [or parts thereof] of Sirach was found at Qumran in both greek and hebrew. That was the first comfirmation that Sirach had been in use in palastine during the time of Jesus and was available in hebrew. One of my scripture professors was a dead sea scholar, spent a year on sabatical just prior to my class, studying the scrolls.
 
YADA said:
As far as tranlations go currently and the adding of words, much biblical scholarship has transpired since Luther’s time. While there are still some hoorible translations in vogue most bibles are fairly accurate translations.
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So, was this problem of adding words to the Scripture confined to non-English translations?
 
awalt said:
Luther removed the books, because they refuted two of his beliefs - praying for souls of the dead, and the concept of purgatory.

I heard on CA Live that the book of Sirach was the standard book used for “RCIA” in the old days, and one of the books so was so grounded in the Church its name was change to Ecclesiastes.

**I think that should be Ecclesiasticus:) Ecclesiastes is part of everyones Bible…Protestant, Catholic or Orthodox. **

History is pretty clear that the books were always there, since the Catholic Church first created the Bible, and Luther removed them as part of the reform movement.
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