Don’t you know that he rejected books from the Bible, with which he disagreed? That’s why Lutherans don’t know the teaching that “it is a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead that they may be loosed from their sins.” (2 Macc 12:46).
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this should help with the whole removing the books problem.
There is sometimes a lot of confusion surrounding the difference between the “Roman Catholic Bible” and the “Protestant Bible” and Luther’s part in all that.
First, it should be noted that the official canon of the Christian Bible was not formally ironed out by the 16th Century. Part of the reason was that there was no real reason, since the church controlled access to the Bible anyway. Once the printing presses began producing Luther’s German translation of the Bible, things began to change. Luther’s translation was the first successful (in that he and his books escaped the flames that thwarted earlier attempts such as Tyndale) edition of the Bible in the vernacular–the language of the people in a particular place. Now many people had their own editions of the Scriptures and could read them in their own homes.
Before it went to press, Luther had to make a decision on what books made up the Bible. The gray area at the time was what we call the Apocrypha. They are also often called “The Deutercanonical” books. They are a small collection that mostly reflect history and writings from what would call “in between the Testaments” --from about 400 BCE to the Time of Jesus.
In Luther’s time, the debate over these books centered on their origin. The books in question are found in the Greek version of the Old Testament, called “The Septuagint” (a translation from the Hebrew done about 100 years before Jesus), but not in Hebrew versions. Complicating the issue, Jewish scholar had no firm opinion whether or not they were “Scripture” or just holy books. Luther chose to follow the latter, saying that books were useful and instructive but not Scripture. He went with the “Hebrew only” side of the debate, and left these books out.
The Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation reacted with a Canon of their own and at the Council of Trent, officially dictated that the Biblical Canon included the books Protestants now called the Apocrypha.
So the difference between a “Catholic” Bible and a “Protestant” one centers around whether to include these books in the Old Testament or either not at all or in a separate section (which some Bible have).
As for the Revelation text, it is really important to note that that verse only refers to the “message of this book” i.e Revelation, not the whole book of the Bible (since it was not yet compiled as the book we know). It is interesting to note that for the past 500 years Protestants AND Roman Catholics have been using that exact verse against each other in the debate over these books. They are, in that case, both wrong.
we as lutherans do read these other books. they just arent in our bible. and they are all from the old testament. . we belive that when Jesus died for our sins, new testament, that all sins were erased. we see praying for the dead like saying jesus death was not good enough to wipe clean all your sins, only some.
