The Deuterocanonicals and the Hebrews…

[The_Iambic_Pen]

In my ongoing quest to discover the truth, I have not limited myself solely to Catholic sources. I figure that since I was raised as a Protestant, I should at least give it a fair chance before making a decision to accept Catholicism. So, I have been seeking out Protestant apologetics information. However, most Protestant apologists are focused primarily on defending Christianity, not Protestantism in particular. While this is certainly admirable, it doesn’t help me in this particular search of mine. I have read Christian apologetics (Josh McDowell’s simple, straightforward book, More than a Carpenter–which I highly recommend–comes to mind), and I have no doubt Christianity is true. What I have been trying to determine lately is whether or not Catholicism is true. Well, obviously Catholics are going to say it is, so I believed, that for the sake of legitimate study, I should seek out the opinions of the “other side.”

Well, as you probably suspected, my investigation of Protestants who focus on the perceived “wrongness” of Catholicism has failed to reveal any decent arguments. As I read their arguments, I detected numerous logical fallacies, a warped view of what Catholics really believe, and, in many cases, a good deal of outright hostility.

I was browsing the forum at Baptist.org, a site someone had mentioned as being anti-Catholic, when I discovered a thread about the “Apocrypha.” In it, I noticed one solitary Catholic debating several Baptists (including one amusing “King James only” type, whose signature showed a man running from the flames of other Bible versions to the safety of the King James Bible) about the canon of Scripture. Well, the overall argument of the Baptists seemed to be, “There are 66 books in the Bible, and if you disagree with this, you are a stupid-head.” The idea was that God inspired the writers of these 66 books, who wrote down their books and gave us the Bible. How the canon was actually decided on never really came up. When the Catholic asked one of the members how he knew which books were canonical, the member’s response was, and I quote, “I am not going to answer! I could be really mean right here but, I ‘ll chill.” (improper comma use and extra space his… ). I have seen this before in debates over the years (I used to debate religion, politics and morality a lot on the internet during college), and I have learned that a self righteous refusal to answer is basically the same as saying, “You win, but I don’t want to admit it.”

Now, all of that being said, one of the Baptists actually did bring up an interesting point. He said that the Deuterocanonicals were not including in the Hebrew Scriptures, but only in the Greek Septuagint. This was disturbing to me, as I thought it odd that the Christians would declare Old Testament works to be canonical when the Jews themselves rejected them (though they still saw them as having historical value). However, when I was browsing this site: geocities.com/confiteor_deo/convert.html, I found out that the Hebrew Canon (aka the “Palestinian Canon”) was actually compiled after the Greek (aka the Alexandrian) Canon. So, the Jews who compiled the Palestinian Canon (around AD 100) actually removed books that the Greek-speaking Jews accepted. Going back to the Baptist.org forums, the Catholic was asking the Baptists why they preferred the Canon accepted by Jews who didn’t believe in Jesus, rather than the Canon accepted by Christians.

Well, as you might expect, no real good answer came of this, and soon after the “I am not going to answer!” post came up. Anyway, despite the hostility and poor logic of (most of) the Baptists posting in that thread, I still came away with some questions. And……here they are:

Did the Early Church Fathers accept the Deuterocanonicals as being inspired? (I did notice today that Pope Clement mentioned Judith in his epistle to the Corinthians)
Does anyone know Luther’s reasons for removing them?
Does anyone know why the Jews compiling the Palestinian Canon removed the Deuterocanonicals?
Were the Greek-speaking Jews the only ones who accepted the Deuterocanonicals to begin with?

Anyway, those are a few questions I have. Don’t worry, I’m not being lazy and just expecting others to do the research for me. I am definitely continuing my study. I just figure some of you might know some information about this subject. As always, I thank you for your patience and your answers. God bless!

 

[Ghosty]

Amusing story, to be sure

I won’t go into too much detail, as it’s late and I’m tired, but I figured I’d toss some basic answers your way, and you can look stuff up from there.

Did the Early Church Fathers accept the Deuterocanonicals as being inspired? (I did notice today that Pope Clement mentioned Judith in his epistle to the Corinthians)

Some did, some didn’t. Some accepted some, while rejecting others. Same with the New Testament. Basically, the reason that the issue of Biblical Canon had to be settled by Council was precisely because no one could agree on which books were inspired. This problem was exacerbated by the fact that almost no one had all the books compiled in one place. You had many churches with only parts of the Old Testament, a couple of the Gospels, and an epistle or two. Things weren’t bound together back then the way they are now, so it was tough and rare to get them all together. Basically it boils down to this: finding a consensus on inspiration beyond the Gospels is a losing proposition. It took councils to settle the matter, and any Protestant who says otherwise is kidding themselves

Does anyone know Luther’s reasons for removing them?

I believe it was because they weren’t accepted by the Jews, but I could be wrong. He also wanted to remove the Epistle of James, so who knows what he was thinking. Someone more versed on Luther would be able to give you more information.

Does anyone know why the Jews compiling the Palestinian Canon removed the Deuterocanonicals?

Technically they didn’t remove anything, because no Palestinian Canon had been compiled yet. See, the folks who decided on the Palestinian Canon were of the mindset that unless they had a copy of something in Hebrew, it simply shouldn’t be used as Scripture. What’s interesting is that things like the holiday of Hannukah are actually from the Septuagint, and Jews still celebrate that today, so they didn’t drop that stuff entirely. The problem with the deuteros, in their eyes (and from my understanding) is that they didn’t have any original copies in Hebrew, so they couldn’t rightly consider them Scripture by their standards. They have even originally been written in Greek (by Jews, of course). The Pharisees wanted to solidify and standardize Jewish Scripture, which simply hadn’t been done before (the Sadducees had a different Canon from even the Pharisees). They made the rules, and those rules are what they follow today (as do the Protestants, ironically).

Were the Greek-speaking Jews the only ones who accepted the Deuterocanonicals to begin with?

Well, since most Jews apparently could speak Greek, this is actually a rather interesting question As I said before, Hannukah comes from the Septuagint, 1 Maccabees 4 and 2 Maccabees 10:1-8 to be precise. All Jews accept this story from what I understand, it just didn’t meet the standards for including it in Canon. I should point out that the Jews’ relationship to Scripture is far more like the Catholics than the Protestants. The Sacred Tradition is extremely important, taking up more bulk than Scripture by far, and it’s given incredible weight. Sola Scriptura is an extremely foreign (and uncomfortable) idea for them, because they rightly recognize that Scripture simply doesn’t come straight out and say things clearly (espescially in Hebrew). The Catholic approach of Sacred Tradition comes directly, and I mean directly, from its Jewish roots. The Catholic Church is an olive that fell very, very close to the tree, so to speak, and most Jews who study the Church will tell you the same. The Church is, quite simply, a post-Messianic type of Judaism, though Jews would obviously differ with us about the identity and nature of the Messiah.

God bless, and I hope others can follow up and correct me, not to mention fill in the gaps!

 

[prodromos]

As far as I know, the Ethiopian Jews still use the Greek Septuagint as their biblical canon.

John

 

[Manhattan42]

Did the Early Church Fathers accept the Deuterocanonicals as being inspired? (I did notice today that Pope Clement mentioned Judith in his epistle to the Corinthians)

It is interesting to note that where the authors of the Gospels, Epistles or other New Testament writings cite the Old Testament, they pretty much quote from the Septuagint.

Luther is a strange bird even by Protestant standards. He was highly anti-semitic (at leat later in life) but also wished to remove the Book of James, Revelation, some letters by John, and Hebrews from the Canon because they essentially disproved his positions.

Does anyone know why the Jews compiling the Palestinian Canon removed the Deuterocanonicals?

As already mentioned, the Jewish Canon from Jamnia in 90ad simply confirmed that the Pharisaic version of the Scripture (ie the ‘Jewish Canon’) was the correct version and would not include the Deuteros.

Were the Greek-speaking Jews the only ones who accepted the Deuterocanonicals to begin with?

This is an interesting situation because by Jesus’ day there were really few Hebrew speaking and reading Jews left. Hebrew died as a language some 500years before during the Palestinian captivity and only a few scholars were left by the 1st century who could actually read Hebrew. (much like Latin within the Church today)

The Greek conquest of Palestine in about 300ad not only saw a shift in language to Greek for most of the world’s Jews, it also brought a significant cultural revolution as well.

The majority of Jews embraced Greek culture over Hebrew culture which included Greek literature, science, and education and even the physical disciplines of the gymnasia.

Alexandria had replaced Jersualem as the center of Jewish religion, learning and scholarship so much so, that replicas of the Temple were built in Egypt. It was here that the Septuagint was penned to provide the Scripture in a language most Jews could understand.

The newly revived priestly class which did serve in the Palestinian Temple was founded during this Greek period and it was this priestly class, the Saducees, who embraced Greek Judaism. The Saducees embraced logic and reason over the spiritual.

The Deutros were written during this period and were written in the Greek, and in many places even re-write Jewish history to reflect a close, yet non-existant, similarity between Moses and Jewish traditions with pagan Greek mythology and because of the Septuagint, were ‘the’ Scriptures for the majority of the world’s Jews.

The Pharisees, on the other hand, were the ‘lawyers’ and more traditional Jews and were those largely, but not wholly, centered in Palestine.

These rejected the Greek influence, including the language, as decadent and embraced the Hebrew language and culture as the ‘true’ way. The Pharisees were the more ‘traditionalist’ Jews and saw themselves as the true ‘remnant’ and favored the spiritual over logic and reason.

Interestingly, however, the Pharisees not only saw the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings (of which the Deuteros were a part) as fully inspired, the Pharisees also embraced oral tradition as equally and fully inspired. But the Pharisees did not consider the Deuteros as ‘inspired’ as even their own oral traditions and Rabinnical interpretations. This explains, somewhat, how the Pharisees could accept the 'tradition of Hannukah as fully inspired, for example, without accepting the written account of Hannukah from the Deuteros as inspired.

With the destruction of the Temple in 70ad and asubsequently the priestly class, the Pharisaic influence won out and their decision to canonize their version of the scriptures became the framework and foundation for modern Rabbinical Judaism.

The oldest Christian churches have always embraced the Greek Old Testament versions of the Scriptures including the Catholics, Orthodox, Copts, etc…

Hope this helps.

All errors are mine.

 

[Genesis315]

This may not be the best historical look at it, but I figure who would the Holy Spirit guide into determining the canon, a Christian council, or a council of people who decided to reject Jesus as the Messiah? Hmmmm.

Also, I think the Jews rejected them becuase they were not in Hebrew, but as Christians, pretty much all of the NT was in Greek so having other books in Greek is not really problematic.

 

[BibleReader]

Hi.

There is some other reassuring information which is good to know about the Deuteros.

The Greek Septuagint is the version of the Old Testament familiar to Christ. The Palestinian Canon was generated by the leaders of Judaism about 70 years after Christ.

Christ paraphrases massively from Wisdom and Sirach. This is easiest to prove to yourself in Matthew. Get a red letter edition of the Catholic Bible, and every time you see a chain reference note from a verse in Wisdom and in Sirach to a verse in Matthew, check the Matthew verse to see if it is red letters because it is Christ talking.

If you have good chain reference notes (they vary in quality from Bible to Bible), you will see that Christ paraphrases Wisdom and paraphrases Sirach about 20 times each.

Christ in fact may have been quoting, not paraphrasing, those books. It just isn’t apparent because our Catholic translations are English language renderings of the Greek of the Septuagint.

In any event, Jesus’ use of the Deuteros makes the decision of the Reformers to remove the Deuteros all the more puzzling. Supposedly, Criteria #1 for removing them was, “Did Our Lord make use of them?”

The Deuteros have another quality which marks them as divinely inspired: Typology.

The non-Deutero books of the Bible make use of a “language” of symbols, about five dozen terms in length, built into thousands of “word-pictures.”

The Deuteros do this, too. For example, the Book of Tobit, one of the rejected Deuteros, has the hero of the book going down to the Tigris River and washing his feet. A big fish jumps out and tries to bite off a foot. Tobit catches the fish, cooks it, and eats it.

Typologically, you’ve just witnessed wonderful symbolic foreshadowings of the sacraments of Reconciliation and the Eucharist.

In the Bible, fish normally portray souls in the Sea of Damnable Souls, so that caught fish = saved people. See John 21:8-11, the huge catch of fish when Jesus came after His resurrection.

However, the Bible typically also symbolizes Christ with sin symbols. See Numbers 21:4 et seq., the story of the bronze serpent on the pole, which Jesus compares to Himself on the cross in John 3. Why is this done? Paul figured it out, at 2 Corinthians 5:21: Christ is “Him-Who-did-not-know-sin-Who-was-made-to-be-sin.” Christ the sinless one, when He purchased salvation from God’s perfect justice by taking the penalty for our sinfulness upon His Own back, ironically ended up being treated as though He were Sin, itself. The Bible symbolizes this concept by foreshadowing Christ with sin symbols!

With this concept in mind, we can now interpret Tobit.

When the hero of the story has dirty feet which need to be cleaned, that is “sin.” (That is why Jesus cleans the Apostles’ feet at the Last Supper – He was foreshadowing Reconciliation.) He cleans His feet – removes his sins – in the Tigris River, because at Genesis 2:14 the Tigris is the “third” river, where “three” is the Biblical type for “will of God” or “commandments.” That big fish coming out of “Commandments River” is Christ in the form of “Him-Who-did-not-know-sin-Who-was-made-to-be-sin.” Note that when the fish bites the hero’s feet to remove his sins, that is Chrisat doing what Christ said needed to be done with sins: “If your…foot is your undoing, cut it off and throw it from you!” Matthew 18:8.

After the “Sacrament of Reconciliation,” the hero is now ready for the Eucharist: He captures the fish, sacrifices it, and eats the actual flesh of the sacrificed one: The Real Presence in the Eucharist.

Bottom line: Christ’s use of the Deuteros, plus the presence of Bible types in them, verify their eligibility for inclusion in the Bible canon.

 

[Genesis315]

BibleReader:

The Deuteros do this, too. For example, the Book of Tobit, one of the rejected Deuteros, has the hero of the book going down to the Tigris River and washing his feet. A big fish jumps out and tries to bite off a foot. Tobit catches the fish, cooks it, and eats it.

Typologically, you’ve just witnessed wonderful symbolic foreshadowings of the sacraments of Reconciliation and the Eucharist.

Ok, I haven’t actually read Tobit in a while. Doesn’t Tobit marry a woman who had been married seven times and each of her husbands had died. Then Tobit marries her and waits three days to consummate the marriage and this marriage lasts. To me, this represents the seven OT covenants and then the three days is the time of Christ’s Crucifixion to His Resurrection, and of course, this covenant is everlasting.

 

[BibleReader]

Genesis315:

Ok, I haven’t actually read Tobit in a while. Doesn’t Tobit marry a woman who had been married seven times and each of her husbands had died. Then Tobit marries her and waits three days to consummate the marriage and this marriage lasts. To me, this represents the seven OT covenants and then the three days is the time of Christ’s Crucifixion to His Resurrection, and of course, this covenant is everlasting.

I don’t see the three days business in the story. In Tobit 7 to 8, Tobiah and Sarah meet, marry, go to the bedroom, cook the guts of the Tigris fish to drive out the demon haunting Sarah by the odor, and “go to bed.” The implication is that they consummate there. Perhaps I am missing something?

In any event, Sarah’s first seven husbands died. “Seven” = “completion” or “perfection.” The latter seems inappropriate, here. Probably, it means “completion,” referring to the completeness of the demon Asmodeus’ domination of Sarah’s life. She then marries an “eighth” time. “Eight” = “salvation.” The wedding feast in the Bible is always a picture of the marriage between Christ and the people of His Church. So, probably this is “Marriage #8” to tell us that it is a picture of God’s people being “saved” by their marriage to Christ.

 

[Genesis315]

BibleReader:

I don’t see the three days business in the story. In Tobit 7 to 8, Tobiah and Sarah meet, marry, go to the bedroom, cook the guts of the Tigris fish to drive out the demon haunting Sarah by the odor, and “go to bed.” The implication is that they consummate there. Perhaps I am missing something?

In any event, Sarah’s first seven husbands died. “Seven” = “completion” or “perfection.” The latter seems inappropriate, here. Probably, it means “completion,” referring to the completeness of the demon Asmodeus’ domination of Sarah’s life. She then marries an “eighth” time. “Eight” = “salvation.” The wedding feast in the Bible is always a picture of the marriage between Christ and the people of His Church. So, probably this is “Marriage #8” to tell us that it is a picture of God’s people being “saved” by their marriage to Christ.

Haha, ok my bad. The memory was a little blurry .

 

[Church_Militant]

One thing that most folks don’t know is that out of the 373 OT quotes in the NT 340 (90%) come from the Septuagint Greek text, which tells us that that is the one that Jesus and the apostles quoted from. Since it patently contained the DCs, that tells us something by inferrence don’tcha think?

BTW this bit of scholarship actually comes from “Old Testament Quotations in the New Testament: A Complete Survey” (Moody Press, 1983) by Gleason Archer & G.C. Chirichigno, both of whom are Protestant.

Beginning Apologetics # 7 “How To Read the Bible”
Pax tecum,

 

[Mot_Juste]

The Iambic Pen:

Does anyone know why the Jews compiling the Palestinian Canon removed the Deuterocanonicals?
Were the Greek-speaking Jews the only ones who accepted the Deuterocanonicals to begin with?

There are some excellent answers already. I’ll just add a couple things.

At the time of Christ, there was no consensus on a closed canon of scripture. The Sadducees only believed in the Pentatueuch (the first five books, Genesis through Deuteronomy). The Pharisees believed in a larger set of books, and the Hellenist Jews in an even larger set.

The pattern has been repeated throughout church history that a thing is not defined except as a response to a challenge. The Palestinian canon was defined by a Jewish council at Jamnia around 90 A.D. in response to the destruction of Jerusalem. With the loss of Temple worship, it became important to lock down the definition of Judaism. They were certainly worried about maintaining the purity of their religion in the diaspora. I don’t know to what extent Christianity was a concern.

–Bill

 

[Lazerlike42]

Luther removed the deuterocanonicals because they supported Purgatory, or rather because one of them did (2 Maccabees). While most of the books in the Bible can be considered in and of themselves, there are a few “sets” that just go together. The books of the Pentateuch (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) for example go together is a certain way. They are a sort of set. The “apocrypha” was also a set, but in an even stronger sense. Basically, you either had to include them all, or you had to exclude them all.

Luther didn’t like 2 Maccabees because it taught about prayers for the dead, so he wanted to get rid of it. However, if he just rejected a single piece of the “apocrypha,” it would look very awkward and he would lose a lot of trust. Therefore, he threw out the who set, because at least that way his canon would have credibility.

He also wanted to get rid of James, 2 Peter, Hebrews, and Revelation. Why?

James speaks very heavily of the need for works (2:14-24, besides other places)

2 Peter has a lot to say about Scripture. Namely, it says Scripture is not to be interpreted privately (1:20), Scripture is hard to understand (3:16) and that the untaught twist Scripture (3:16)

Hebrews is basically one huge letter about sacrifices. It compares the OT sacrifices to Christ’s. Therefore, it tends to say a lot of things about the sacrifice of the mass.

Revelation has a lot of different things which go against Protestantism. There are some of the most explicit passages about being judged by works (20:13-14). There is implied the idea that faith isn’t enough (3:16). Perhaps the most important reason is that based on his reasoning, he couldn’t say it was authentic. You see, the writing style of Revelation is very different from the Gospel of John. If John was written by John, then if all we use is the Bible it seems very unlikely that he also wrote Revelation. In the 1500s, the main reason it was accepted was because the Church had declared it was inspired back in 397. To accept the OT was no problem, since the Jews did (in general). To accept the letters of Paul was easy, as Paul wrote them. The Gospels were accepted both because of who wrote them and also because they were so fundamental to Scripture that if they were rejected Luther would have no credibility at all. Accepting Revelation was difficult, because it didn’t seem to be written by anybody important (similar to Hebrews, the writer of whom we are still unaware). In fact, Revelation was written by a man named John the Elder, but he wrote it in taking dictation from John the Apostle. It was written when John was too old to write well, so he had another member of the clergy, John the Elder, write it. If anything of this was known in 1500, it was only through Church tradition, which Luther would have rejected. Today, of course, various research has proven the authorship of Revelation. Luther probably didn’t have anything other than the word of the Church.

 

[The_Iambic_Pen]

Thanks for all the information! I guess the fact that Christ quoted regularly from the Septuagint (including the Deuterocanonicals) is sufficient support for the use of the Alexandrian Canon. I find myself very disturbed at the thought that Luther would have removed (and tried to remove) books that didn’t agree with his theology. It seems like a violation of the “Bible alone” doctrine to take out that which does not agree with one’s theology. At least modern Liberal Protestants simply “re-interpret” the text instead of removing parts of it (though the end result is the same). At any rate, I’ll have to study Luther and his motivations more, but it’s starting to look like he tried to base the Bible on his theology instead of basing his theology on the Bible. So much for sola scriptura…

God Bless!

 

[Lazerlike42]

The Iambic Pen:

Thanks for all the information! I guess the fact that Christ quoted regularly from the Septuagint (including the Deuterocanonicals) is sufficient support for the use of the Alexandrian Canon. I find myself very disturbed at the thought that Luther would have removed (and tried to remove) books that didn’t agree with his theology. It seems like a violation of the “Bible alone” doctrine to take out that which does not agree with one’s theology. At least modern Liberal Protestants simply “re-interpret” the text instead of removing parts of it (though the end result is the same). At any rate, I’ll have to study Luther and his motivations more, but it’s starting to look like he tried to base the Bible on his theology instead of basing his theology on the Bible. So much for sola scriptura…

God Bless!

You’re absolutely right. We are always taught in school that Luther realized one day he should only use the Bible, so he read it and developed theology. This is actually backwards from the truth. He actually developed his beliefs and then, when he realized that nobody would listen to one man contradicting 1500 years of teachings and the Pope, he used the Bible as a tool to “back him up.”

 

[Rand_Al_Thor]

Peace be with you!

Here’s an excellent defense of the deuterocanonicals by Jimmy Akin: cin.org/users/james/files/deuteros.htm

In Christ,
Rand

 

[DianJo]

Aw, poo! Rand Al’Thor beat me to one of the references I was going to give you!

Here’s another: icnet/~erasums/RAZ345.HTM#33

Hope this link helps!

 

[Gracie2004]

One last thought here…the Council of Yavneh (Jamnia), only included those books written in Hebrew…since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls it has been realized that there are several of the books they excluded which date before the time of Yavneh, which were written in Hebrew…which they excluded…so even now there is debate in some Hebrew circles on which books really should have been included in the canon which was closed at Yavneh.

Sirach was found in the Dead Sea Scrolls in Hebrew.

 

[DianJo]

Mot Juste:

The pattern has been repeated throughout church history that a thing is not defined except as a response to a challenge. The Palestinian canon was defined by a Jewish council at Jamnia around 90 A.D. in response to the destruction of Jerusalem. With the loss of Temple worship, it became important to lock down the definition of Judaism. They were certainly worried about maintaining the purity of their religion in the diaspora. I don’t know to what extent Christianity was a concern.

–Bill

I just read an article by someone (and I didn’t save it on my computer - ugh!) that talks about this “council of Jamnia” in 90 AD. There was actually no “council” perse. It was a gathering of Jewish rabbis who asked permission of the Roman rulers to gather for “purely spiritual” reasons. The jewish “canon” was not decided at this gathering, it was talked about in that the 2 most controversial books was Ecclesiastes and Sirach. Those were the only 2 books discussed at this gathering but no decision wa smade about them. It even stated the (I think) that the Jewish canon was never closed - don’t quote me on that one cuz my memory is a little fuzzy on that bit of information.

I’ll see if I can find (or remember) the link.

 

[DianJo]

DianJo:

I just read an article by someone (and I didn’t save it on my computer - ugh!) that talks about this “council of Jamnia” in 90 AD. There was actually no “council” perse. It was a gathering of Jewish rabbis who asked permission of the Roman rulers to gather for “purely spiritual” reasons. The jewish “canon” was not decided at this gathering, it was talked about in that the 2 most controversial books was Ecclesiastes and Sirach. Those were the only 2 books discussed at this gathering but no decision wa smade about them. It even stated the (I think) that the Jewish canon was never closed - don’t quote me on that one cuz my memory is a little fuzzy on that bit of information.

I’ll see if I can find (or remember) the link.

It’s weird quoting myself!

Here’s the link - I found it! Someone else on another bible thread gave these links:
catholic-convert.com/Por…r%20Website.doc or
catholic-convert.com/Pot…anonCorrect.doc

It’s an interesting article.

 

[RobNY]

The Iambic Pen:

Now, all of that being said, one of the Baptists actually did bring up an interesting point. He said that the Deuterocanonicals were not including in the Hebrew Scriptures, but only in the Greek Septuagint. This was disturbing to me, as I thought it odd that the Christians would declare Old Testament works to be canonical when the Jews themselves rejected them (though they still saw them as having historical value). However, when I was browsing this site: geocities.com/confiteor_deo/convert.html, I found out that the Hebrew Canon (aka the “Palestinian Canon”) was actually compiled after the Greek (aka the Alexandrian) Canon. So, the Jews who compiled the Palestinian Canon (around AD 100) actually removed books that the Greek-speaking Jews accepted. Going back to the Baptist.org forums, the Catholic was asking the Baptists why they preferred the Canon accepted by Jews who didn’t believe in Jesus, rather than the Canon accepted by Christians.

Well, as you might expect, no real good answer came of this, and soon after the “I am not going to answer!” post came up. Anyway, despite the hostility and poor logic of (most of) the Baptists posting in that thread, I still came away with some questions. And……here they are:

Did the Early Church Fathers accept the Deuterocanonicals as being inspired? (I did notice today that Pope Clement mentioned Judith in his epistle to the Corinthians)
Does anyone know Luther’s reasons for removing them?
Does anyone know why the Jews compiling the Palestinian Canon removed the Deuterocanonicals?
Were the Greek-speaking Jews the only ones who accepted the Deuterocanonicals to begin with?

Anyway, those are a few questions I have. Don’t worry, I’m not being lazy and just expecting others to do the research for me. I am definitely continuing my study. I just figure some of you might know some information about this subject. As always, I thank you for your patience and your answers. God bless!

Dear Iambic Pen,

Posting in one of your other threads, I anticipated this question, and indeed, gave a link that I’ve found wondrously helpful to my acceptance of the Scriptural status of the Deuterocanonicals.

The answer is that the Church Fathers *unanimously accepted the Deutercanonicals as inspired Scripture. *How do I know this? A very adept apologist, Matt, over at his website compiled a lengthy and exhausting look at whether or not the Fathers considered them inspired and used them as Scripture. The answer is a resounding yes! Did Some Church Fathers Reject the Deuterocanonicals as Scripture? is the one that specifically addresses this. In [Refuting an Attack on the Deuterocanonicals](Did Some Church Fathers Reject ) he deals more broadly with the issue, but also intersects with the first link I gave showing that the Fathers considered them inspired. The reading is excellent but extremely lengthy. Please, I ask you to read them yourself (and possibly be amazed by it!).

The link “Refuting an Attack on the Deuterocanonicals” also addresses the issue of Jewish Scripture as well, so that’s two birds with one stone! He talks about the Jewish council in Jamnia (approx 90 AD), among other things, and concludes that Jewish Scripture wasn’t set (and also cites Protestant Arnold Sundberg as part of his proof).

Once again, I have to say, I remember reading these and just putting my doubts to rest on the issue. Really, do read it*. *

It’ll answer all of your questions, except maybe the Luther ones. That ain’t bad. Best of luck!!!