Coptic,
Are you waiting for a Protestant to say that the Catholic church preserved and compiled the writings that became the NT? Kudos for tenacity but shame on you for perpetuating the myth that Protestants and Catholics can’t agree on anything.
The Jews never accepted the DB and they were not part of the oracles committed unto them (Rom. 3:2) Furthermore, they are not written in Hebrew
This is totally false. Palestinian Jews rejected the DB, but the Septuagint, which is the Greek version of the OT composed in the 2nd-3rd century B.C. at Alexandria, Egypt by 70 or 72 Jewish scribes, was used by non-Palestinian Jews. It is a well known fact that the Septuagint (LXX) was both the Bible of the diaspora Jews and the Bible of all the early Christians, as will be proven below. Further, it’s also a fact that the LXX contained the DB, as will also be proven below.
Protestant scholars admit the LXX was the bible of the diaspora Jews who were far more numerous at the time of Christ than Palestinian Jews.
- Oxford University church historian Paul Johnson, in his book A History of Christianity, writes:
“There was already [in the first century] a huge Jewish diaspora, especially in the great cities of the eastern Mediterranean-Alexandria, Antioch, Tarsus, Ephesus, and so forth…The Greek adaptation of the Old Testament, or the Septuagint, which was composed in Alexandria was widely used in diaspora communities…” (pg. 10-11).
- Baptist textual scholar Lee McDonald, in his book The Formation of the Christian Biblical Canon, writes:
“It is most likely that these [DB] books were considered by the Jewish community holy or sacred well before the time of Christ, and that they were simply received by the early Christians as part of the sacred collection they inherited from Judaism. There is evidence that at least some non-canonical books had their origin in the land of Israel and were translated and transported from Israel to Alexandria and probably wherever Jews lived in significant numbers in the Roman Empire . The grandson of Ben Sirach [the writer of the deuteroncanonical book Ecclesiasticus]…lets us know he was translating for the Jews in Alexandria . The NT also has many allusions to some [deuterocanonical] literature found in the LXX, and the oldest Christian collections of OT scriptures contain much of that literature” (page 90).
- Furthermore, the Protestant Fausset’s Bible Dictionary, under “Apocrypha” states:
Apocrypha= “…the writings added in the LXX, I and II Esdra, Tobit, Judith, the sequel to Esther, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, Song of the Three Children, Susanna, Bel and the Dragon…” (page 42)
- Furthermore, the Protestant Nelson’s New Christian Dictionary, under “Apocrypha” says:
“The Septuagint incorporates all of them (with the exception of 2 Esdras), and they are not differentiated in any other way from the other books of the OT” (page 40).
- Renowned evangelical scholar F.F. Bruce writes also of this well known point in his The Canon of Scripture:
"However much the wording of Stephen’s defense in Acts 7 may owe to the narrator, the consistency with which its biblical quotations and allusions are based on is the Septuagint is true to life….As soon as the gospel was carried into the Greek speaking world, the Septuagint came into its own as the sacred text to which preachers appealed. It was used in the Greek-speaking synagogues of throughout the Roman Empire " (page 49).
- Renowned Protestant patristics scholar, J.N.D. Kelly, wrote in his well-known Early Christian Doctrines:
“It should be observed that the Old Testament thus admitted as authoritative in the church was somewhat bulkier and more comprehensive than the 22 or 24 books of Hebrew Palestinian Judaism. It always included, though with varying degrees of recognition the so-called Apocrypha, or deuterocanonical books. The reason for this is that the Old Testament which passed in the first instance into the hands of Christians was not the original Hebrew version, but the Greek translation known as the Septuagint…most of the scriptural quotations found in the New Testament are based upon it rather than the Hebrew” (page 53).
- As to whether any were ever written in Hebrew scholarship says quite different:
F.F. Bruce writes:
“…Yeshua ben Sira…in Egypt in 132 B.C, translated his grandfather’s book of wisdom, commonly called Ecclesiasticus or Sirach from Hebrew into Greek” (Canon, page 31).
Baptist Lee McDonald quoted above (no. 2) agrees the DB were transported from Israel and translated from Hebrew into Greek at Alexandria.
Furthermore, it is well known that the Dead Sea Scrolls found at the Qumran community contain DB books that are in Hebrew, as Charles Pfeiffer’s book The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Bible demonstrates (pages 16-17), as does McDonalds Formation of the Christian Biblical Canon on page 81, where he notes that Ecclesiasticus was found in Hebrew in caves 2 and 11 (page 81).
Does a canonical book have to be written in Hebrew? On what grounds must a book be written in Hebrew to be canonical. Does the Bible say that? Of course not, and it’s obviously an assumption that is totally irrelevant.
That’s more than those who wield the KJV can say. They are not ordained through Christ’s Priesthood, they are self ordained and lack a divine mission given by God (as they are not part of the Apostolic Succession). All of this is found in Scripture.
