Why did protestants delete books of the bible?

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I know the protestant bible is missing seven books (Tobias, Wisdom, First and Second Maccabees, etc…) Why did protestants delete those books? Any thoughts on this? Thank you!!! 🙂
 
Martin Luther did it due to mental illness. See Luther’s Canon.

Other Protestants did it because “their theology starts where the Catholic Church ends”. Meaning they say “what is unique about Catholicism? Let’s take that out…”.

Current Protestants do it because they’ve been told the Bible only has 66 books and have never taken the time to look more deeply.
 
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Maybe I should re-state.
Martin Luther had mental illness. Mixed with the hurt from being excommunicated he raged at the Church. Due to this he took out anything he thought supported Catholic theology.

It is why the other leaders of the Protestant Reformation added back several of the books he removed.
 
Around the end of the first century AD, when the rabbis were drawing up the definitive Jewish canon, they left out these seven books, for different reasons – in one case, at least (Tobit), because they claimed to have found theological errors, and in several other cases simply because the books had been originally written in Greek, not Hebrew. Luther decided to follow the rabbis’ lead.
 
In the twenty years or so following the destruction of the Temple in AD 70, I believe. It’s what some historians used to refer to as “the Council of Jamnia,” though that term is now said to be incorrect.
 
Friend, your comments are really counter-productive. We don’t have the right to impute motives to Martin Luther like this; that’s between him and God.

Best to stick with what Martin Luther said his reasons were, and then to discuss the problems with those reasons.
 
What I wonder is if Protestants are in the process of updating their thinking in light of findings contained in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
 
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Apparently a few people took offense at me mentioning Martin Luther having to deal with mental illness.

Here is an article by a Protestant who is very much pro-Martin Luther. It describes how his mental afflictions drove his actions and even that he suffered from depression until the end of his life. Martin Luther, Grace and OCD

Sorry to have offended some of you.
 
If I understand correctly, it’s for the same reasons that those books are missing from the Hebrew Bible: we have only Greek translations at hand, and the original Hebrew/Aramaic texts are lost to us. Also, I seem to recall that Luther wanted to remove far more books than the Deuterocanonical ones (including James, Jude, and Hebrews), but couldn’t offer a similarly effective argument for removing them.
 
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The Protestant Bibles use the Hebrew Translation of the Old Testament while Catholics and the early Christians used the Septuagint Translation, which has 7 more books. The Septuagint was a Greek translation for Greek speaking Jews.

After the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem and diaspora in 70AD, the leaders of Judaism, wanting to distance themselves from Christianity, rejected the Septuagint. They claimed that the Septuagint was never an official text, until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls which included the Septuagint and Hebrew translations, along with writings supporting the Septuagint.
 
LovelyLadybug said:
I know the protestant bible is missing seven books (Tobias, Wisdom, First and Second Maccabees, etc…) Why did protestants delete those books? Any thoughts on this? Thank you!!! 🙂
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Luther was educated with two Bachelor degrees, two Master degrees, and a Doctoral degree. He was very knowledgeable in church history, and he belonged to a very strict Augustinian monastery. His reasons for rejecting the Deuterocanon, were four-fold:
  1. He had learned that Jerome rejected the Deuterocanon, because he did not find them in the Hebrew, like he did with the books in the Hebrew Bible.
  2. He learned the Deuterocanon could not be found in the Targums (Aramaic paraphrases of the Hebrew Bible written from the 1st Century BC to the early 1st Century AD), but the books in the Hebrew Bible were in the Targums.
  3. He believed there were irreconcilable errors & contradictions in the Deuterocanon with not only the books in the Hebrew Bible & the NT, but also between the Deuteros (like Judith saying Nebuchadnezzar was king of the Assyrians who ruled in Ninevah, while Baruch stated he was king of Babylon).
  4. He believed the Deuteros taught a works-based salvation (giving alms leads to salvation), and he eventually began to reject the doctrine of purgatory, believing it was not found in the Bible. This began with his rejection of the selling of indulgences by Johann Tetsel, who was given permission by the Archbishop of Mainz, Germany, and Pope Leo X.
All this led to Luther reexamining passages like Romans 1:17 (“the just shall live by faith”), which he believed St. Paul was saying “the just shall live eternally by faith alone”), which “faith alone” was a defining characteristic of the Reformation, which was later declared anathema at the Ecumenical Council of Trent in 1546.
BartholomewB said:
In the twenty years or so following the destruction of the Temple in AD 70, I believe. It’s what some historians used to refer to as “the Council of Jamnia,” though that term is now said to be incorrect.
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Correct that it was not a “council,” but a Rabbinical school. But they did not determine what books belonged in the Old Testament at this school, because Rabbinic Judaism had grown out of Pharisaic Judaism, which had defined their OT canon as limited to the books in the Hebrew Bible, even before the time of Christ. Although there were some in the Pharisaic school of Shammai who questioned certain books in the Writings, like Proverbs, the discussion did not result in rejecting any of the Writings, or any other books in the Hebrew Bible.
 
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SteveLy said:
Martin Luther did it due to mental illness. See Luther’s Canon.
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Actually, Luther’s German translation included the Deuterocanon. He just placed them in a separate uninspired section. But he did include them.
ThomasMT said:
What I wonder is if Protestants are in the process of updating their thinking in light of findings contained in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
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Only two or three of the Deuterocanon were found in the DSS, compared to every book from the Hebrew Bible (except for Esther). Also, the DSS also included books not found in the Catholic OT, which are found in Eastern & Oriental Orthodox Bibles (as well as books not found in ANY Bibles). This is why using the DSS is not used as evidence for any Biblical canon - Catholic, Protestant, or otherwise.
JimR-OCDS said:
The Protestant Bibles use the Hebrew Translation of the Old Testament while Catholics and the early Christians used the Septuagint Translation, which has 7 more books. The Septuagint was a Greek translation for Greek speaking Jews.
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The Septuagint was originally limited to only “the Law” (~250 BC). “The Prophets” & “The Writings” were added later before the time of Christ. The Deuterocanon was added sometime after this, most likely in the second century or after. We know this because when the NT cites the OT books, it uses specific phrases like “It is written,” “Have you not read?,” “the Scriptures say,” “the Law & the Prophets,” etc. While the NT uses phrases like these for the books in the Hebrew Bible, it doesn’t use them for any of the Deuteros. This is why the Reformers & later Protestants up to the present day reject them.
 
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The book of Tobit is the only one in the Bible to say something nice about a dog. Is there a record of Calvin or Luther ever being bitten?
 
It’s not insulting to say someone had mental illness, if there is evidence.

One of the things I always found disturbing was his foul mouthed abuse of opponents. He once called the Archbishop of Mainz the “S***bishop of Mainz” and he called Cardinal Hohenzollern the “Whoremaster on the Spree”
 
Le_Cracquere said:
Also, I seem to recall that Luther wanted to remove far more books than the Deuterocanonical ones (including James, Jude, and Hebrews), but couldn’t offer a similarly effective argument for removing them.
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The table of contents in Luther’s Bible shows that he segregated four books – Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation – into an appendix at the end. The other books are numbered from 1 to 23, while these four are left unnumbered.

(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)
 
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