F
flameburns623
Guest
The issues were a little more complicated than this. If Luther wanted to exclude II Maccabees because it contained a verse often misapplied to justify purgatory he could have excluded just that book. Remember that the Book of Sirach has some pretty stern admonitions against image-making which Protestants could have used (and actually have used, in the case of Lorraine Boettner) against Catholic veneration of sacramental images.
The fact is that the deuterocanonical books (the proper Roman Catholic appellation for what Protestants like to call the Apocrypha) have always been understood by Christians to have lesser status than the rest of the Old Testament. Jerome left them out of early editions of his Vulgate and included them later only under pressure. Even today, Roman Catholic Bible scholars and the Church itself caution that these books are less authoritative than the rest of Scripture. Catholic apologists, of course, like to club Protestants over the head with the reference to praying for departed souls Luther was uncomfortable with the idea of having ‘lesser-inspired’ books of Scripture included alongside of ‘fully-inspired’ books. However, he actually included them in his translation of the Bible (in a separate section from either the Old or the New Testament).
Likewise, Luther’s famous criticism of James was not simply because he wanted to expunge a book which did not conform to his theology. James is in a class of New Testament books known as the antilegomena, books not universally accepted without reservation by early Church fathers. It did not help that James seemed to Luther to be out-of-character with the Pauline epistles. But it is overstatement to say that Luther sought to exclude James simply because he didn’t like James’ emphasis on works.
