Search results
Nov 7, 2021 · These include the notion that Protestants removed books from the Bible or that Roman Catholics finally published their Bible pure and simple at the Council of Trent. As we will see, the Old Testament’s history from the beginning of the Christian era to the 16th century was quite complex.
1534 – The Reformers did not remove books from the Bible. In 1534 Luther’s Bible with Apocrypha completed. None of the major Bible translations that emerged during the Reformation produced a Bible of simply 66 books.
With this background, we can now address why the Protestant versions of the Bible have less books than the Catholic versions. In 1534, Martin Luther translated the Bible into German. He grouped the seven deuterocanonical books of the Old Testament under the title "Apocrypha," declaring.
- Tobit, written 225-175 BCE. This book tells the story of two Israelite people, a blind man named Tobit living in Nineveh and a woman named Sarah, living in a city called Ecbatana.
- Judith, written about 100 BCE. Judith, a Jewish widow, attracts and seduces an Assyrian general besieging her city. Having ingratiated herself with him, she waits until he is drunk and then decapitates him, saving the capital Jerusalem from total destruction.
- Esther, written around 115 BCE. Although the Hebrew version of Esther is canonical, the Greek translation adds six sections to it. Esther is the story of an Israelite woman who saves her people from an anti-Israelite Persian plot.
- Wisdom of Solomon, written around 50 BCE. This book centers on the importance of Wisdom as related to humans and to God. It may have influenced the famous prologue of the Gospel of John, with wisdom replaced by the “Word.”
May 9, 2020 · Some Protestant Bibles print these seven books under the heading “Apocrypha,” not recognizing them as inspired in the same sense as the other Old Testament books. Only in 1546, at the Council of Trent, did the Catholic Church decree that the longer list must be accepted and used.
Why are Protestant Bibles missing these books? Protestants offer various explanations to explain why they reject the deuterocanonical books as Scripture. I call these explanations "myths" because they are either incorrect or simply inadequate reasons for rejecting these books of Scripture.
Both the Jewish Bible and the Hebrew canon in a Protestant Bible (aka Old Testament) contain 39 books, whereas a Catholic Bible contains 46 books in the Old Testament. In addition, the Greek Orthodox, or Eastern Orthodox, Church accepts a few more books as canonized scripture.
