Dear friends in Jesus Christ…,
I think I need to give a little more informant about the following questions. Why does the Catholic Bible have 73 books, while the Protestant Bible has only 66 books? Why we have two different Bibles? Some Protestants believe that the Catholic Church added 7 books to the Bible at the Council of Trent in response to Luther’s Reformation, but that is not what happened.
In about 367 AD, St. Athanasius came up with a list of 73 books for the Bible that he believed to be divinely inspired. This list was finally approved by Pope Damasus I in 382 AD and was formally approved by the Church Council of Rome in that same year. Later Councils at Hippo (393 AD) and Carthage (397 AD) ratified this list of 73 books. In 405 AD, Pope Innocent I wrote a letter to the Bishop of Toulouse reaffirming this canon of 73 books. In 419 AD, the Council of Carthage reaffirmed this list, which Pope Boniface agreed to. The Council of Trent, in 1546, in response to the Reformation removing 7 books from the canon (canon is a Greek word meaning “standard”), reaffirmed the original St. Athanasius list of 73 books.
So what happened? How come the King James Bible only has 66 books? Martin Luther didn’t like 7 books of the Old Testament that disagreed with his personal view of theology in the 16
th Century. His reasoning was that the Jewish Council of Jamnia in 90 AD didn’t think they were canonical, so he didn’t either. The Jewish Council of Jamnia was a meeting of the remaining Jews from Palestine who survived the Roman persecution of Jerusalem in 70 AD. It seems that the Jews had never settled on an official canon of OT scripture before this. The Sadducees only believed in the first 5 books of the Bible written by Moses (the Pentateuch), while the Pharisees believed in 34 other books of the Old Testament as well. However, there were other Jews around from the Diaspora, or the dispersion of the Jews from the Babylonian captivity, who believed that another 7 books were also divinely inspired. In fact, when Jesus addressed the Diaspora Jews (who spoke Greek) he quoted from the Septuagint version of the scriptures. The Septuagint was a Greek translation by 70 translators of the Hebrew Word. The Septuagint includes the disputed 7 books that Protestants do not recognize as scriptural.
Initially, Luther wanted to eliminate some New Testament Books as well, including James, Hebrews, Jude, and Revelation but eventually did accept the 27 books of the New Testament that Catholic Pope Damasus I had approved well before in 382 A.D. So while strongly at odds with the Catholic Church, he did accept their New Testament canon, and though while wanting to be rid of Jewish synagogues, he accepted for the books of the Old Testament those approved by the Jewish Council of Jamnia in 90 A.D.
The Council of Jamnia had used four criteria for deciding whether or not certain books were canonical:
1. The books had to conform to the Pentateuch (the first 5 books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy);
2. They could not have been written after the time of Ezra (around 400 BC);
3. They had to be written in Hebrew;
4. They had to be written in Palestine.
So though Luther was accepting the books approved by the Jews in 90 A.D., Jewish belief did not accept an understanding of the New Testament -- Gospels, and Epistles -- that were written basically in the first century as well. Seven books that Catholics accept which were written before Christ, after Ezra, and some in Greek as well, that were accepted by the Diaspora Jews (the Alexandrian Canon) who were not in Palestine are: Tobit, Judith, Baruch, Wisdom, Sirach, First Maccabees, and Second Maccabees, as well as additional verses of Daniel and Esther. These books are called the “deuterocanon”, or second canon, by Catholics, and the “Apocrypha”, or hidden/obscure, by Protestants….to be continued next week.