The Apocrypha and it's removal from Protestant Bibles.

larryjf · Posted: Thu Jun 19, 2003 9:10 am Post subject:

The protestants may be following more "one type" of Jewish tradition. Let's not forget that during the time of Jesus there was a large group of Jews who imersed themselves in Greek culture. I think they were called "herodians". They most likely would have read the Septuagint, which does have the apocropha.

Also, since Alexander the Great, greek became the common language of the known world. We even see that Jesus Himself quotes from teh Septuagint from time to time.

The Hebrew manuscripts that we have today are later in time than the Septuagint thanks to the work of the Masorites. I think around 40-60 AD they made a new translation of the Hebrew scriptures. Then, they collected all of the older scriptures from other synagogues and destroyed them. This seems especially corrupt since these anti-christian masorites would have made this translation after Jesus - and they may have been a little prejudiced in translation.

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Black Knight · Hamster Joined: 05 Aug 2005 Posts: 86

Myth 1
The deuterocanonical books are not found in the Hebrew Bible. They were added by the Catholic Church at the Council of Trent after Luther rejected it.

The background to this theory goes like this: Jesus and the Apostles, being Jews, used the same Bible Jews use today. However, after they passed from the scene, muddled hierarchs started adding books to the Bible either out of ignorance or because such books helped back up various wacky Catholic traditions that were added to the gospel. In the 16th century, when the Reformation came along, the first Protestants, finally able to read their Bibles without ecclesial propaganda from Rome, noticed that the Jewish and Catholic Old Testaments differed, recognized this medieval addition for what it was and scraped it off the Word of God like so many barnacles off a diamond. Rome, ever ornery, reacted by officially adding the deuterocanonical books at the Council of Trent (1564-1565) and started telling Catholics "they had always been there."

This is a fine theory. The problem is that its basis in history is gossamer thin. As we'll see in a moment, accepting this myth leads to some remarkable dilemmas a little further on.

The problems with this theory are first, it relies on the incorrect notion that the modern Jewish Bible is identical to the Bible used by Jesus and the Apostles. This is false. In fact, the Old Testament was still very much in flux in the time of Christ and there was no fixed canon of Scripture in the apostolic period. Some people will tell you that there must have been since, they say, Jesus held people accountable to obey the Scriptures. But this is also untrue. For in fact, Jesus held people accountable to obey their conscience and therefore, to obey Scripture insofar as they were able to grasp what constituted "Scripture."
Consider the Sadducees. They only regarded the first five books of the Old Testament as inspired and canonical. The rest of the Old Testament was regarded by them in much the same way the deuterocanon is regarded by Protestant Christians today: nice, but not the inspired Word of God. This was precisely why the Sadducees argued with Jesus against the reality of the resurrection in Matthew 22:23-33: they couldn't see it in the five books of Moses and they did not regard the later books of Scripture which spoke of it explicitly (such as Isaiah and 2 Maccabees) to be inspired and canonical. Does Jesus say to them "You do greatly err, not knowing Isaiah and 2 Maccabees"? Does He bind them to acknowledge these books as canonical? No. He doesn't try to drag the Sadducees kicking and screaming into an expanded Old Testament. He simply holds the Sadducees accountable to take seriously the portion of Scripture they do acknowledge: that is, He argues for the resurrection based on the five books of the Law. But of course, this doesn't mean Jesus commits Himself to the Sadducees' whittled-down canon.

When addressing the Pharisees, another Jewish faction of the time, Jesus does the same thing. These Jews seem to have held to a canon resembling the modern Jewish canon, one far larger than that of the Sadducees but not as large as other Jewish collections of Scripture. That's why Christ and the Apostles didn't hesitate to argue with them from the books they acknowledged as Scripture. But as with the Sadducees, this doesn't imply that Christ or the Apostles limited the canon of Scripture only to what the Pharisees acknowledged.

When the Lord and His Apostles addressed Greek-speaking Diaspora Jews, they made use of an even bigger collection of Scripture - the Septuagint, a translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek - which many Jews (the vast majority, in fact) regarded as inspired Scripture. In fact, we find that the New Testament is filled with references to the Septuagint (and its particular translation of various Old Testament passages) as Scripture. It's a strange irony that one of the favorite passages used in anti-Catholic polemics over the years is Mark 7:6-8. In this passage Christ condemns "teaching as doctrines human traditions." This verse has formed the basis for countless complaints against the Catholic Church for supposedly "adding" to Scripture man-made traditions, such as the "merely human works" of the deuterocanononical books. But few realize that in Mark 7:6-8 the Lord was quoting the version of Isaiah that is found only in the Septuagint version of the Old Testament.
But there's the rub: The Septuagint version of Scripture, from which Christ quoted, includes the Deuterocanonical books, books that were supposedly "added" by Rome in the 16th century. And this is by no means the only citation of the Septuagint in the New Testament. In fact, fully two thirds of the Old Testament passages that are quoted in the New Testament are from the Septuagint. So why aren't the deuterocanonical books in today's Jewish Bible, anyway? Because the Jews who formulated the modern Jewish canon were a) not interested in apostolic teaching and, b) driven by a very different set of concerns from those motivating the apostolic community.

In fact, it wasn't until the very end of the apostolic age that the Jews, seeking a new focal point for their religious practice in the wake of the destruction of the Temple, zeroed in with white hot intensity on Scripture and fixed their canon at the rabbinical gathering, known as the "Council of Javneh" (sometimes called "Jamnia"), about A.D. 90. Prior to this point in time there had never been any formal effort among the Jews to "define the canon" of Scripture. In fact, Scripture nowhere indicates that the Jews even had a conscious idea that the canon should be closed at some point.

The canon arrived at by the rabbis at Javneh was essentially the mid-sized canon of the Palestinian Pharisees, not the shorter one used by the Sadducees, who had been practically annihilated during the Jewish war with Rome. Nor was this new canon consistent with the Greek Septuagint version, which the rabbis regarded rather xenophobically as "too Gentile-tainted." Remember, these Palestinian rabbis were not in much of a mood for multiculturalism after the catastrophe they had suffered at the hands of Rome. Their people had been slaughtered by foreign invaders, the Temple defiled and destroyed, and the Jewish religion in Palestine was in shambles. So for these rabbis, the Greek Septuagint went by the board and the mid-sized Pharisaic canon was adopted. Eventually this version was adopted by the vast majority of Jews - though not all. Even today Ethiopian Jews still use the Septuagint version, not the shorter Palestinian canon settled upon by the rabbis at Javneh. In other words, the Old Testament canon recognized by Ethiopian Jews is identical to the Catholic Old Testament, including the seven deuterocanonical books (cf. Encyclopedia Judaica, vol. 6, p. 1147).

But remember that by the time the Jewish council of Javneh rolled around, the Catholic Church had been in existence and using the Septuagint Scriptures in its teaching, preaching, and worship for nearly 60 years, just as the Apostles themselves had done. So the Church hardly felt the obligation to conform to the wishes of the rabbis in excluding the deuterocanonical books any more than they felt obliged to follow the rabbis in rejecting the New Testament writings. The fact is that after the birth of the Church on the day of Pentecost, the rabbis no longer had authority from God to settle such issues. That authority, including the authority to define the canon of Scripture, had been given to Christ's Church.

Thus, Church and synagogue went their separate ways, not in the Middle Ages or the 16th century, but in the 1st century. The Septuagint, complete with the deuterocanononical books, was first embraced, not by the Council of Trent, but by Jesus of Nazareth and his Apostles.

This is from an article by Mark Shea that you can find here
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Snowy · Posted: Sat Dec 23, 2006 6:49 pm Post subject:

Being braught up in an evangelical church I never knew there were other venerable texts.
All texts outside of the excepted sixty six book canon were either never mentioned or demonized totally.
Books by modern authors were ok though.
Today after much study, research and reading I know just how much I was missing. After reading the Apocrypha proper and pseudepigraphs like Jubilees and books like 1 Enoch, Jasher and several others my KJV makes a lot more sense.
Always being told to just have faith when it comes to the hard questions gets old fast when you are in the middle of going thru a hard time.
Faith means trust and trust is what christians do, I trust God a lot more than these denominations.

(Hos 4:6) My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee, that thou shalt be no priest to me: seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I will also forget thy children.

(Joh 8:32) And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

(Isa 29:13) Wherefore the Lord said, Forasmuch as this people draw near me with their mouth, and with their lips do honour me, but have removed their heart far from me, and their fear toward me is taught by the precept of men:
KJV

Snowy

FFT · Posted: Sun Dec 24, 2006 9:38 am Post subject:

Hooray for the Wayback Machine!

bitterlily · Posted: Thu Jul 26, 2007 3:36 pm Post subject: A Free Copy Of The Apocrypha!

Nobby · Posted: Thu Jul 26, 2007 7:59 pm Post subject:

Yes bitterlily, I have "e-Sword" bookmarked in my favorites. Some of the linkes I have at the top of the books may be from there! Very Happy

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bitterlily · Posted: Mon Jul 30, 2007 5:28 am Post subject:

Did you ever hear the Jewish Enclopedia's version of why the Apocrypha was removed from the Bible:

Quote:

Palestinian tanna; born about 50; martyred about 132. A full history of Akiba, based upon authentic sources, will probably never be written, although he, to a degree beyond any other, deserves to be called the father of rabbinical Judaism (Yer. SheḲ. iii 47b, R. H. i. 56d)....

Eminent as Akiba was by his magnanimity and moral worthiness, he was still more so by his intellectual capacity, by which he secured an enduring influence upon his contemporaries and upon posterity. In the first place, Akiba was the one who definitely fixed the canon of the Old Testament books. He protested strongly against the canonicity of certain of the Apocrypha, Ecclesiasticus, for instance (Sanh. x. 1, Bab. ibid. 100b, Yer. ibid. x. 28a), in which passages is to be explained according to ḳid. 49a, and according to its Aramaic equivalent ; so that Akiba's utterance reads, "He who reads aloud in the synagogue from books not belonging to the canon as if they were canonical," etc. He has, however, no objection to the private reading of the Apocrypha, as is evident from the fact that he himself makes frequent use of Ecclesiasticus (Bacher, "Ag. Tan." i. 277; Grätz, "Gnosticismus," p. 120). Akiba stoutly defended, however, the canonicity of the Song of Songs, and Esther (Yad. iii.5, Meg. 7a). Grätz's statements ("Shir ha-Shirim," p. 115, and "ḳohelet," p. 169, respecting Akiba's attitude toward the canonicity of the Song of Songs are misconceptions, as Weiss ("Dor," ii. 97) has to some extent shown. To the same motive underlying his antagonism to the Apocrypha, namely, the desire to disarm Christians—especially Jewish Christians— who drew their "proofs" from the Apocrypha, must also be attributed his wish to emancipate the Jews of the Dispersion from the domination of the Septuagint, the errors and inaccuracies in which frequently distorted the true meaning of Scripture, and were even used as arguments against the Jews by the Christians.
SOURCE=Online Jewish Encyclopedia, A full History of Akiba Ben Joseph

Did you notice the years of Akiba's life(50-132)? This was during the same period of the very earliest disciples of Jesus. They were most probably taught directly by the 12 Apostles. These early disciples (particularly Jewish) were using the Apocrypha as a witness against them.
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Steven3 · Lion King Joined: 10 Jul 2007 Posts: 1205 Location: UK