I have been participating in the 90 Day Bible Reading Challenge that is going on here on HSB.  So far it has been a really awesome experience for me!  However, ForeverConfused and I, the two Catholic participants, have it harder than everyone else, because we have to read 73 books rather than 66. ;)  I thought that I'd write up a post about why that is, and get into the historical context a little bit.

The 7 "extra" books in the Scriptural canon are Tobit, Judith, 1 and 2 Maccabees, Wisdom, Sirach, and Baruch (there are also a couple more chapters in Esther and Daniel).  They are all in the Old Testament, and are often called by Protestants, "the Apocrypha", which literally means, "hidden".  Because we as Catholics believe that they are in fact included in the Bible, we call them "deutercanonicals", meaning that they are a part of the canon. There is a collection of apocryphal books, but these seven are not included in them. 

So how did Protestants and Catholics end up with two differing Bibles?  Protestants will claim that the Catholic Church added extra books, but in reality, it was the Protestants who removed the books from the original canon. 

Let's go all the way back to first century AD.  There was some dispute then between the Jews on the Old Testament canon.  There was no common canon shared between all of the Jews.  Some rejected the writings of the prophets while others accepted them as binding.  There was one widely used Greek version called the Septuagint (LXX) which included the deuterocanonical books.  This is the Old Testament that is used by Catholics today, and also by many Jews (particuarly the Ethiopian Jews).  The only distinction between the deuterocanonical books and the books accepted by both Catholics and Protestants is that the deuterocanonicals were included in the LXX. 

Around 80 AD, a group of Jewish Rabbis in Jabneh met together to discuss the canon.  They were getting very annoyed that this new little "Jewish cult" that was gaining so many new converts: Christianity.  These Christians were using the LXX to convert their followers, and it was being very effective.  The Greek translation seemed to support their views too clearly.  For example, in Hebrew, Isaiah 7:14 would be rendered as, "a young woman shall conceive and bear a son," whereas in the Greek, it would be, "a virgin shall conceive."  The Rabbis at Jabneh consequently condemned the Septuagint, however, that didn't stop the disputes over the canon, which continue to go on to this day. 

I'll hopefully be posting the second part of this entry this week, so stay tuned :)

Pax Christi,
Sylvia

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