Why catholic has more books than protestant? And what validates/invalidates these books?
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12 comments
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That’s because they took reference to the greek translated copy of the Hebrew bible which they thought was the earliest and most accurate copy and they contained those extra books. But they failed to consider that those extra books aren’t particularly used by the early church at that time, plus the jews themselves don’t have them in their canon. And these books did not fit the general narrative as the other books did. It felt like it was written by a different author.
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Apocrypha- the stories are interesting, and Wesley & others thought they are edifying,but not totally up to the level of scripture
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Theological consistency
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The extra books in the Catholic bible do not meet the test for inspiration.
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The protestants expunged 7 books. The Septuigint had all the books the Catholic OT had. This was the Bible Christ and the early Church used. Go read how the bible came to be to see that my words are true. BTW, the 1st edition KJV Bible had 73 books.
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Btw, the Catholic Church via Her Church Councils e.g. Rome, Carthage, Hippo decreed the canon, specifically the Athanasius Canon
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Inspired and non inspired b
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But let’s just point out that, if you go back to the early Church fathers, you’ll see that they use these deuterocanonical books. And what’s even more interesting, I think, for non-Catholics is to find out that the Jews would use many of these deuterocanonical books, as they’re called, that are no longer in the Jewish Bible today
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for example, in the Babylonian Talmud–which is a very authoritative source for Jewish tradition–actually, in the Babylonian Talmud, Sirach is actually quoted as Scripture, which is really remarkable. So this is really interesting.
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So there’s a long history here where somehow, sometime, because the Talmud is dated to about the fifth century BC, so somewhere down the road these books are no longer read by the Jews as Scripture
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Some people will point to a supposed council that happened in the 1st century, it’s called the Council of Jamia, but now we know that council never really existed. In fact, there’s a great book–I thought this might come up, so I thought I’d hold it up because we’ve got a camera here– called “The Canon Debate” by Lee Martin McDonald and James A. Sanders. There’s a whole article in here on the myth of Jamia, that it never actually took place. Very scholarly discussion written by Protestants, in fact.
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