Did Catholics Add 7 Books to the Bible? Or Did Protestants Remove Them?

Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. So today I want to explore what ought to be a really easy historical question, namely, at the time of the Reformation, did the Catholic Church add seven books to the Bible in response to the reformers, or did the Protestants remove seven books from the Bible? The reason I say it should be an easy historical question is that scholars are unanimous on this, because you simply need to read the evidence and you’ll see there were clearly seven books in the Bible that were removed by the reformers. Another way to pose this would be to say, “How many books were in the Bible at the time of the Reformation?” So it’s not just Catholic, but also Protestant scholars and secular scholars. And moreover, simply the writings prior to the Reformation themselves. So I’ll give you a couple examples.

And I have a friend who says one of them supports purgatory, and that’s why.

Sorry, Jack, I thought I had that set to the right mark and I screwed it up.

From Brady, “Why did the reformers remove some books from the Bible?” That’s a loaded question. I have a friend who says one of them supports purgatory, and that’s why. Ah, the importance of knowing our biblical history. Please do not be deceived by people who will tell you on the YouTube machine, the Bible wasn’t concocted until the fourth century. It was the Council of Nicaea that put those books together. Otherwise, the whole thing was a hash. That is not biblically, historically, accurate. Inside of the first century, we know that the books that you and I have in our New Testament were the books that were recognized by the early church in the first century.

Hold on a second. He keeps saying the New Testament, and you might be saying, “Oh, maybe he’s just misspeaking.” No, this entire video, he assumes, quite obviously incorrectly, that the seven books in question are seven New Testament books. None of them are. The New Testament is identical between Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Coptic Bibles. The entire debate is about the Old Testament. So that should be the first red flag that something is really wrong with this line of argumentation that he doesn’t even know which part of the Bible we’re dealing with, Old Testament or New Testament.

But second, the reader wrote in and said, “Hey, it sounds like the reformers removed seven books from the Bible. Why did they do that?” And he starts talking about, “Oh, don’t listen to people who say there was no Bible prior to the Council of Nicaea.” That’s not the question at all. No one asked about Nicaea. The question’s about the Reformation. The reader isn’t saying there was no Bible, the reader, or the writer is saying, “There was a Bible and it seems like Protestants removed some books from it. Why’d that happen?” And so what he’s saying here is just not… It’s not even remotely right.

Were they codified? Meaning, did somebody put a binding around them and go, “That’s it, stamp of approval.”? No, these books were assumed to be apostolic in authority in the first century.

Now, I could quibble with some of his history here, but I’m not going to, because I think he’s actually making an important point, one that he’s going to violate later. Namely, there is an important difference between whether a book is recognized as canonical, as inspired as sacred text, and whether it’s officially declared such. You can have a lot of things that you believe as a Christian that are never officially declared, particularly if they’re uncontroversial. So we can get into the whole history of the New Testament canon, and how it was figured out. There’s a little more debate about it than he’s letting on, but that’s not really the point, because again, we’re not supposed to be talking about the New Testament. This is a question about the Old Testament, and the Old Testament was not clearly settled by the close of the first century. There was a great deal of debate about it. Nevertheless, I’ll let him continue.

As time passes, which it does, and we sometimes fail to remember that when we’re thinking about history, interlopers came along, some good books, some not so good. Some claiming to be from Peter, others claiming to be from Paul. But were they really? That is why, then, in the fourth century, the church went, “We really, there’s just too many challengers coming in, causing a whole lot of confusion.” Some of them weren’t so terrible like the Didache, but some of them were heretical. And the church recognized we just have to codify this using a reed, five standards, to determine these are the books that are in, to keep the others out. It wasn’t as much about which ones are in, but blocking others out.

So I have no idea where he’s getting this or what he’s talking about, because again, he still thinks we’re in the New Testament, which we’re not. But also the Council of Nicaea, you can look for yourself, you can go online. The first Council of Nicaea, the canons of the Council are online and they don’t say anything about which books are in the Bible. Now, there’s an interesting detail in Saint Jerome’s writing where he suggests they do consider which books are canonical, but if they do, we don’t have any record of it, and so this whole thing about how they had a five point standard they were looking at is apparently just made up out of whole cloth. Now, you can say as a general rule, when early Christians considered which books were and weren’t canonical, they were looking at certain traits, particularly when we’re talking about New Testament books, which again, we’re not, but you can’t say the Council of Nicaea did that.

It didn’t. And you can go read that for yourself. I’d give you a quotation here, but it’s hard to quote nothing. So really the person who should be giving you a quotation saying, “Here’s the canon in the First Council of Nicaea that does this,” would be Todd Friel. And he doesn’t, because there is no such canon. And so you’ll find a lot of times skeptics will make this claim. This is really famously Dan Brown’s argument in DaVinci Code, and it’s just so obviously untrue, that all you have to do is just go to Google, just type in Canons of the first Council of Nicaea. It’s not like we’re looking at some esoteric text, this 19th century monastery has one copy in Greek. No, no, no. This is an extremely important church council that has been widely translated into English. We know the canons. We regularly pray the Nicaean Creed. It is not secret what it did and didn’t say, and it didn’t say anything one way or the other about which books belong in the Bible.

However, history is not done. A fellow named Jerome, commissioned to write a Latin version of the Bible using Greek and Hebrew, he translated it into Latin. Did he include the books that the Roman Catholic Church has in their canon today? And the answer is he translated them with a note saying, “But these aren’t actually the Bible. They can be profitable for understanding how people before us did things. But these are not inspired writ.” That’s from the Latin Vulgate.

Okay. So this has elements of truth in it, but it’s still getting a lot of things wrong. So let’s talk about the fourth century church, because he mentioned earlier, this is the church that figures out which Bible is the right Bible, right? It’s got all these interlopers and it’s saying… He says it’s the Council of Nicaea, but not really then, which books are and aren’t in the Bible. And it’s true, the fourth century church makes a really important set of contributions to this. But when you read what the Fourth Century Church actually has to say, it’s not anything like what he’s saying. And instead, you’ve got things like the Third Council of Carthage in 397 that now this is a regional council, it’s not an ecumenical council, it’s not binding on all Christians. It is a North African council. But North Africa at the time is a major hub of Christianity, and it’s listing which books are in the Bible.

And it says, “It was also determined that besides the canonical scriptures, nothing be read in the church under the title of Divine Scriptures. The canonical scriptures are these…” And then it lists the entire Catholic Bible, including Maccabees, including Judith, including Tobit, including all of these books that Protestants today deny. So when he talks about how great the fourth century church is, well he doesn’t actually think they got this right. He thinks the fourth century church is actually wrong. St. Augustine says the same thing. He talks about this, he gives a whole list in On Christian doctrine and he explicitly mentions Judith, Second Book of Maccabees. He actually mentions all of the seven. And then in City of God, he talks about how these books, he looks particularly the two books of Maccabees, he says, “They are not considered canonical by the Jews, but they are considered canonical by the church.”

So there’s no question that there’s a widespread belief in the fourth century that these 73 books are the books that make up the Bible. And this is what leads to the Latin Vulgate. You might notice that Friel said, “Oh, Jerome was commissioned to translate the Vulgate into Latin.” And you might say, “Well, commissioned by who?” Commissioned by the Pope, because there was enough clarity about which books should be considered canonical, that it was important to bind them into a single volume called Book or Bible, and that’s what he did. But Jerome disagreed with what everybody else said. Now that part is where Friel is half right. But I think Jerome’s position gets exaggerated and misrepresented enough that it’s worth reading what Jerome has to say for himself. In his prologue to the book of Judith, he argues that he wasn’t going to translate the book, he said, “But because this book is found by the Nicaean Council to have been counted among the number of the sacred scriptures, I’ve acquiesced to your request, indeed, a demand.”

So he’s been told to do it, so he is going to do it. And also he says, “First Council of Nicaea says this is scripture.” Now again, I don’t know what Jerome’s talking about, but Jerome is writing about 80 years after the First Council of Nicaea. Now, I don’t think Todd Friel has some special knowledge of the First Council of Nicaea that is not widely known, because he’s gotten everything else factually wrong here. But I would not be shocked to learn that Jerome, writing 80 years after the First Council of Nicaea, knows details about the proceedings of the council that didn’t make it into the final acts of the council, or the final canons of the council. That’s purely historical speculation. We’re left with this strange situation where Jerome claims that this book, Judith, which Catholics accept and Protestants reject, was affirmed by the First Council of Nicaea.

We don’t know what he’s talking about again, but it’s an interesting, intriguing historical detail. It also complicates the picture. Going on, Jerome writing against Rufinus, one of his frenemies, talks about which version of Daniel to use, and he uses the longer form of Daniel, and he writes about this too, Rufinus. He says, “Well, we’ve got four versions to choose from.” He says, “The churches choose to read Daniel in the version of Theodotion. What sin have I committed in following the judgment of the churches?” So he follows that version when figuring out which base text to use for translation. And to make this all even a little more complicated, so you’ll notice he’s… Even he’s got his private theological judgments. He’s got his own views about which books should and shouldn’t be considered scripture, but he’s willing to defer to what he calls the judgment of the church.

So this is an important detail that gets misrepresented because you have this idea that oh, sure, the Third Council of Carthage, oh sure, the Pope, oh sure, the broader church, maybe even the First Council of Nicaea and now Lost Canons, all say these books are inspired, but Jerome, he’s going to trump all that. Well, Jerome doesn’t think Jerome trumps all of that. He expresses, in his very blunt style, his own views, but nevertheless, he defers and he goes along. He could have not translated the Latin Vulgate, right? He, you might notice, translates these seven books to include in the Latin version of the Bible that’s used for the next 1000 years as the standard Bible throughout all of Western Christianity. So I just think that’s worth including additionally and beyond all that, beyond his references to Nicaea’s apparent endorsement of Judith, beyond his personal deference to the judgment of the churches on these matters, you also have him in numerous places citing to these books as scripture, even though elsewhere he says they’re not scripture.

So Jerome’s position is way more nuanced and complicated than I think Protestants give it credit for. So yeah, sure you get half a point for Jerome, but Jerome is virtually alone on this question. You have Jerome, you have Rufinus, and you have what’s called The Ordinary Gloss, which is a biblical commentary that was popular in the Middle Ages that argued against the canonicity of these seven books. Outside of those three sources, I don’t know of anyone else prior to the 16th century who’s making an argument that these seven books shouldn’t be in the Bible. And I would have a good deal of difficulty making any kind of principled case that an ecumenical council says X and Jerome says Y, and we should go with Jerome instead of the council. And as I said, I don’t think Jerome would make that argument, because we see from his own conduct that he didn’t view himself as greater than a church council. Okay, back to Friel.

Fast-forward, we enter into the Protestant Reformation. It is now…

Okay, just want to point out, this is standard Protestant history where there’s just, you skip 1000 years, but fine. Okay, we’ll do it.

The 16th century, and justification by faith alone, it is sweeping Western civilization, and the books that were recognized at that time were these same 27 that you have in your New Testament today. Why then does the Roman Catholic Church today have more, and did Protestants take them out?

First of all, the Catholic Church doesn’t have more books in the New Testament. You literally, to check this, would only need to open a Catholic Bible one time. We have the same books in the same order. This question is like saying, “Why do Protestants have five legs?” And you’re just like, “I don’t know how to answer that because it’s an absurd hypothetical.” No one who has even a little bit of knowledge about this would make this claim, but go on.

Historically, no, because they were never codified as being biblical. The apocryphal books, a collection of writings that were actually rejected early by the church, were now, suddenly, courtesy of the Council of Trent in 1545, which took about four years to complete, they started to add those books to the canon. Protestants did not remove them, the Roman Catholic Church added them, and that is simply historical fact.

Again, none of that is historical fact. First of all, we know these books were not rejected by the early church, as we’ve just seen. You’ve got Augustine and you’ve got Third Council of Carthage, there’s plenty of other old citations. Even people who don’t seem to include them on their canonical list will regularly cite them and call them scripture and use them to prove doctrine. And so no, it’s just not true these seven books weren’t included, or they were rejected in antiquity. But you’ll notice that he’s gone back to saying, “Well, they weren’t codified,” but he already called that out as a cheap trick early on. That people say, “Well, the Bible wasn’t codified until the fourth century, therefore we didn’t know what books were in it.” And he rightly said, “You can know what the books were even before they’re codified.” Well, so here.

They knew what the books were even prior to the being codified. That’s not just a special argument that you could only use for the New Testament. That’s also true of Christianity’s knowledge of the Old Testament, that we knew which books were in the Old Testament even before they were codified. Now sure, there were debates. There were debates about the New Testament as well, but the idea that there was a general consensus is something that I think is important to preserve, and something that he’s just getting historically wrong here.

Now again, you heard him just make the claim that the Catholic Church added these books at the Council of Trent. Now, you already saw the Council of Florence about a century prior. So ask yourself, how could that claim possibly be true? How could we say the Catholic Church adds seven books at the Council of Trent that it had already affirmed and codified a century earlier, and that we find regularly cited to by popes, that we find regularly cited to by church councils, and church fathers, and everything else all down through history? And that we find on these biblical canonical lists like St. Augustine’s list, like the third Council of Carthage and the like? And the answer is, you can’t make sense of that. This is a nonsensical, just false historical claim.

Why did they do that? Well, men like Martin Luther, understanding justification by faith alone, recognized purgatory doesn’t even… it wouldn’t make sense. If we are totally forgiven, imputed with Christ’s righteousness, why do we have to go burn off our bad works, or earn our way into paradise, if it’s already been earned for us? So he started looking through his New Testament, and couldn’t find a single verse that even comes close. I suppose you could argue First Corinthians four, but that has more to do with works than it does salvation. There was no support for purgatory, so…

Okay, so this is picking nits, and I acknowledge that, but that’s not First Corinthians four, it’s First Corinthians three that I assume he’s talking about, unless he’s got some other verse in mind. But the usual passage in First Corinthians that gets pointed to in purgatory debates is First Corinthians 3:10-15, in which St. Paul describes himself as a skilled master builder who laid a foundation, and the foundation of course is Jesus Christ. And he says, “Now if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble, each man’s work will become manifest for the day. That is, judgment day will disclose it, because it will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done.” So then he describes two categories of saved people. First, if the work which any man has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward.

Second, if any man’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire. Now if you understand the actual teaching on purgatory, which isn’t what Todd Friel just said. We aren’t saying, “Jesus Christ isn’t enough. We have to also save ourselves through good work.” That’s not the way this… That’s an inaccurate understanding of purgatory. That’s an inaccurate understanding even of the justification debates. It’s not, “I need my own merit apart from Christ.” That’s just inaccurate. What it is, with the belief in purgatory, is that there are some, who because of the lives they led, although they are saved, they’ll be saved as through fire. And that’s right there in First Corinthians three. So when he says, “This isn’t about salvation, it’s about works.” Well to divide them up that dramatically is presupposing the Protestant framework.

Now, I guess we should say a few more words about this, because he’s saying, he mentioned earlier in the 16th century, you’ve got the spread of this idea in justification by faith alone, and that Martin Luther can’t harmonize justification by faith alone with his belief, or with purgatory, excuse me. And I would just say, yeah, we’ll get back to that, but that’s not an argument against the Bible. That’s not an argument against these seven books. That’s an argument against Martin Luther’s belief, and justification by faith alone. So here I want to actually, this is the part that is a little bit of a digression, and I acknowledge that, but I’m going to do it anyway, to say, “Why do we trust that First and Second Maccabees belong in the Bible?” There are a lot of ways you could go about proving that, but one way that I think is really interesting and doesn’t get talked about a lot is this connection they have with the Epistle to the Hebrews.

And so in Second Maccabees 12, this is the part Martin Luther objects to, presumably, there is this scene in which Judas Maccabeus and his men have just had a battle, and some of their comrades have fallen, and they go and they find on the bodies of everyone who was dead sacred tokens of the idols of Jamnia, which the law forbids the Jews to wear. In other words, these are guys who died, on the one hand, fighting for the freedom of Israel, but on the other hand, carrying these superstitious pagan relics, or tokens, whatever you want to… Amulets, there’s the word I was looking for. And so they bless God. Judas Maccabeus and his men realize that God has acted rightly, and then they turn to prayer, beseeching that the sin which had been committed might be blotted out.

Okay. So they clearly have a belief that there’s a chance that there will be some purification of these men after death. They’re not obviously going to hell. These are men who died fighting for Israel, but they’re also not, obviously, right with God. They’re in this weird, complicated relationship, as so many lives are. And so what do they do when they die? They pray for them, and then Judas exhorts the people to keep themselves free from sin. Don’t go that way. And then he takes up a collection of 2000 drachmas of silver, and sent it to Jerusalem to provide for a sin offering. A sin offering after death. This is a really fascinating theological concept. Now so far, this is just a historical account, but then we’re told by the author that in doing this, he acted very well and honorably, taking account of the resurrection. For if he were not expecting that those who had fallen would rise again, it would’ve been superfluous and foolish to pray for the dead.

But if he was looking to the splendid reward that is laid up for those who fall asleep in godliness, it was a holy and pious thought. Therefore, he made atonement for the dead that they might be delivered from their sin. Now, that account makes a lot of sense, if you believe in something like purgatory. It does not make any sense if you believe in something like sola fide. Todd Friel says this, you just can’t harmonize that view with something like sola fide. Okay, great. So if First and Second Maccabees belongs in the Bible, or even if First and Second Maccabees are theologically orthodox, right? Because even if you don’t think it’s divinely inspired, if you think this thing is true and good, that’s enough. That’s the only standard it would have to meet. That’s where the Hebrews part comes in. Christian Brady has, he turned this into an article, but originally he just posted it online, that Hebrews 11 is a midrash of First Maccabees two. He’s looking at First Maccabees, well then look at Second Maccabees next.

Why did they do that? Well, men like Martin Luther, understanding justification by faith alone, recognized purgatory doesn’t even make sense. If we are totally forgiven imputed with Christ’s righteousness, why do we have to go burn off our bad works, or earn our way into paradise, if it’s already been earned for us? So he started looking through his New Testament, and couldn’t find a single verse that even comes close. I suppose you could argue First Corinthians four, but that has more to do with works than it does salvation. There was no support for purgatory, so what did the Roman Catholic Church do?

Okay, before we get his answer to his own rhetorical question, let’s just get a couple things straight. First, I know this is at the risk of picking nits, but he’s wrong about the passages. First Corinthians three, not first Corinthians four. In first Corinthians three, now remember, he says there’s nothing in the New Testament that sounds like, “Your works might get burnt up after you die.” Well, listen to one Corinthians three for yourself and see if the Catholic Church is just making this up.

St. Paul begins by declaring himself a skilled master builder, and says he lays a foundation which is Jesus Christ. Then he says, quote, “Now if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stone, wood, hay, stubble, each man’s work will become manifest, for the day,” that’s Judgment Day, “will disclose it. Because it will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done.” Paul then lays out two categories of saved people. Number one, “If the work which any man has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward.” Number two, “If any man’s work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire.”

So look, I agree with Todd Friel that there’s no room for this kind of theology if you accept imputational justification by faith alone. And it should be pointed out here that the early church didn’t. We’ll get into that in a little more, but this is not what the early church believed about how one was saved. They didn’t believe justification by faith alone, they didn’t believe in imputation. Protestant authors are really clear about this. Alister McGrath really famously in Iustitia Dei says, “This is a theological novelty of the 16th century, a theological novum.” So that idea, this is a brand new theology of how we’re saved that’s inconsistent with the belief in purgatory, and is inconsistent with First Corinthians three. Now, First Corinthians three is there in the Bible. So the idea, “Oh, there was nothing there in the Bible, and so we had to go and make some texts up about purgatory.” Well, that’s where he’s going to go next, so we’ll let him go there.

Find some books that do talk about it, and they added those to the canon…

Okay, so that’s just not true. Well, let’s talk a little bit about the books and then about why we can trust the books. Now, I’ve already seen, they were already there. You’ve got the early Christians talking about them. You’ve got the Council of Florence talking about them. This is not something they were inventing in response to sola fide. Long before anyone was claiming this 16th century doctrine of imputed justification by faith alone, you’ve got a clear belief both in purgatory and a belief that these seven books are in the Bible. Now, of those seven books, there’s one in particular that’s going to be relevant for this debate, and that’s second Maccabees. So Second Maccabees 12 tells the story about Judas Maccabeus. First and Second Maccabees both tell this story, but there’s a particular moment in Second Maccabees 12 that’s really relevant, because Judas and his men, they’re going to fight against the Greek persecutors, and many of the Israelites fall in battle. And they find, under the tunic of everyone who had died, sacred tokens of the idols of Jamnia, which the law forbids the Jews to wear.

In other words, these are men who on the one hand, died defending Israel. These were people who died fighting against Gentile oppression. But on the other hand, they still had these superstitious amulets. And so the question is, what do you make of that theologically? What do you make of somebody whose life is a muddle of righteousness and sin? And look, I don’t think they’re the first people to ask that question about loved ones who’ve died, or fellow believers who’ve died, where you say, “Yeah, I can see lots of really promising things, but I can also see some things that give me some pause, some things that really troubled me.” And what do they do? Well, we’re told. First, they bless God, because he knows all things, and this was revealed in this moment very profoundly to them. Second, we’re told, they turned to prayer, beseeching that the sin which should have been committed might be wholly blotted out.

Now, if you don’t have something like purgatory, this doesn’t make any sense. They’re either in heaven, and don’t need your prayers, or in hell, and can’t make use of your prayers. And so praying for the dead makes no sense without purgatory, and yet here they are, very clearly praying for the dead. And then they don’t even just do that. Judith Maccabeus then tells the people to keep themselves free from sin, so this doesn’t happen to them. And then they collect a sin offering. He goes around and collects a collection, man to man, to the amount of 2000 drachmas of silver. Now, we’re going to return to why this matters because Hebrews is going to talk about this. We’ll get there. I’m getting a little ahead of myself. But then we’re told, the author then comments on this.

So instead of just mentioning these things happen, where we could say, well, it depicted it. Sometimes scripture depicts things that are actually evil. Well, the author here is very clear this was good. He says in verse 43, “In doing this, he acted very well and honorably, taking account of the resurrection. For if he were not expecting that those who’d fallen would rise again, it would’ve been superfluous and foolish to pray for the dead. But if he was looking to the splendid reward that is laid up for those who fall asleep in godliness, it was a holy and pious thought. Therefore, he made atonement for the dead, that they might be delivered from their sin.” This is the kind of theology that Todd Friel is saying is bad and wrong. Well, the problem with that is that this is the kind of theology the New Testament is steeped in.

So I’m going to give you a couple examples. Now, remember, this is First and Second Maccabees this story is in, that if you want to understand the epistle to the Hebrews, it’s really important to read those two books. Why do I say that? Christian Brady has an… It’s originally a blog article. I think that he turned into an actual essay. The original article was called Hebrews 11 is a Midrash of First Maccabees Two, and you’ll find a nearly verbatim form of this in a published essay form later. But he argues that if you look at the flow of it, Hebrews 11 has that famous hall of fame in which the author of Hebrew says, “By faith, our ancestors received approval,” and then proceeds to list individuals in a roughly chronological order. And that this really closely mirrors what we find in first Maccabees chapter two, with Mattathias’ dying declaration, to remember the deeds of the ancestors, which has a very similar kind of list.

Now, Brady actually argues that there’s a way that we should read it with and against First Maccabees two. That Hebrews 11 is both intentionally patterned off of First Maccabees two, but is also going maybe a little deeper, going beyond. That it’s not enough to just hope for earthly glory. We’re also setting our eyes on something greater. That as you move from the Old Testament to the New Testament, the promises are bigger. This is an explicit part of Hebrews, that with Christ comes greater promises. But let’s get a little sense of what we’re talking about here, because he mentions this First Maccabees two. If you’ve never read it, this section goes from verse 49 to verse 68, but I’m going to quote just a little bit of the middle, part 51 to 55. Mattathias says, “Remember the deeds of the fathers, which they did in their generations and received great honor and an everlasting name.

“Was not Abraham found faithful and tested, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness? Joseph, in the time of his distress, kept the commandment and became Lord of Egypt. Phineas, our father, because he was deeply zealous, received the covenant of everlasting priesthood. Joshua, because he fulfilled the command, became a judge in Israel.” Now, it goes on from there, but if you’ve ever read Hebrews 11, that should sound really similar. Only, where First Maccabees two is focusing on their mighty deeds, Hebrews 11 is focusing on the profundity of their faith that these two of course go hand in hand. We could get into the whole faith and works thing again, but these two are going hand in glove. But first, the Hebrews 11 list, which goes all throughout the entire Hebrews 11, but then also kind of leads to the culmination in the first couple verses of Hebrews 12.

At the end of it, it’s interesting for another reason. It’s not just that it looks a lot like First Maccabees, looks like it was patterned off of it. But the final examples that he gives, he says, “What more shall I say? For time would fail me to tell of Gideon, Barak Samson,” and then so on and so on, and then he includes this line. “Some were tortured, refusing to accept release that they might rise again to a better life.” Wait a second. He’s given all these biblical examples, and if you’ve got a Protestant Bible, you might be saying, “What’s that last example he gave? This is in chronological order, seemingly. I don’t know that one.” Well, it’s because you don’t have Second Maccabees. Second Maccabees, chapter six, this is Eleazar. He is told to eat pork, he refuses to, and then he’s killed. This is also present in Second Maccabees seven.

There’s a woman who has seven sons who’s presented the same option. You can eat pork and live, live as a gentile, and you’ll be fine, or you can be a religious exemption, and you’ll be killed for that. If you are a conscientious objector, you’re not going to live. And so for example, Second Maccabees 7:7, the second of the seven sons is brought forth. They tear the skin of his head with the hair, and ask him, “Will you eat, rather than have your body punished limb by limb?” He then replies in Hebrew, “No.” “Therefore, he in turn underwent tortures as the first brother had done, and when he was at his last breath, he said, “You accursed wretch. You dismiss us from this present life, but the king of the universe will raise us up to an everlasting renewal of life,” or the Vulgate has, “In the resurrection of eternal life, because we have died for his laws.”

Now remember, here are the things Hebrews is saying. There’s some kind of example in salvation history where the faithful were tortured and refused to accept release, that they might rise again to a better life. So we’re looking for three things. Number one, the person has to be tortured. Number two, they have to be offered release and say no. And number three, this has to be because of a belief in the resurrection. Second Maccabees seven has all those three things in those order very explicitly, and I don’t know another passage that has those three things in that order, except for maybe Second Maccabees six. So I’m not the only person to notice this. This is, again, a pretty widely accepted, I think, scholarly opinion. Matthew C. Easter, who teaches at Missouri Baptist, I believe he is Baptist, he talks about this. And it is one of the essays in the Zondervan Academic book, Reading Hebrews in Context.

This is a mainstream evangelical publication. This is not some weird fringe thing. He says, “Given the number of parallels to Second Maccabees 6-7 in Hebrews 11 and 12, the author’s introduction of God as creator in Hebrews 11:3 likely parallels the Maccabean mother’s words.” This is the mother of the seven sons. “If Hebrews 11:3 parallels the scene of martyrdom in Second Maccabees seven, then the author introduced God as creator to substantiate the hope of resurrection we see later in Hebrews 11.” Now, that’s a lot there. I totally understand if all of that is a little more detailed than you’re hoping for, or wanting. But the basic gist is this. Hebrews appears to be both patterned, in its most famous section, off of First Maccabees two, and seems to include reference to scriptural examples from Second Maccabees. Now, Protestants might say, “Well, maybe they’re just including these events because they’re historically true, and not because they’re canonical.”

That would make it really unique, because all the other examples are coming from scripture. These appear to all be scriptural examples. But fine, if you just say Second Maccabees is historically true, you still have to say, “Well, historically, the Jewish people believed in something like purgatory,” which if you read the Jewish encyclopedia article on purgatory, you’ll find they did, and still do. This is why Jews pray for the dead. When someone dies and they sit Shiva, 10 men gather around and pray for the soul of the dead person. Why? Because they believe in an intermediate state. There’s some differences in the Jewish and Catholic view, but they clearly don’t believe in anything like the Protestant view. Okay.

In order to support their doctrines that had actually no biblical support, that’s history, that’s reality, protestants did not take out books. It was the Roman Catholic Church, in the middle of the 16th century, who added them.

Okay, so I think you can see all of that was false. That it is not the case that the Catholic Church added seven books. It’s not the case that they added them in the 16th century, and it’s not the case that they added them in response to the Protestant reformation. And it’s not the case they added them to try to invent a justification for purgatory. What’s amazing about all of this is that he’s really… If you were to take all of these claims, and just assume that the opposite of everything he says is true, you would have a really good case against the Protestant Bible. By that, I mean there is somebody who is removing books from the Bible because he doesn’t like their theology, and that’s Martin Luther. And you don’t have to take my words for it, you can take Martin Luther’s words for it.

And his preface to the epistles of St. James and St. Jude in 1522, in his German translation of the Bible, he says he likes… He says, “Though the epistle of St. James was rejected by the ancients,” that’s a gross mischaracterization of the debate about St. James, but nevertheless, “I praise it and consider it a good book because it sets up no doctrines of men, but vigorously promulgates the law of God. However, to state my own opinion about it, though without prejudice to anyone, I do not regard it as the writing of an apostle, and my reasons follow.” He then says, “In the first place, it is flatly against St. Paul and all the rest of scripture, in ascribing justification to works.” Now, he explains that it appears to contradict Romans four based on Luther’s reading of Romans four. He says, “Now, although this epistle might be helped in an interpretation devised for its justification by works, it cannot be defended in its application to works of Moses’s statement in Genesis 15.”

In other words, even if you could invent some workaround where you can harmonize the Epistle of James with sola fide, which later Protestants have tried to do, that still, he says, wouldn’t do it. And he says, “This fault, therefore, proves this epistle is not the work of any apostle.” So let’s break that down. Luther realized that it wasn’t just Second Maccabees that contradicted sola fide, it’s also the Epistle of James, famously in James 2:24, it says, “So you see the justification is not by faith alone.” Luther adds the word alone to Romans 3:28, to say that justification is by faith alone, where the actual uncorrupted text says, “Justification is by faith, apart from works of the law,” which is what Catholics believe. We believe in justification by faith. We don’t believe in justification by faith alone, because the only time the phrase faith alone appears is when James tells us in James two, “Justification is not by faith alone.”

You can go check this, do a little search in Bible Gateway, or wherever you read your Bible online. Look up the phrase faith alone, and you’ll see it appears one time, and it’s James telling us, “That’s not how justification works.” Luther admits this. This is a defeater for his whole theology. And so his solution is, “Yeah, it must not be written by James. It must not really be an inspired book.” And then he goes on, in his preface to the book of Revelation… This is the first one. He’s going to change this view later, but originally, in regards to Revelation, he says, “Let everyone think of it as his own spirit leads him. My spirit cannot accommodate itself to this book.” And he says, “For me, this is reason enough not to think highly of it. Christ is neither taught nor known in it.” And then he says, “Therefore, I stick to the books which present Christ to me clearly and purely.”

So I mentioned this before, but I want to just give some biblical, or give some, excuse me, historical support for this. Philip Schaff, who is a Protestant theologian and one of the finest historians of the early church from the 19th century, meaning he’s in the 19th century, but he’s dealing with early Christianity. He’s responsible for the anti-Nicaean fathers, or no, no, excuse me, the Nicaean and Post-Nicaean Fathers series, which is a massive undertaking of just translating these works in English. And so he is a really important figure for all of this. He knows the church fathers very well, and in his own work history of the Christian Church, he says, “If anyone expects to find in this period, or in any of the church fathers, Augustine himself not excepted, the Protestant justification of justification by faith alone, as the article upon which the church stands or falls, you’ll be greatly disappointed.” He says, “You just don’t find it.” The closest you get, according to him, is St. Clement of Rome who joins it with the doctrine of James.

In other words, even Clement, even when he sounds like he’s getting close to sola fide, then says all this stuff that agrees with James and doesn’t endorse the sola fide view. So you don’t have anyone in the early church believing what Luther does about justification, but you do have them believing in these seven books, and you do have them believing and praying for the dead. I mean, all of that is abundantly supported. So yes, there is someone who changes the Bible because they don’t like the belief on purgatory, but it isn’t the Catholic Church doesn’t like the belief on purgatory, so we add some books to add purgatory. Luther doesn’t like the belief on purgatory, and doesn’t like the belief on justification, and so he takes books out of the Old Testament and the New Testament. The very thing that we just got accused of by Todd Friel is actually true of Martin Luther, and not of the Catholic Church. That Luther tries to remove four books from the New Testament, tries to remove seven books from the Old Testament, that’s just historical fact.

Now, closing thoughts. I want to turn back to the Ben Witherington III article from Christian History from 2017, where he talks about how the early Protestant Bibles, despite Luther having these doubts about them, despite him lowering seven books to a second tier status, he doesn’t totally remove them. And I said we’d get back to this and say, “Okay, so how did those books get totally removed from Protestant Bibles?” Because they’re in all the original Protestant Bibles. You’ll find the deuterocanon, the so-called apocrypha, in the German, Swiss, and English Bibles that the reformers produced. So what happens? Well, according to Witherington… This is accurate. It’s not just own private view. He says, “So when and where does the Protestant Bible of 66 books show up? This practice was not standardized until 1825, when the British and Foreign Bible Society in essence threw down the gauntlet, and said, “These 66 books and no others.””

But then he says, “But this was not the Bible of Luther, Calvin, Knox, or even the Wesleys, who used the authorized version.” That’s the KJV. So if you’re reading a KJV today, and it has 66 books in it, it’s not the original KJV. If you’re reading a Protestant Bible that has 66 books, it’s not the one used by the reformers. That these were books that were removed. And more importantly, not just was it not the Bible used by the reformers, it’s not the Bible used by the early Christians. It’s not the Bible used for the 1000 years and more preceding the Reformation. That as a matter of sheer historical fact, Protestants gave themselves the authority to just randomly remove books from the Bible by their own authority. Martin Luther felt free to both discard four books from the New Testament, and left it up to each of our individual spirits which books we would add or remove. I mean, that is total wildness. He’s right there in text talking about that.

And you have Protestants today who still pretend that this isn’t the case, and that actually, he was just accepting the books that he’d already been given, and then the Catholic Church was the one doing this. That this wild spirit of biblical anarchy to say, “It’s not the Bible that rules over me. I rule over the Bible. I can add books and remove them as I please,” that’s not the Catholic Church’s view of the Bible. That’s not what the Catholic Church did with the Bible. That’s what Martin Luther and later Protestant reformers did with the Bible. So there you go. On the simple question of whether it was us who added them or the Protestants who removed them, I hope that leaves the matter to rest, and I hope it gives my Protestant readers and listeners something to think about. Something to really ponder. Did they have the authority to take those books out of the Bible? And if they can take them out, who else can take books out, or add books? For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.