In this clip, Cy Kellett welcomes Joe Heschmeyer to discuss why Catholics have a different Bible than other Christian denominations. Joe continues with details about the historical context of the Old Testament and the significance of the Septuagint in Catholic tradition.
Transcript:
Cy: Robert, we’re very glad to have you. Why aren’t you Catholic?
Caller: I was born and raised a Southern Baptist and I’ve got my ESV, English Standard Version Bible. I’ve heard you guys reference other books like the Book of Enoch. Do the Catholics have a different Bible with different books than the other Christian denominations?
Cy: Great, Robert, thank you.
Joe: Yeah, that’s a fantastic question. Yes, but Enoch is actually not one of them. So let me explain, just as best I can, kind of the short version of this. And there’s a lot of history to this. If you go back to the time of Christ, there was some confusion among the Jews about which books were and were not inspired. So for instance, the Sadducees only accepted the first five books of the Bible, the Torah. And so you’ll see anytime Jesus talks with them, he only quotes the Torah to them. But the fact that they didn’t have the rest of the Old Testament actually really hurt because it meant that they didn’t accept the resurrection of the dead. It meant they didn’t believe in angels. And so, you know, you have to prove all of those things from the first five books: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.
The Pharisees tended to have a Bible that was closer to like the Protestant Old Testament, but there are exceptions with that. And then the Jews living, what are called the Hellenistic Jews, meaning the Greek-speaking Jews living in places like Greece and Alexandria, Egypt, and across the Roman Empire, they had usually the Greek translation called the Septuagint. The Septuagint, there’s kind of a family of translations, but it usually is the Catholic Old Testament. Now, I’m putting the word “usually” in there for a reason. Those are kind of oversimplifications on both ends.
But this difference in the Old Testament isn’t something that originally is a Catholic-Protestant issue. It’s an issue within Judaism. So how do we know which version is the right one? Well, there’s a few ways. Number one, the Septuagint is the one that’s usually quoted in the New Testament. About 80-85% of the biblical quotations of the Old Testament are to this Greek version that includes these other books. And I’ll get to what those other books are in a second.
Number two, we see things like, for instance, in the Book of Acts where the noble Bereans, these Christians in Berea, Greece, are praised for searching the Scriptures. Well, the scriptures they’re searching are going to be including these books that modern Protestants don’t accept.
Number three, we see references to the events of these books. For instance, in places like Hebrews 11, when it talks about the woman whose sons are killed, that’s a reference to an event that happens in the books of Maccabees, specifically in 2 Maccabees. It’s also where we get feasts like the Feast of Hanukkah; that’s also from 1 and 2 Maccabees. We see Jesus celebrating that feast called the Feast of Dedication in John 10.
So we see lots of these places where these things that aren’t in Protestant Bibles are in Catholic Bibles, and they are seemingly referenced in the New Testament. Now, Protestants will sometimes say that there is a 400 or 450-year period of divine silence between the prophet Malachi, the last chronological book of the Protestant Old Testament, and the New Testament. But that notion of 400 years of silence or 450 years of silence is totally unbiblical. Jesus instead says that the prophets testify and tell John; there’s no cessation of prophecy. In Luke 2, we see the prophetess Anna in the Temple. We see prophecy is still very much alive, even in the first century.
So that’d be the first thing: the normal arguments being made for the shorter 66-book Protestant Bible are not, I think, well supported biblically. Additionally, we see that the early Christians, while there was initially confusion about which books belonged in the Bible, with basically two exceptions—St. Jerome and Rufinus, who most people don’t even know who that is—everyone agreed on some or all of these what are sometimes called apocryphal or, a better term, is deuterocanonical books.
Now, Protestants will use the term “Apocrypha” for a wide collection of books that they reject. The more technically accurate term is “Deuterocanon.” The reason I mention that is because Enoch is apocrypha, but it’s not deuterocanon. Deuterocanon has a specific meaning of seven books that are accepted by Catholics and not accepted by Protestants. Those books are the Book of Tobit, Judith, 1st and 2nd Maccabees, Sirach, Baruch, and then Wisdom or Wisdom of Solomon.
In addition to that, there are longer forms of the Book of Esther and the Book of Daniel, where the Greek version of those books is longer than the Hebrew version. So we accept the canonicity of all of those. You’ll find those if you go back and read the writings of the early Christians; you’ll find them regularly cited as scripture.
So the question we should be asking is, well, how do we know which books are in Scripture at all? There’s an important role that the Church plays, not in making it become. In other words, the Church’s role is not to take an uninspired text and then, like through a magical decree, make it an inspired text. It’s rather that we trust that the Holy Spirit, working through the Church, recognizes which books are of inspired status and which ones aren’t.
If we can’t trust the early Church to get that right, that raises some grave threats for, like, how do we know that we got the New Testament right? On what basis do Protestants know which books belong in their Bible? You know, those kinds of questions are the ones that I think we ought to be asking.
Cy: Robert, thank you for the question. How does that address what you wanted to know?
Caller: Yes, in several ways. Now, I know that there are very specific books. Then if you know the whole calling into question the whole New Testament because early Christianity is Catholicism, I just don’t get why Protestants don’t accept those books. Like, I had never heard of them growing up, and I grew up in a private Christian school. I never even heard of it. And like, the Book of Enoch I heard of because of some crazy Internet video.
Cy: Oh, that might have been ours. We did a crazy Internet video on the Book of Enoch. But actually, no, it was about how Catholics don’t accept it and why Catholics don’t accept it. But, Joe, how did it come about that someone raised as a Baptist in Georgia might have entire books of the Bible that are not in their Bible?
Joe: Yeah, I mean, well, it’s a kind of a complicated history. So it’s the Third Council of Carthage in 397 that it’s a local council, not an ecumenical council, but one that St. Augustine’s at that really clarifies in the West what the canon of Scripture is. The canon of Scripture is a fancy way of saying which books belong in the Bible. There is no divinely inspired table of contents.
So when you get to the Reformation, when people call into question saying, well, the Church has gotten a lot of things wrong, maybe the Church got which books are in the Bible wrong, it creates some real problems. Martin Luther begins this process. He calls into question the status of four New Testament books as well as these seven Old Testament books. John Calvin calls into question six of the seven Old Testament books.
So what’s striking is that the resulting Protestant Bible doesn’t agree with the early Church, doesn’t agree with the Catholic Church throughout the ages, doesn’t agree with what Martin Luther argued for, doesn’t agree with what John Calvin argued for, and is actually the result of this kind of several centuries-long process of first lowering the status of these seven books and then eventually removing them from Bibles entirely.
It was, I believe, the British Foreign Mission and Bible Society that, just by a private decision, this missionary group decided, you know what, we’re not going to include these books in our Bibles anymore. And that changed the course of like English-speaking Protestantism. It’s a group no one’s ever heard of. It had no authority, no status to decide which books belonged in the Bible and which ones didn’t. It would be like the Gideons, you know, the ones who leave the Bibles in the hotel rooms, deciding to include some new book. They don’t have the authority to do that.
So that’s kind of the crux of the issue right there. Now we could talk for an hour about kind of related issues with that, but that’s kind of the simplified version.
Cy: We do have a book by the great Gary Machuda that’s called *Why Catholic Bibles Are Bigger*, and it’s comprehensive; it explains the whole history. If you’d like it, we’ll give it to you free. You just give your address to Thomas, and Thomas will send it to you. But if you don’t want to give us your address, that’s fine. But we’re happy to send you a free copy of it.