Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Why Are Catholic and Protestant Bibles Different? | Questions You're Asking

Starting point is 00:00:05 Welcome to 10 Minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life and the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. And I'm Patrick Miller. Right now, we are answering questions you're asking. A lot of these are coming from our Facebook page. So follow 10-minute Bible Talks on Facebook. Vote on your favorite questions, or you can just give your own, and you might hear it right here on the podcast. Are you looking for a fun idea for your next dink night?

Starting point is 00:00:32 Well, I've got a great idea for you. going to need is a Catholic Bible and a Protestant Bible, okay? Flip them both to their respective tables of contents, and you will discover that the Protestant Bible is missing seven books from the Bible. Or maybe is it that the Catholic Bible has added seven books that shouldn't be in the Bible. Well, if you're Catholic and your partner is Protestant, or the other way around, you are in for a fun night. May the best Bible nerd win.

Starting point is 00:01:00 Okay, but seriously, have you ever wondered how this is possible? why would two Christians have two different Bibles? Is this proof that we don't really know what belongs in the Bible? Is it proof that something nefarious happened during the development of the Bible's canon? Well, if your question is about how our biblical books were chosen, how they got put into what we think of as our Bible today, you need to listen to episode 131, which is called Who Chose Which Books Went Into the Bible. But on that episode, I promise I'd say something about why Catholic and Protestant, Bibles in particular differ. And we've had a lot of listeners like Jack Serrano ask us to tackle this particular question. It only took me 2.5 months to make good on the promise. So here we go.

Starting point is 00:01:45 The Catholic Bible has seven books which the Protestant Bible doesn't have. And by the way, there's other biblical canons out there that also have some other different books. There's the Ethiopic, Syriac, Orthodox, so on and so forth. In addition to that, though, the Catholic editions of both Esther and Daniel have actually added a few chapters that you won't find in your Protestant Bible. So before we talk about why these differences exist, we need to start on what everybody agrees about. Everybody, in all of these traditions, everybody agrees on which books belong in the New Testament. That's why episode 131 about who picked which books went into the Bible, that's why that episode is focused on the New Testament only. Now, everybody also agrees

Starting point is 00:02:29 that every book, which is included in the Protestant Old Testament, that every book in the Protestant Old Testament belongs in the Old Testament. So that's just a way of saying that all of the books in both the Protestant Old and New Testament are agreed upon by all major traditions. There's no disagreement there. So for clarity's sake, when I say the Old Testament, I'm going to be talking only about the books that all traditions agree upon. Now, the disagreement comes with what are called the Duderow canonical books. It's a fun word, right? That's just Latin for second canon. Again, so I want to be clear because I know this can get confusing. When I say Old Testament, I'm referring to the books written before the New Testament, which all traditions agree on.

Starting point is 00:03:13 Whenever I say Duthoro canonical books, which is just fun to say, I'm going to be referring to those books which different traditions disagree about, but all of these books were also written before the New Testament. Now, for the sake of, clarity, we'll focus on the differences between Catholic Bibles and Protestant Bibles. The seven Deutero-canonical books that are in the Catholic Bible are Tobit, Judith, Baruch, C-Rach, First and Second Macabees, and the Wisdom of Solomon. Now, these Deutero-canonical books, they actually share a lot of things in common, and that helps you understand a little bit of the context behind them. First of all, all of these books were written between 300 and 100 BC, which

Starting point is 00:03:55 means they were written after most of the Old Testament was constructed. Second, the Deuterocanonical books were widely read, and they were considered highly important by Jews during this same period and all the way into the period of Jesus and Paul. In fact, we can be relatively certain that Jesus and Paul not only read these books, but we're very familiar with these books. We see allusions to them and echoes of them throughout the New Testament. But a third thing that they all share in common is this. The New Testament never directly quotes from any of them, nor do any New Testament authors ever call any of the Deuterocanonical books scripture. And this explains why it's not in the Protestant Bibles, because it was not considered even by ancient Jews as being on the same

Starting point is 00:04:41 authority level as the rest of scripture. They have not historically ever been considered to be on the same authority level as the rest of scripture, despite being very important. So what should we make of these books. Well, I think a few analogies might help us understand. Let's start here. Take C.S. Lewis as an example. C.S. Lewis did not write scripture. Sorry if that's a newsflash to you. He didn't, though. Nor should we read him like scripture. But C.S. Lewis also isn't just a mere Christian author. We know this by virtue of the quality of his work. We know it by virtue of the fact that his work has been nearly universally received by Christians as very helpful over the last century, regardless of their denominational backgrounds. Because of this, most Christians recognize that

Starting point is 00:05:28 CS Lewis has a special kind of authority. Yeah, he's not the Bible, but if C.S. Lewis said something, we all give it more authority than we would give, let's say, Matt Chandler, or just a different modern Christian author. C.S. Lewis has special authority, not equal to scripture. but certainly above common authors today. That's a helpful way to think about the Deutero-canonical books. Let me give you one more analogy that actually gets us much closer to the heart of the matter. Constitutional interpretation. I bet you expected that. Okay, so only the Constitution of America is the Constitution. It has a unique authority in the governance of our country, but there are other writings around the Constitution, which have a

Starting point is 00:06:11 kind of secondary level of authority, in part because they actually help us understand what the original writers of the Constitution actually meant. They help us see what were the battles, what were the questions, what were the conversations that people saw themselves as participating in during the construction of the Constitution. For example, someone might refer to a quote from Alexander Hamilton in one of the Federalist papers to elucidate some aspect of the Constitution. Now, I think that's a really great way of understanding the Deutero-canonical books. They don't have the authority of the Old or New Testament because they're not Scripture, but they are also aren't just any other book, any other writing out there. They're a lot like the Federalist

Starting point is 00:06:51 papers. They are windows, windows into the conversations, the debates, the interests, that the authors of the New Testament saw themselves as being embedded within. So I actually think it's a real shame that Protestants, like myself, know so little about these books. If you read them, you're going to feel like you were reading from the same thought universe as the Old and New Testament. But I also think that it's a mistake to elevate these books to the level of scripture. It's worth noting, by the way, that most Catholics do not see these books on equal footing with the Old and New Testaments. So let's then answer a different question briefly here. How did these books end up making their way into some of our Bibles and not others of our Bibles? Well, the answer is pretty

Starting point is 00:07:34 straightforward. The answer is that the early church was comprised of mostly Greek speakers. Okay, so these weren't people who could read Hebrew or understand Hebrew. They wrote and they spoke Greek. Now, the Greek translation of the Old Testament is called the Septuagint, and that Septuagint was the Bible of the early church. And the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament, actually included the Deuterocanonical books. Now, you have to keep in mind, they were always designated as being secondary in importance. And now, fast forward in time, and a guy named Jerome comes along, and he translates the Bible into Latin, what's called the Vulgate. And he does this in the late 4th century. Now, the Pope requested that Jerome translate all of the books

Starting point is 00:08:18 included in the Septuagint, which would of course include the Deuterocanonical books. But catch this. Jerome did it. He translates all the books. But in his own translation notes, he makes it clear that the Deuterocanonical book should not be considered as scripture. So he follows right along with what early Christians believed, with what ancient Jews believe. These are important books, but they aren't scripture. Fast forward all the way to the Reformation. So we're moving 1,100 years into the future. And the reformers, like many Renaissance thinkers, believed in this motto, Adafontes, which is Latin for back to the sources. And so they said, look, we need to go back to the original sources to find out the truth. And when they went back to the original sources,

Starting point is 00:08:58 they discovered that the Deuterocononautical books were not really a part of the quote-unquote original Bible. And so they thought it would just be best to remove them from Bibles and minimize the confusion. Now, in those days, basically anything that the reformers said, no to? Roman Catholics would say very loudly yes to. This is exactly what's happening in our own culture when you look at polarization. People end up becoming more and more extreme in their views. And so when the reformers removed the Deuterocanonical books, they ended up treating them kind of like their demonized books, their evil books. We shouldn't have anything to do with those books. And on the flip side, the Catholic Church became more entrenched in treating them as

Starting point is 00:09:39 biblical books, and that takes us to today. So what's that mean for us? Well, let me give you the bottom line. It means you can trust your Bible, because, and I think this is amazing, most Christians and Jews have agreed about the authority of most of the biblical books. In other words, when we look at our Old Testament, everybody agrees that's the Old Testament. And if you're a Christian, when we look at the New Testament, everybody agrees that that's the New Testament. These books, over which there's a small amount of disagreement, are important books. They should be, respected and even read today. In fact, you could walk away from this podcast. I'd encourage you to go out and read something like The Wisdom of Solomon. You'll love it. You're going to hear echoes of Jesus and

Starting point is 00:10:19 Paul, or really it's the other way around, but you will enjoy it, I would bet, and it's going to help you appreciate your New Testament better, but you have to know it's not Scripture. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this content, please subscribe and give us a rating. That helps other people find this podcast more easily. Also, ask yourself, who could you share this podcast with? Texting an episode to a friend or a family member is a great way to help them grow spiritually. If you want to go deeper, check out our show notes for book recommendations.

Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Why Are Catholic and Protestant Bibles Different? | Questions You're Asking

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