Catholic and Protestant Bible?

Question

How come the Catholic Bible have more books than the Protestant Bible?Did the Catholics add more books in the Bible or did the Protestant take out some in books?I remember reading somewhere (Revelation I believe) that we should not add or take out God's word,are Catholics guilty of adding orare the Protestant guilty of taking out God word?

Answer 1

In addition to Spiritroamings excellent answer, it should be noted that the admonition in Revelation refers to the Revelation not the entire canon of scripture.

The answer to this question keeps focusing on who is to blame - Catholics or Protestants. This is sad. As stated above, when John wrote the Revelation, the canon of scripture had not been set. So John could not have been referring to the canon of scripture. He was referring to the letter we know as the Book of Revelation. He ends the letter by warning that anyone who adds to the prophecies of this book or removes from the prophecies of this book...

Surely our Catholic brothers and sisters are not suggesting that a new church didn't have the right to define its canon, particularly in the light of the Jewish decisions on what defined the canon of our Old Testament?

Pastor John

Answer 2

The Catholics did not add more books, the Protestants removed some as they decided to create their own religion. Catholics kept the Bible and teachings of Christ( as he established his Church) for over 2000 years. Any books that they did not understand or went along with their ideas was removed and considered to not be part of the Bible all of a sudden.You are correct in your assertion that we should not be taking out of God's word because by doing so his word would not be complete.We should all remember that God is the divine author of the Bible and he doesn't not want us humans deciding we can edit it better than he can.

Answer 3

No, it was the Protestants, King James and the Hampton Court Conference that excluded six books. Martin Luther hated the Epistle of St. James.
The Catholic Church excepted the deutero-cannonical books (the six) that the Jews used in their diaspora. The Reformers rejected the 6 books as not being written in Palestine. But they were written by the Jewish community.
The council of Trent set the canon or list of the scriptures based upon venerable usage in the Church over the centuries, seeing in this the mind of the Holy Spirit on the subject.
Interestingly enough, King James Bible had the six books in the original edition listed as Apocrypha and put in the back of the book.
It wasn't the Catholic Church that messed with scripture, it was the protestant reformers. They tailored the bible to suit their new doctrines of "Sola Scriptura" and "By Faith alone." Neither of which are biblical concepts.

Answer 4

The New Testament canon of the Catholic Bible and the Protestant Bible are the same with 27 Books.

The difference in the Old Testaments actually goes back to the time before and during Christ’s life. At this time, there was no official Jewish canon of scripture.

The Jews in Egypt translated their choices of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek in the second century before Christ. This translation of 46 books, called the Septuagint, had wide use in the Roman world because most Jews lived far from Palestine in Greek cities. Many of these Jews spoke only Greek.

The early Christian Church was born into this world. The Church, with its bilingual Jews and more and more Greek-speaking Gentiles, used the books of the Septuagint as its Bible. Remember the early Christians were just writing the documents what would become the New Testament.

After the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, with increasing persecution from the Romans and competition from the fledgling Christian Church, the Jewish leaders came together and declared its official canon of Scripture, eliminating seven books from the Septuagint.

The books removed were Tobit, Judith, 1 Maccabees, 2 Maccabees, Wisdom (of Solomon), Sirach, and Baruch. Parts of existing books were also removed including Psalm 151 (from Psalms), parts of the Book of Esther, Susanna (from Daniel as chapter 13), and Bel and the Dragon (from Daniel as chapter 14).

The Christian Church did not follow suit but kept all the books in the Septuagint. 46 + 27 = 73 Books total.

1500 years later, Protestants decided to keep the Catholic New Testament but change its Old Testament from the Catholic canon to the Jewish canon. The books they dropped are sometimes called the Apocrypha.

Here is a Catholic Bible website: http://www.nccbuscc.org/nab/bible/

With love in Christ.

Answer 5

pastor art is SADLY misinformed.

The book known as the Bible was originally a various collections of Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, and Chaldean (Daniel, Esther, and others were in Chaldean and not part of the Torah or Haftorah [The Law and the Prophets]) documents read by the early Christians in their worship. Some churches had some writings and others had other writings, but the Bible was not a whole book until the Council of Carthage in 397 A.D.

After the Emperor Constantine forbade the persecution of Christians, they were able to emerge from the catacombs and freely associate. There followed a great deal of discussion of what was considered scripture. There were some books that they promoted as scripture that are not in the Bible today, such as the Gospel of Thomas or the Epistle of Barnabas.

To resolve this dilemma, the Church assembled the leading scholars and experts of that time in Carthage (not Trent, art)to decide what was really scripture. The document they produced was called The Canon of Scripture, and here is the text of this document:

"[It has been decided] that nothing except Canonical Scriptures should be read in the church under the name of Divine Scriptures. But the Canonical Scriptures are: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Josue [Joshua], Judges, Ruth, four books of Kings [1 and 2 Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings], Paralipomenon two books [1 and 2 Chronicles], Job, the Psalter of David [Psalms], five books of Solomon [Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Wisdom, Ecclestiasticus or Sirach], twelve books of the [minor] prophets [Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi], Isaias, Jeremias [includes Lamentations of Jeremiah and the words copied by his scribe Baruch], Daniel, Ezechiel, Tobias, Judith, Esther, two books of Esdras [Ezra, Nehemiah], two books of the Machabees. Moreover, of the New Testament: Four books of the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles one book, thirteen epistles of Paul the apostle [Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, Philemon], one of the same to the Hebrews, two of Peter, three of John, one of James, one of Jude, the Apocalypse of John. Thus [it has been decided] that the Church beyond the sea [Rome] may be consulted regarding the confirmation of that canon; also that it be permitted to read the sufferings of the martyrs, when their anniversary days are celebrated."
These writings were delivered to St. Jerome, the leading scholar in the Old Testament and ancient languages. St. Jerome together with the brothers of of his monastery painstakingly translated the writings into Latin, which was the universal language of the day. This first Bible was called the Biblia Vulgata of the Vulgate or Common Bible.

During the rise of Protestantism, for various unsubstantiated reasons the following parts were removed from the Bible.

The Book of Tobit
The Book of Judith
The Wisdom of Solomon
The Book of Sirach [Ecclesiasticus]
The Writings of Baruch
The First and Second Books of the Macabees
Two Chapters of Daniel and the Song of the Hebrew Children in the fiery furnace (Daniel 3:25-90)
Consequently, the Catholic Bible has 72 books and the Protestant Bible has 66. One interesting note is that the original King James version of the Bible had all the books and writings found in the Catholic Bible.

Answer 6

The Protestants chose not to include the Apocrypha in the Bible. These books while written by Jewish authors are not considered to be the product of divine inspiration by Protestants. The admonition in the Book of Revelation pertains only to that book although God does say in Deuteronomy to neither add to nor diminish from his Word.

Answer 7

Those who assembled the Protestant Bible rejected the Books of the Apocrypha as the inspired Word of God.

Answer 8

The Catholics assemble their Holy Book, the Bible (in
Council of Carthage 379 AC) before the Jews assemble the Torah, theirs Holy Book.

That does not means that there are not scriptures before (the Septuagint as called), but that they are not ordered or referred as a full Holy Book neither for Christians nor for Jews.

When Protestants comes, Lutero and others took the Jew's version of the Old Testament instead of the Catholics', believing wrongly that the Jews' version are older.

But the final verse of the Revelation (who is coincidentally the last of the Bible) is referred first to the book of Revelation itself, but also to the meaning of the Holy Word, not theirs books.

That is because St. John Apostle (the writer of the Revelation) knows nothing about the Bible as we know it, because the Bible (379 BC assembled) is long after St. John Apostle wrote Revelation (circa 100 BC) as a book to bring true hope to the first Christians in a cryptic language they understand as the complete winning of Jesus (nothing about dark prophecies).

So the Protestants who took Bible literally, that is without the historical context Jesus and writers of the Bible are talking in, are in the fault last verse of the Bible talks about.

Answer 9

right this is a few extra techniques on the venture: Why the Apocrypha isn't interior the Protestant Bible. a million. no longer between the apocryphal books is written interior the Hebrew language, which became on my own utilized by utilising the stimulated historians and poets of the old testomony. All Apocryphal books are in Greek, different than one that is extant merely in Latin. 2. not one of the apocryphal writers laid declare to suggestion. 3. The apocryphal books have been by no skill regarded as sacred scriptures by utilising the Jews, custodians of the Hebrew scriptures (the apocrypha became written merely before the recent testomony). in reality, the Jewish human beings rejected and destroyed the apocrypha after the overthow of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. 4. The apocryphal books weren't authorized between the sacred books in the process the 1st 4 centuries. 5. The Apocrypha consists of remarkable statements which no longer merely contradict the "canonical" scriptures yet themselves. to illustrate, in the two Books of Maccabees, Antiochus Epiphanes is made to die 3 diverse deaths in 3 diverse places. 6. The Apocrypha consists of doctrines in variance with the Bible, jointly with prayers for the lifeless and sinless perfection.

Answer 10

The Protestants removed seven books: Tobit, Judith, 1 & 2 Maccabees, Song of Songs, Wisdom, and Sirach because these books didn’t agree with their doctrines.