With that, we go to Rockland, Maine, on The Presence Radio, Linda. Welcome to the show,
you're on the air with Dr. Michael Barber. Hi. Thank you for taking my
call. You're welcome. You sound so calm. I
like when you're on the radio. See, I'm just cuddly. I'm just soft and nerfy, I've got my cup of tea
and my teddy bear...actually my teddy bear is Dr. Barber, but that's a different
story. Well you're doing a whole lot better than I am. What I wanted to
ask was about, this doctor there said that the books that are in the
Bible Canon are the ones that could be read in the liturgy. That's right. Uh huh.
All right. My question is more about the deuterocanonical books that are in
our Bible--I'm Catholic, I didn't say that, but I am--and they're not in the
Protestant Bible. So Linda is the question "Why? Why does
the Catholic Bible have the extra books? Hold on, let me
finish, I'll make it as short as I can: why are they not in the
Protestant Bible, Part A; Part B, how come only a couple of them are ever
read in the liturgy? The majority of them are not. There's just about two or three...
yeah. Linda, let me use it a little hockey analogy: you've
given a really good slap shot at the goalie, let me just put my
stick up and tip the puck as it goes by me to ask Dr. Barber to define
what Linda means by the deuterocanonical books. Well sure. Certainly there are
books in the Catholic Bible that are not in the Protestant Bible, or even in the
modern Jewish Bible. That's what she's referring to. That's right, and not in the modern Jewish Bible either.
Right, and so why is that? Well, there have been books written on this, and I've done
a lot on this myself, but I don't want to spend a lot of time--I gotta be careful
here because I can get lost in the weeds pretty quickly. 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; but, for example, in the Babylonian
Talmud--which is a very authoritative source for Jewish tradition--actually, in
the Babylonians Talmud, Sirach is actually quoted as Scripture, which is
really remarkable. So this is really interesting. 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. 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. And so many non-
Catholic Christians will say, "Well, Jesus would have not read these books as
Scripture!" Well the problem is, in the first century there wasn't an official
Bible that all Jews agreed upon, right? You have the Pharisees, you have the
Sadducees, they disagreed on a lot of different things; the Pharisees believed
in life after death, the Sadducees did not--that's why they're "sad, you see?" Right? *Badum-tiss*
So we know that the early Jews were, you know, debating which
books belong in the in the Bible. It wasn't until the Church decided, "These
are the books that are going to belong in the Bible." Now St. Jerome, who was
tasked with putting together the official Latin version of the Bible, at
first, because he was working with rabbis, said, "You know, I don't think these books
should be in the Old Testament, the rabbis don't use them." But he ended up
changing his mind on that, and you can see in later letters he actually refers
to books like Sirach as Scripture. So what ends up happening
with the Protestant Reformation is, Martin Luther doesn't like certain
things taught in some of those deuterocanonical books, like for example,
in the book of Maccabees, in 2 Maccabees we have a line that would seem
to imply the existence of purgatory. Martin Luther didn't like that, so he
wanted to take those books out, and the fact that Jews weren't using them in his
day gave him a good reason to say, "Oh look, there's been a lot of debate." And
there had been debate, some of the fathers, like I said, Jerome had doubts;
but when the Church put the official list together,
it included those books. And what's really interesting is, if you look at a
Gutenberg Bible--do you know what that is? The Gutenberg Bible? I sure do. Yeah, if you
look at the Gutenberg Bible, it came off the the printing press before the Protestant
Reformation you'll see-- They had the deuterocanonical. There you go.
I've seen the Gutenberg Bible myself, actually. Early front editions of the King James
Version as well? Yeah, and you'll actually see them in other Protestant
translations--there are there debates among Protestants about, you know, this--in
fact, what's really interesting is, one of the arguments that the rabbis used for
not including these books in the Canon later on was, "Well, we don't have
Hebrew copies of these books, and God only speaks Hebrew, you know!" Oy vey.
That would mean that none of the New Testament books could be Scripture,
because of course they're written in Greek-- Yeah, that--talk
about "proving too much." Right, exactly. Linda, does that help? Yeah, I just...I wanted
to find out...well, he had, he stated, a book that...I listen to the radio,
they don't have EWTN on television anymore where I live--our dirty
cable company took it off--so I can't see ya. Isn't that ironic that a dirty
cable company would show all manner of material that's not EWTN? Can I
recommend, Linda, I can't say everything I'd like to say about this, but there's a
great book by Gary Michuta called "Why Catholic Bibles Are Bigger." Fantastic book.
We sell it here at Catholic.com, by the way. Excellent. And I encourage you to pick
that up, because it is the best treatment of this at a popular level. And
we'll pray you get a good Bishop there for the
to Portland, Linda. Oh, goodness. What's the name of the book again, please? It's called
"Why Catholic Bibles Are Bigger." And who wrote it? Gary Michuta. M-I-C-H-U-T-A.
Okay. Thank you very much and God bless.
Merry Christmas, Linda.