20th September 2013
I have been browsing again through David B. Currie's book, "Born Fundamentalist, Born Again Catholic" and this time really took on board his section on the history of the Bible. It answers many questions. He mentions the Bible burning which today's Evangelicals and others are so wrathful about - but points out there were other Bibles provided as replacements, Bibles with the correct translation!! We cannot judge the Church of the 16th C by our 21st C horror of burning books. To the churchmen of that time, it was common-sense to burn an error-ridden book such as the Tyndale or the Wycliffe Bible. Serious biblical scholars admit they are not worth tuppence. Today, I thought I would quote from and para-phrase some of the pages in this section of Currie's book.
In view of my experiences doing street contact this year, I wonder how many Pentecostals or Evangelicals and other Sola Scrittura fans know that a Catholic priest, Bede, translated part of the Bible into English in the 8th C. Gutenberg was a Catholic and he printed the first Bible. In 1478, a Bible in Low German was printed! By the end of the 15th C Catholics were printing Bibles in many European languages. I was really delighted to come across these facts the first time I read Currie's book some years ago, because although I was aware the Catholic Church had always spread the Bible wherever it could and as much as it could, until then I did not have solid quotes I could use.
Currie says that he, " like most evangelicals, was totally misinformed about the historical background of what we called the Apocrypha. (Catholics refer to these books as deuterocanonical.) As I explored the issue, I was surprised by what I discovered. Finally, I began again at ground zero by separating out the facts that were not in dispute. These books or portions of the Bible are included in Catholic OT but not in the Protestant."
He adds on p. 104, "...the NT has a separate canonical issue involving the Gnostic (heretical) books. Evangelicals, unlike a small group of liberal Protestants, are in total agreement with Catholics on the NT canon."
He continues, ... "there is no doubt at all that Jesus and his companions used the Septuagint. This was the accepted Bible (written in Greek) of the Palestinian Jews and others around the Mediterranean for over a hundred years before Jesus' time and it continued to be used by Christians after the Ascension. Its canon cannot be doubted and it included the seven books of the Apocrypha on an equal standing with the rest of the inspired OT. Currie says the NT referrs to these apocryphal books over twenty times. Some of the parallels between the referred texts and the originals are even clearer in the Greek than in English translations - eg: James 1:19 "Be quick to listen, slow to speak." In Sirach 5:11, we read, "Be swift in listening, but slow in answering." Apparently, Ronald Knox suggested that Wisdom may have been written by Paul because of the striking similarities between his epistles and Wisdom.
Biblical and apocryphal books are referred to with equal respect by the NT writers. For example, Ezekiel 14:14 & 20 refer to Noah, Job and Daniel. Evangelicals assume that Ezekial was referring to the Noah of Genesis: 5-9, the Job of Job: 1-42, and the Daniel of Daniel 1-12. But this is not true of the Daniel they assume to be the character mentioned because he was only a child in Ezekiel's time! Ezekiel was referring to another character who was so well known to his audience that did not need to give an explanation to his audience. So, where is the second Daniel? He is found in the Apocrypha, Daniel:13-14, and is sometimes spelled Danel. He lived long before Ezekiel and like Noah and Job he was a gentile. [CCC 58.] Ezekiel, writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, accessed the Apocrypha in the same way as he accessed the rest of the Scriptures.
Currie says on p. 105: "The early Church Fathers followed the apostles' lead in this matter, peppering their writings with references from the apocryphal books, generally using the Septuagint translation. The Septuagint, with its inclusion of the apocryphal books, was undeniably the Bible of the early Church.
There are lists of the canon of Scripture, including the Apocrypha, from very early times. The first fragment (.....) appears to date from just after the end of the first century. The major early disputes, however, involved the canon of the New Testament. The first fragment of any canonical list appears to date from just after the end of the first century. (.....) The canon of the Old Testament was not in dispute within the early Church.
Beginning with Peter’s sermon at Pentecost, the Christians and the unbelieving Jews locked in battle over whether Jesus was the Jewish Messiah. The Christians made extensive use of OT messianic prophecies. Many of these prophesies were in the seven books that Evangelicals now refer to as apocryphal.
The Jewish leader revised their canon about A.D. 90 to exclude those books not written in Hebrew (2 Maccabees, Wisdom, and Daniel 13 -14) and those books for which the Hebrew original was not extant (Judity, Baruch, Sirach and 1Maccabees, in order to solve much of their apologetical problems with Christians. By excluding those books, they eliminated many of those messianic prophesies. This revision came to be called the Palestine Canon but it was a Jewish canon, developed after many of the apostles were dead and most of the New Testament had already been written. The Christians did not confirm this decision, taken independently by the Jews.
In fact, Christians continued to use these seven books as before. (.........) These are the facts that all the sides can agree on. What do they mean? When I first started to think this issue through, I found myself becoming angry with my Evangelical teachers for the first time! The conclusions followed so easily. It seemed to me that only someone who wilfully ignored the obvious could come to Evangelical conclusions about the Apocrypha. Then I remembered that I too had ignored these facts for most of my life. I cooled down rather quickly.
It is a fact that Jesus, his apostles, the New Testament writers, and the early Church all used a Bible that included the Apocrypha. The Palestine Canon, which excluded these books, had not been ‘invented’ yet. I recognised with a mental thud that the Catholic Church had not added these seven books after the Reformation in order to bolster their theology. (........) The Reformers took these books out of the canon accepted by the early church.”
Why would anyone do this? Currie replies that the reformers did not like the teachings found in these books any more than the Jews did, and for similar reasons - the books clashed with their own ideas. The Jews objected to the messianic prophesies. The reformers objected to the doctrines regarding salvation, prayers for the dead, and purgatory. The reformers approved of the Palestine Canon, which was Jewish, in order to delete those seven books. Some of the reformers, (Currie does not say who they were so will have to try and find out elsewhere) considered printing their Bible with four books from the New Testament relegated to the Index! These were Hebrews, James, Jude and Revelation. However, they realised there was no precedent to permit them to do this. But they never returned the seven apocryphal books to the Old Testament section of their Bible. Fortunately, not all non-Catholic publishers of the Bible concurred. The King James was originally published with the Apocrypha in it, and the Orthodox Church also accepts them. Even John Wesley quoted from them frequently, according to Currie.
Currie continues on p. 107: “Evangelicals have no good, objective explanation for accepting the canon they do accept. Catholics did not change the canon of the early Church or the deposit of faith to make them fit preconceived ideas. The fact that the Reformers did is one of the saddest chapters in all Christendom."
And he ends, on p. 108: “When I realised this, for the first time in my life I was not sure how much I trusted Evangelical scholarship. From the timing of the different canons, it is obvious that Jesus used the Septuagint, with its inclusions of those seven books. The early Church followed suit. Because, during the Reformation, the canon was being challenged, the Church re-affirmed the historic canon of the early Church at the Council of Trent. * (.....) I can’t help smiling when friends ask me if I still read the Bible, now that I am a Catholic. The Bible is what drew me into the Catholic Church. Yes, I do still read it - all of it. So do many of my Catholic friends, every day.” * (My emphasis)
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