In this episode Trent shares a portion of his rebuttal to a popular video on YouTube that argues the Deuterocanonical books of scripture are not inspired because the Jewish historian Josephus said the Old Testament was “closed” centuries earlier.
Welcome to the Councel of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Councel of Trent Podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker, Trent Horn. On today’s episode, I want to share with you a treat from my video rebuttal series on YouTube for several reasons. One, I think they’re good. I think you’ll like them. And if you haven’t watched them yet, you really should. It’s a great way to examine arguments opposed to the Catholic faith and know how to answer them.
In today’s episode, I’m going to share with you my rebuttal to Allen Parr on the deuterocanonical books of scripture and why Catholic Bibles are bigger. The more important question is why are Protestant Bibles smaller? Why did they get rid of these books of scripture that Jesus and the apostles used? I don’t know if you can hear it, I’ve got a good mic, but I can hear it. There is pounding and banging on my door because I am still operating from home right now. So I figured, you know what? While the kids are banging and pounding on the door, maybe instead of sitting down for a complete new episode to record right now, I’ll record those episodes when they go to bed. Oh man, they are still pounding away out there. Oh my goodness. But it’s been great. It’s been a real treat to be here.
I mean, there’s trade offs always when you work from home, right? I love being able to see my children, but sometimes you really can have too much of a good thing. So I would take my microphone. You know what? I’m going to let him in right now and he can … Okay, all right. Come here. This is Thomas, actually. Here, Thomas, come here. All right, come here. I want you to talk to us. Why were you banging on the door?
Thomas:
Because.
Trent Horn:
Because why?
Thomas:
Because [inaudible 00:01:46].
Trent Horn:
Because you want to say hi to dada?
Thomas:
Yeah.
Trent Horn:
Oh, okay. How old are you?
Thomas:
Two.
Trent Horn:
No, you’re three.
Thomas:
Yeah.
Trent Horn:
Say right here, “I’m three.”
Thomas:
I’m three.
Trent Horn:
So do you want to tell everyone, they’re going to listen to a good show today, you want to tell them, “Enjoy the show?”
Thomas:
Enjoy the show.
Trent Horn:
Oh, okay. And then you want me to play baseball with you?
Thomas:
Yeah.
Trent Horn:
Okay. We can do that. All right, everyone. Well, enjoy this clip and check out more videos on YouTube coming up soon. Say, “Bye, everybody!”
Thomas:
Bye everybody.
Trent Horn:
All right, enjoy everybody.
Thomas:
[inaudible 00:02:24]
Allen Parr:
Now, the second reason why the Protestants would reject the Apocrypha as being inspired by God is because the Jews themselves rejected the Apocrypha and did not consider these books as part of their Old Testament canon or scripture. A very helpful quote is from a man by the name of Josephus, who was-
Trent Horn:
Well first, before we continue on with Josephus, I’ll just say this. Some Jews rejected the deuterocanonical books of scripture, and some Jews rejected some of the protocanonical books of scripture, and some Jews accepted the deuterocanonical books of scripture. Some. In the time of Jesus, it’s more appropriate to talk about Judaisms rather than Judaism itself. There were marked differences between different Jewish schools of thought and even within particular Jewish schools of thought. Even among the Pharisees, there were disputes among the followers of Shammai and the followers of Hillel, these two different rabbis. But let’s jump and hear what he says about Josephus.
Allen Parr:
Scripture. A very helpful quote is from a man by the name of Josephus, who was a Jewish historian, who wrote around 100 AD. And he clearly affirmed that there were certain books that the Jews accepted and believed as part of the Old Testament canon of scripture. Notice he says here, “For we have not an innumerable multitude of books among us disagreeing from and contradicting one another as the Greeks have.” So he’s saying, “Hey, we don’t have a whole bunch of books that we think are considered inspired by God, but only 22 books.” Now you may be-
Trent Horn:
Okay. So this passage that Allen’s reading from, so Josephus, the Jewish historian, lived around the end of the first century after Christ. He wrote a history of the Jews called the Antiquities, the history of the Jewish war. He also wrote a work called Against Apion, which is sort of a rhetoric and propaganda piece. It’s an apologetic defense of Judaism against pagan ideology and mythology. And he’s writing it to Apion, who is an Egyptian writer. And Josephus’s goal is to show that Judaism is superior to other non-Jewish religions and belief systems. And so what Josephus does and what modern scholars have recognized with Josephus is that he embellishes, he exaggerates, and he takes some things and tries to make them universal to make Judaism look like the greatest thing since sliced bagels. You know?
And so how do we know that he does this? Well first, trying to say that the Jews never disagreed about any of the books of scripture that we only have the 20, where is it? We have 22 books and we all agree on this. Well, that’s just not the case. You had the Samaritans who worshiped on Mount Gerizim, and the Sadducees who believed in the Pentateuch. The Samaritans may have believed in some of the prophets, but the Sadducees seem to, the members of the priestly class, they only believed in the first five books, the Pentateuch. You had the Pharisees whose canon was similar to the Protestant Old Testament canon, but may have been different. It may not have included the book of Esther, for example. Then you had the Essenes, the Jewish Hasidics. John the Baptist may have belonged to them. And their canon included some of the deuterocanonical books because we found the deuterocanonical books among the Dead Sea Scrolls. We’ll talk about that a little bit later.
But when you read Josephus in this section where he says that we don’t have innumerable books, we just have these 22 books, what he goes on to say shows the amount of embellishing that he’s doing. So for example, he goes on to say, “For during so many ages as have already passed, no one has been so bold as either to add anything to them, the Jewish sacred books, to take anything from them, or to make any change in them.” But that’s not true. There were multiple Jewish manuscripts. You had the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, that manuscript tradition, different Setptuagints that were created. You had different Hebrew and Aramaic traditions among the manuscripts. We see this with the Dead Sea Scrolls. So there were other manuscript traditions where people had added to texts or had subtracted to them. So as one scholar says, Josephus’s rhetoric, I think it’s Campbell is his name, he wrote a study on Josephus and the canon. He says that Josephus’s rhetoric has run ahead of reality at this point.
He goes on, Josephus goes on to say, “But it has become natural to all Jews immediately and from their very birth to esteem these books to contain divine doctrines and to persist in them, and if occasion be, willingly to die for them.” Let me see if I can actually increase the size here a little. There we go. It’s late here as I try to record in my home office. But of course, that’s an exaggeration to say every Jew knew that these books were divined from the moment that they were born and that all of them were willing to die for them. That was also certainly not the case as well. So let’s continue.
Allen Parr:
As the Greeks have. So he’s saying, “Hey, we don’t have a whole bunch of books that we think are considered inspired by God, but only 22 books.” Now you may be saying, “Wait a second. Why is it that the Jews only accepted 22 books and we have 39 in our Old Testament?” Well, without going into too much detail, essentially, the Jews grouped their books together much differently than what we have in the Protestant Bible today. In other words, give you an example. 12 of the minor prophets, we consider each one of those as a different book, whereas the Jews linked them all together and just called that one book called the 12. Also, we have First and Second Samuel broken out into two different books. The Jews considered that as just one book. They considered both of the First and Second Kings as just one book. They also considered Ezra and Nehemiah as just one book. They also considered Ruth and Judges as one book. They also considered First and Second Chronicles as one book. So when you put all that together, essentially, they only believe in 22 books. Now, let’s keep-
Trent Horn:
That’s not entirely true. Some Jews believed in 24 books, depending on how you counted those books. And some Jews believed in a far larger canon. The apocryphal book for Ezra documents some Jews believing that their canon consisted of 94 books. You also see other Jews numbering at 70, saying that 70 was a symbolic number. Many of these numbers have symbolic value to them. Using 22, for example, is a reference to the Hebrew alphabet. So trying to take the number of characters in the Hebrew alphabet and referencing it to the number of books in the canon was something that Josephus was probably doing and that other Jews at the time did.
But the major takeaway from this is, once again, is that it was not uniform. We see this here, that Jews had different numbers in the canon. The Sadducees, the Samaritans, the Essenes, different Pharisees, they disagreed about the canon because the canon was not fixed at this time. People did not believe that prophecy had ceased and that the Old Testament was finished. They wouldn’t have called it an Old Testament. They didn’t believe that all the Bible had completely had been written because Messiah had not come yet, there could still be prophets. And we’ll get to that here with the next argument that Allen makes.
Allen Parr:
Going. He says, “But only 22 books, which contain the records of all the pastimes, which are justly believed to be,” what? Divine, right? “And of them, five belong to Moses, which contain his laws and the traditions of the origin of mankind until his death.” This interval of time was little short of 3000 years. But as to the time from the death of Moses, now pay attention to this now, until the reign of Artaxerxes, King of Persia, who reigned after Xerxes. The prophets who were after Moses wrote down what was done in their times in 13 books. So notice the time frame here that Josephus is saying the Old Testament spans. From the times of Moses all the way to Artaxerxes, which we believe as Protestants is where the Old Testament actually ends. But let’s keep going.
Trent Horn:
The problem with that argument is Artaxerxes of Persia, his reign ended around 424 B.C. So let’s just say 400 B.C. And a lot of Protestants will say that from 400 B.C. until Christ was born, there was no divine revelation during that time. God was silent for 400 years. But the problem here is that many conservative Protestant scholars, evangelical scholars, will say that there were several books of the Old Testament that either began to be written after this time or had major portions added to them and editors finalized them and they reached their final stages after the reign of Artaxerxes. So if the Old Testament ended at Artaxerxes of Persia in 424 B.C. when his reign ended, what do you do with books like Ecclesiastes, Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Daniel? Their conservative Protestant scholars will say these books were written after that point or major portions were added to them after that point. And as we’ll see, divine revelation did not cease after this point. That’s a misreading of what Josephus is saying.
Allen Parr:
The remaining four books contain hymns to God and precepts for the conduct of human life. Now this next statement is super important to understand. So if you don’t get anything else out of this section, pay very close attention to what I’m getting ready to share with you. “It is true our history have been written since Artaxerxes very particularly, but have not been esteemed of the like authority with the former by our forefathers.” What is Josephus trying to say? He’s saying yes, other historical books, historical books, historical books, not books that have divine nature. He says, “Yes, there’s been other historical books that have been written from the time of Artaxerxes, but they are not considered of the same authority or divine nature as these other 22 books.” And why does he say this? He says, “Because there have not been an exact succession of prophets since that time.” In other words, Josephus is recognizing that Malachi was the last prophet inspired by God and there were no other prophetic voices between that 400 years when the Old Testament ends and when Jesus Christ is born.
Trent Horn:
That is not what Josephus says at all, actually. Josephus believed that prophecy occurred long after, and even after the time of Jesus and before the time of Jesus, but after Artaxerxes, that there was prophecy. What he’s talking about here, there wasn’t an exact line of succession of the prophets to be historically recorded, not that the gift of prophecy had ceased as a whole among the people. We can know that by looking at his writings and at the New Testament writings. Let’s get this in here. I’m on you. You fit in here, you go in here. There you go. All right.
So when you read Josephus, he talks about other prophets after the time of Artaxerxes. He talks about John Hyrcanus, [Manamus 00:13:41], Jesus Ben Ananias, or Jesus, son of Ananias, who Jesus son of Ananias prophesied about 30 years after the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth. And so he actually prophesied the destruction of the temple. But prior to the birth of Christ, but after Artaxerxes, so during the intertestamental period, you had Josephus said that John Hyrcanus was a prophet. And Manamus was a prophet. We also have evidence that the people believed that prophecy was still possible. They did not believe that God had just been silent for 400 years because they were waiting for the Messiah. They were waiting for God’s revelation. Nobody told them it had been closed or that there would be no more prophets because Luke 2:36 says that Anna was a prophetess. Jesus told people John the Baptist was a prophet. And most importantly, people thought Jesus was a prophet, multiple occasions.
One that strikes out in my mind, though, is in John chapter nine, the man who was born blind. Remember him? They asked him, “This man healed your blindness. Who is he?” And in John 9:17, the guy says, “He is a prophet.” Why would he say? Nobody said to him, “Hey, don’t you know there haven’t been prophets in 400 years?” No, the people believed there could be prophets. And if there could be prophets, that mean there could be divine revelation.
And so because of that, the Jews disagreed about the canon. And so Josephus may be articulating a canon that was popular among certain rabbis at the end of the first century, but it was not uniform because there were Jews who disagreed with the rabbis about the nature of the canon, including books dealing with the deuterocanonical books of scripture. Rabbi Ben Akiva, for example, who lived at the end of the first century, he died around the second Jewish uprising, that’s called the Revolt of Bar Kokhba. He said this, he said, “The Christian gospels and heretical books do not defile the hands.” Do not defile the hands means that when you pick up an inspired word of God in the temple or you hold the inspired word of God, it defiles your hands. And not that it makes you unclean, but it’s a recognition you are unclean in respect to these divine books. And so you have to purify yourself. But he said that the Christian gospels are not the word of God so they don’t defile the hands. And like the Christian gospels, he said the books of Ben Sira, or Sirach, and all the other books written from then on do not defile the hands.
So here, the rabbis at the end of the first century, beginning of the second century, that’s true. They rejected the deuterocanonical books of scripture. So what? They also rejected the gospels and the other writings of the New Testament. So if I’m not going to follow their advice on the writings of the New Testament, why should I follow their advice on the deuterocanonical books when many other Jews disagreed with them? That’s why Rabbi Akiva had to give this issue, this order, in the first place.
You look at Protestant scholars, Lee Martin McDonald’s a Baptist scholar, wrote a great book called The Biblical Canon. This is what he says, that the Pharisaic tradition is actually a Babylonian tradition of the canon that Jews have in their Bible today. This was not the canon of scripture during the time of Jesus. McDonald says this tradition, which does not include the deuterocanonical books, dates from the middle of the second century at the earliest, but there is no indication that it received universal recognition among Jews at that time. The Protestant Old Testament, and remember, McDonald is a Protestant, reflects a Babylonian flavor that was not current or popular in the time of Jesus in the land of Israel. So did some Jews reject the deuterocanonical books? Yes. But some Jews also rejected the New Testament as well. Was that the common belief in the time of Jesus and the apostles? No. Jesus and the apostles quoted from the Septuagint, primarily, the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, which contained the deuterocanonical books of scripture.
Allen Parr:
Even though these apocryphal books were written somewhere before the birth and life of Jesus Christ, the Jews during this time rejected these books as being a part of the Old Testament canon. Now, why is this important? It’s important because the argument will go back and forth and Catholics will say that Protestants removed certain books from the Bible.
Trent Horn:
Well, they certainly did. And like I said, there were Jews who disagreed about the canon in the time of Jesus because it wasn’t closed, it wasn’t fixed. And there were Jews during the time of Jesus who accepted these deuterocanonical books, at least some of them. One example of that would be from the Dead Sea. I’ve actually been here. I’ve been to Israel twice. And I love this area going by the Dead Sea, got to get your obligatory floating in the Dead Sea. They got a bar, actually, at the Dead Sea. It’s the lowest bar in the world because it’s the lowest elevation on earth. They call it the lowest bar with the highest prices. But I love going to the Caves of Qumran to see where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found.
These scrolls are written between 400 B.C. and 100 A.D. They tell us a lot about Judaism in the time of Jesus. And they were found here in these caves. These shepherd boys threw rocks and shattered a vase that contained these scrolls. And it’s remarkable story about where the Dead Sea Scrolls came from. But you had the books that were a part of the Protestant Old Testament canon. But also on a special parchment style reserved for sacred scripture, you had books like Sirach, Tobit, and Baruch. So you had Jews, the Essenes, like I said, that John the Baptist may have belonged to, who accepted these books as canonical scriptures, as the inspired word of God. So there wasn’t a uniform canon like Josephus is talking about. Instead, Jews who are similar to John the Baptist and Jesus accepted these books as well.
Allen Parr:
Whereas Protestants will say, “Well, hey, you know what? You could make an argument that these books should have never been put in the Bible in the first place because the Jews never actually received or believed that these books were on the same divine level and authoritative level as the 39 books that we have in the Old Testament, or if you’re a Jew, 22 books.”
Trent Horn:
No, some Jews. The Rabbinic Jews who rose to power after the second Jewish revolt, they rejected these books along with the New Testament gospels, but not all Jews did. There are still Jews today, Ethiopic Jews, who hold to the inspiration of these and other books. So once again, we Christians are not obliged to follow the canonical decisions of these second century Jews. They didn’t do that for the New Testament. Why should we do that for other books that Christians and Jews accepted from the deuterocanonical books during the time of Jesus and the apostles, and also which were quoted extensively by the church fathers in the centuries afterwards?
Allen Parr:
Now here is the third reason why Protestants reject the Apocrypha, and that is because Jesus himself did not quote or reference or even affirm the divine authorship of any of the apocryphal books. If these books were really divinely written by God and they were already written before Jesus Christ was born, wouldn’t it make sense that Jesus would have quoted from these books, Jesus would have affirmed these books, Jesus would have taught from these books in the synagogue, Jesus would have accepted these books as part of his doctrine. But nowhere in the gospels do we see Jesus referencing these books. As a matter of fact, in Luke 24:44 it says-
Trent Horn:
Well, this argument. The problem with this argument is that it also undercuts other books in the Protestant Old Testament canon. This is a quote from F.F. Bruce, a conservative Protestant scholar in his book on the canon of scripture. And Bruce says, “Nowhere in the New Testament is there a direct quotation from the canonical books of Joshua, Judges, Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Solomon, Obadiah, Zephaniah, and Nahum. And the New Testament elusions to them are few in number. So there are lots of books that Jesus and the apostles did not quote from, that doesn’t mean that they’re not the inspired word of God. So if this is your argument against the deuterocanonical books, this argument also would cut against a lot of books from the Protestant Old Testament canon as well. So it’s not a good argument.
Allen Parr:
He said to them, “This is what I told you while I was still with you. Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the Psalms.” Now, the law of Moses, there’s the first five books, the prophets, and the Psalms. At this time, those three statements right there comprise what the Jews believed were the Old Testament. So what was Jesus doing? He was affirming that the books that the Jews believed in in his day was part of the Old Testament, indeed was. In other words, he was saying, “That’s it. The Old Testament canon is closed. You don’t add anything to it. You don’t take anything away.” He says, “The law, the prophets, and the writings.” 22 Old Testament Jewish books.
Trent Horn:
Oh, wait a minute here. Jesus doesn’t say the writings. He says the Psalms. So it’s correct. You have the law, the Torah, you have the prophets, which I think is the Nevi’im. And the writings, the Ketuvim, Ketuvim. And the writings was open-ended. It was not a closed, fixed a set of books. Otto Kaiser has a great book. He’s an Old Testament scholar, has a book on the Apocrypha of the deuterocanonical books. And he says the writings during this time, the other books besides the law and the prophets, it was not a closed set of books because the Hebrews, the Jews, did not have a closed canon this time.
So this argument assumes that first, Jesus says the Psalms, not the writings. He could just to be talking about the law of the prophets and the Psalms because that has Messianic content to it referring to him specifically. But here, this assumption, when people say, “Even if Jesus did say the law of the prophet and the writings, that assumes the deuterocanonical books are not a part of the writings, the Ketuvim.” But that’s an assumption that Allen is making. And one that’s just not backed up by the evidence.
Allen Parr:
But Jesus also says in Matthew chapter 23 and 35, speaking of the Pharisees, he says, “And so upon you will come all the righteous blood that has been shed on earth.” Now watch this now, “From the blood of the righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah, son of Berechiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar.” What is Jesus saying? He’s saying, “Hey, the blood from Abel.” What book is that from? That’s from the book of Genesis. And then who is one of the prophets towards the end of the Old Testament? Well, you have Malachi, you have Zechariah, you have Haggai. So this is referring once again to the Old Testament ending somewhere around Zechariah. So you have Genesis all the way through Zechariah or the book of Malachi. So my friend, if Jesus did not accept these-
Trent Horn:
Okay, here’s the problem with this argument. First, it assumes it’s talking about Zechariah that is killed in the book of Second Chronicles. And it assumes that Second Chronicles was the last book of the Hebrew Bible. Whereas today, most Protestants would say that it’s Malachi. So this argument rests on a ton of assumptions. Number one, it rests on an assumption that Jesus was talking about the canon of scripture. He could have just been picking two famous prophets that span a long period of time without trying to make an assumption about what the canon of scripture was. That’s not what was being disputed. Jesus wasn’t talking about that. That’s assumption one. Assumption two, it assumes that Second Chronicles was the last book and that that’s the Zechariah, the prophet Zechariah, that is being referenced there, the one that’s in Second Chronicles at the end of the Hebrew Bible, at least that’s what usually I hear Protestants who make this kind of argument.
And number three, it makes an assumption about which Zechariah that we’re talking about. Because actually, Jesus seems to be speaking about another Zechariah. He talks about Zechariah, the son of Berechiah, the son of Iddo, the prophet, in Matthew 23:35. And that’s not the Zechariah from the book of Chronicles. That’s the Zechariah from the book of Zechariah itself, which nobody says was the last book of the Old Testament canon. And so that would be different than Zechariah, the son of Jehoida, who I believe is the Zechariah that is killed in Second Chronicles. Jesus is talking about another Zechariah.
Now some people will say, “Well, wait a minute. Zechariah, the son of Berechiah, it could be a different name. It could be a different way of referring to him. There’s no reference to the prophet of the book of Zechariah being killed in the temple. That’s not found in that book.” It is found in extra biblical sources though. There are targums, which are kind of paraphrases, an Aramaic paraphrase or summary of the Hebrew books. The targum of the book of Lamentations refers to this Zechariah, the son of Iddo. Iddo would be his grandfather. The son of Berechiah, son of Iddo. It says this Zechariah, who was the prophet Zechariah, was killed in the temple actually. So Jesus may be referring to a completely different Zechariah. So the point is this argument is very weak. It’s not an argument to show the canon of scripture because it rests on a ton of assumptions that may not be the case. So it does not establish the Protestant Old Testament’s canon based on the weak assumptions that are found in it.
Allen Parr:
Books as being part of the Old Testament canon, then it doesn’t matter who comes after and says that they should, then they need to be rejected. The fourth reason is that Jesus and the New Testament writers never quote from nor affirm that these apocryphal books should be in the scriptures. As a matter of fact, out of 263 quotes, some say 295 quotes, in the Old Testament that are found in the New Testament, not one of them refer back to any of the apocryphal books.
Trent Horn:
Even if it did, it wouldn’t matter because I know what Protestants will say. They’ll say, “So what? Jude quotes from Enoch. Paul quotes from Menander and Greek poets.” They’ll say, “Just because it is quoted, it doesn’t mean that it’s scripture.” So this is a classic case of heads, I win, tails, you lose. Even if it were quoted, that wouldn’t be good enough for them. They would say, “Oh, it has to have it is written or the word of the Lord before it.” So even if it were quoted, that still wouldn’t be good enough. And as I showed before, there are other books of the Bible that are not quoted that are still the inspired word of God. We showed nearly a dozen of them quoted from the citation from F.F. Bruce.
Allen Parr:
There are no statements in the gospels or anywhere in the New Testament that says, “For it is written,” or, “Thus says the Lord” that refer in any way, shape, or form to these apocryphal books, leading us to believe that even the New Testament writers of scripture did not believe that these books should be included in the Bible and that they were authoritative or divinely written in some way.
Trent Horn:
But then if you clued that caveat has to be quoted and have a formula in front of it like, “It is written,” or, “The word of the Lord,” only about a third of the Old Testament is quoted that way. So you’re already, you’re cutting out a ton of the Old Testament. Notice, once again, Allen and other Protestants don’t give an objective criteria. Here’s what makes something canonical. Something belongs to the Old Testament canon if … And they can’t give a criteria because if they included that rule, it would exclude a ton of protocanonical books. The book of Esther would never survive. Esther was a very controversial book. You want to know why?
Well, one reason is the Protestant version of Esther … So remember, part of the deuterocanon are additions to Esther and Daniel. The Protestant version of Esther doesn’t even mention God, has no explicit reference to God. So it’s a weird book to have in the Bible, right? So Esther was debated among Jews, it’s not quoted in the New Testament. It’s the only book absent from the Dead Sea Scrolls. Of the protocanonical books, it’s absent from some of the lists of the church fathers. It’s absent from other Jewish lists that we have found during this time. But Protestants accept it. Why? Because it’s just a part of their tradition that they’ve inherited from their Protestant forefathers basically.
So that’s what’s funny. I would ask, once again, if you are a Protestant, you’re going to establish the Old Testament canon, what is your standard? Don’t just try to take shots at the deuterocanonical books. How do you know something belongs in the Old Testament, canon or not? And apply that standard uniformly and see if you can reconstruct the number of books that you believe exists there, the number of books that are the 40, the 39, sorry, the 39 books. We have 46 books. The 39 books that are a part of the Old Testament canon that you believe in.
Allen Parr:
Now, the fifth and final reason why we as Protestants reject these books as being authoritative or being part of the Bible is because even the greatest Roman Catholic scholars in the Roman Catholic church rejected these books as being on the same level as the rest of the books of the Bible all the way up until the 16th century. So you have roughly 1100 years or so where they had these books included in their Bible, but there was a general sense where even the Roman Catholic scholars believe that these books were not on the same level and should not be received or accepted as such. It wasn’t until the Councel of Trent in 1546 where the Catholic Church canonized or considered these books as being on the same level of inspiration as all of the other books. Before then, these books were in the Bible once again, but it was generally considered that they were not on the same level.
Trent Horn:
I think what Allen is getting at here is he’s talking about the controversy that Jerome, Saint Jerome, introduced when he rejected the canonical nature of these books. And a lot of Protestants, it’s funny. It’s funny, a lot of Protestants will listen to Jerome on things like the deuterocanonical books of scripture, but they won’t listen to him on things like that Mary is a perpetual virgin, the authority of the papacy, other elements of Catholic doctrine here. But they love listening to Jerome on the deuterocanonical books of scripture, because Jerome was a famous critic of them.
Well, here’s the problem. Why did Jerome reject the deuterocanonical books of scripture? He rejected them because he was tasked with creating a new translation of the Latin translation of the Bible. And he believed that the best, the only manuscripts you could trust for the Old Testament were Hebrew manuscripts. They’re part of the Masoretic tradition. And so he wanted to go to the Hebrew and he thought that the Septuagint, that the Greek translation, was just a rough paraphrase, sorry, was a rough translation or copy of the Hebrew. So he wanted to go directly to the Hebrew translation from other rabbis of his time who did not accept the deuterocanonical books of scripture.
But the problem here, once again, is that modern scholarship has shown that Jerome is incorrect. The Greek translation of the Bible is not just a copy of the Hebrew translation. They come from independent manuscript traditions that allow us access to even older copies of the Hebrew and Aramaic originals that we do not have today. And by the way, not all of the deuterocanonical books were written in Greek. There’s good evidence Judith may have been written in Hebrew, we’re not sure. Tobit, the oldest fragments we have of Tobit are in Hebrew and Aramaic found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. So that’s just not the case. And of course, there’s no requirement for all the books of the Old Testament to be written in Hebrew or Aramaic. There is no one single language that is God’s language. It could be Hebrew, it can be Aramaic. It can Koine Greek, it can be different languages.
But so when we follow the Dead Sea Scrolls and that different tradition, what we see there is that Jerome just, he made an error in that regard. And many people disagreed with him. Saint Augustin disagreed with him, Pope Innocent I disagreed. And so during that time in the fourth century, the church reaffirmed at the regional Councils of Hippo and Carthage that the deuterocanonical books of scripture were indeed part of the Bible and reaffirm that amidst the controversy at that time.
And Jerome even referenced this. Saint Jerome even says that the Council of Nicaea declared or spoke of … In Jerome’s preface to the Book of Judith, he talks about how Nicaea affirmed that Judith is inspired and is canonical. And many other church fathers agree with him. So when you have traditions in the middle ages that rejected the deuterocanonical books of scripture, they do so because they uncritically follow Jerome’s example. And what other scholars have said is his idiosyncratic views about the Old Testament manuscripts, thinking that the only reliable ones came from a particular Hebrew tradition, when actually the Septuagint tradition is a reliable one for us to get back to even older Hebrew manuscripts it was based on that we no longer possess. And once again, there’s an inconsistency here that Protestants will listen to Jerome when Jerome agrees with them, but then ignore him when he defends other aspects of Catholic doctrine, which I find to be funny.
Allen Parr:
And without going into too much detail in history, this was more than likely a response to the Reformation, once again, we talked about in a few videos before, where Martin Luther essentially said, “I disagree with some of these doctrines in the Catholic Church.” And therefore, he decided that certain books in the Catholic Bible should not necessarily be a part of the scripture. So he did not remove them. But what he did was he put them in a certain section all by themselves called the Apocrypha.
Trent Horn:
And Luther also wanted to do that with Hebrews, Revelation, James. Martin Luther did not like the letter of James. He even talked about once how he was tempted to want to throw it in the stove, that he called it an epistle of straw in his very first preface to it. He grudgingly accepted it, but he wanted to get rid of it as much as he could. Why? Because letter of James is the only place where the words faith alone occur. And of course, James, in James chapter two, says, “We are justified by works and not by faith alone.” And so that was always a real sticking point for Luther. So you’re right, Luther wanted to get rid of the deuterocanonical books and some of the New Testament books as well, which the church then had to reaffirm the canon of scripture, both the Old and New Testament in light of this at the ecumenical Councel of Trent. Councel of Trent. Yeah.
Allen Parr:
If the majority of Roman Catholic scholars saw enough inconsistency and errors in these books for 1000 years, that kept them from really viewing these books as being divinely inspired, then, my friend, that says something about whether we should accept these books as being inspired by God. So my friend, I know this was a super-
Trent Horn:
And that’s not the case. It’s not that suddenly they went from being non-canonical to becoming inspired at the Councel of Trent in the 16th century. They were affirmed at regional councils before that, but the church only defines things at ecumenical or universal councils when there is usually a controversy or heresy that prompts it to be done. The church didn’t define Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist through transubstantiation until the fourth Lateran Council because there wasn’t significant rejection of this teaching until around the 11th century or so. And the same was true with the canon of scripture. It was after the proclamations of the Councils of Hippo and Carthage in the end of the fourth century, as well as the letters of Pope Damasus, and the letter of Pope Innocent I, for example. We see lot of uniformity in the canon of scripture after that point that you simply don’t possess earlier on. So I think that’s enough to cover here from Allen Parr’s video, Five Reasons Why the Apocrypha is Not Inspired and Should be Rejected.
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