Today I talk about these obscure additional bits of literature found in some Bibles.I ask @JoelSwagman if he has all the additional material I show here in his Bible.
Because this video was directed right at me, and because I love talking about this kind of thing anyway, I jumped right in on the comments. I'll reproduce the comments below:
* Hi William, thanks for thinking of me. What a fun idea to get some dialogue going on our mutual reading of the Bible. I'll post my thoughts to each of your questions in separate comments.
* The Bible I'm reading is: "The Jerusalem Bible: Reader's Edition" It's one of the official Bible's of the Catholic Church, and thus has all the Catholic books in it, but none of the other apocryphal books. I went with this Bible out of necessity. When I began this project a couple years ago, this was the only English version of the Bible that distributers in Vietnam would ship. (Possibly because of Vietnam's Catholic history?) I was originally planning to go with the NIV translation for my reread, because that's the translation I trusted the most (largely just due to the fact that it was the version in common use in my protestant upbringing--so there's some childhood bias going on.) Anyway, once I realized I was stuck reading The Jerusalem Bible, I actually started to get excited about all the extra books I now had access to. Although looking at your expanded Apocrypha, I'm now jealous of your Bible. Maybe I'll do that one for my next read through.
* The books in my Bible are all the Catholic apocrypha. 7 additional books (Tobit, Judith, 1st Maccabees, 2nd Maccabees, The Book of Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus and Baruch), and then additions to Daniel and Esther. Because this is a Catholic Bible, they are all integrated into the Old Testament, rather than being in a separate section. The additions to Daniel and Esther are integrated into the main text, but are put into italics so that you can easily see what are the added parts and what is the original text.
* By the way, my playlist for the apocrypha is here. (I'm slowly working my way through these books as they come up in the Catholic Bible): https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOY-0V_l_9x4402PS5pwe5ca_Qg--E4W-&si=quGGR3Iw9ex0LY-B
William replied: Thank you. Question: is the additional material I showed past 2 Maccabees as I flipped the pages is an 'Appendix' at the end of your Bible? Is Psalm 151 and the Prayer of Mannaseh included in your Bible?
I replied: No extra appendices in my version. No Psalm 151 or Prayer of Mannaseh.
* In my protestant upbringing, we used the term "The Apocrypha" to refer to the 7 extra books in the Catholic Bible--what the Catholics refer to as The Deuterocanon. Anything else, like The Book of Enoch, etc, was just "an apocryphal book" . And that's how I prefer to use the terms even today, although I have to confess, I'm not sure if that's technically correct, or if that was just the common usage where I grew up.
* I wonder what the criteria for inclusion in the NRSV apocrypha is. They obvious include more than the Catholic Bible, but it doesn't look like they include the books from the Ethiopian Bible (e.g. The Book of Enoch). Are they just including the books from the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Bibles? That strikes me as a bit anti-Ethiopian, huh?
William replied: I agree. Anti-Ethiopian. I think they were attempting to cast a net as wide as possible BUT the entire Ethiopian bible is NOT completely translated into English. So there you have your first issue.
I replied: Oh really? I didn't realize that! Well, there goes my ambition to someday read all the apocryphal books.
* No books of Esdras in my Bible. I have 1st and 2nd Maccabees, but not 3rd and 4th Maccabees.
* At least in The Jerusalem Bible, there's no prayer of Manasseh. Not even as an addition to 2nd Chronicles. I'm not sure if other Catholic Bibles might be different?
William replied: Thanks for all the clarification. Now we are more or less on the same page. Perhaps you have opinions on some specifics I talked about like purgatory or how to describe the Apocrypha (my opinion being books written by gentiles for a Jewish audience)
William replied: Thanks for all the clarification. Now we are more or less on the same page. Perhaps you have opinions on some specifics I talked about like purgatory or how to describe the Apocrypha (my opinion being books written by gentiles for a Jewish audience)
I replied: Just wrote most of that up now in a separate comment.
* My understanding (and I'm not a scholar either, so take me with a grain of salt) is for the Catholic Bible, these were all books that came from the Septuagint--the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible--but were books that were not known to be written in Hebrew. (Although if you research these books individually, it gets a bit more complicated. Some of them scholars think may have been originally written in Hebrew and then translated into Greek, and books like Tobit have been found in Hebrew in the Dead Sea Scrolls. But at the time of the Protestant reformation, only the Greek versions were known to exist.)
My understanding is that they were probably written by Greek speaking Jews, not gentiles. I believe Hebrew was a dead language by the time of the Jesus, so most literate people (either Jews or Gentiles) would be writing in Greek. I could be wrong.
Judaism would later reject these books as part of their canon, but that was after the Christian bible was formed.
The church based it's Bible on the Septuagint version of the Old Testament up until the Protestant Reformation, at which point the Protestants wanted to base their Old Testament on the Hebrew scripture.
That being said, my understanding is that these books were rejected collectively, but also individually. That is, in addition to the fact that none of these books were in the Jewish canon, there were also things that the Protestant reformers found problematic about each one of them.
Another reason for rejecting them is that the Protestants claimed that these books weren't cited as authoritative anywhere in the New Testament. Although this last claim gets a bit controversial, as Catholics point to several New Testament verses which they claim are references to the 7 books in the Apocrypha (I've looked at a couple of these Catholic websites, and some of the verses they are claiming to be references to The Apocrypha seem to me to be a bit dubious, but you can make up your own mind.) The other problematic part is that the book of Jude is quoting from the Book of Enoch, so by this logic, shouldn't the book of Enoch be canonical for protestants?
William replied: Wow! I learned a lot. Thank you! Yes, by that logic the Book of Enoch should be included. I have a cheap paperback English edition of Enoch.
* About purgatory--yeah, I don't know. 2nd Esdras is not in the Catholic Bible, so I wonder what the Catholics base their idea of purgatory on. To be honest, I've not really thought much about it until just this moment. I'm sure we could research it easily enough though...
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The Jerusalem Bible: Reader's Edition on Amazon: https://amzn.to/4fbgM92
The Holy Bible: The New Revised Standard Version (Updated Edition, with the Apocrypha) on Amazon: https://amzn.to/4gb90NB
The Books Of Enoch on Amazon: https://amzn.to/3ZOUJ3y
(These are associate's links. If you buy anything through those links, I get a commission.)
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