How do we know which books are supposed to be in the Bible and which books should not be in the Bible?
This is a perennial question, and it's a major debate between Catholics and Protestants.
And as you know, the Catholic Church has seven books more than the Protestant.
It also has additions to Esther and Daniel, as we'll see in just a moment.
So we're going to look at the history of the canon and make a defense for why we include those seven books in our Catholic canon of the Bible.
So the seven Deuterocanonical books that are in the Catholic Bible, but not in the Protestant Bible, are these Tobit, Judith, 1st and 2nd Maccabees, Wisdom of Solomon, Wisdom of Sirach, which is sometimes called Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, including the Letter of Jeremiah.
And then there are some wider additions to Esther and Daniel, notably in Daniel, you have the Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Children, Susanna, and the story of Bel and the Dragon.
So these seven books are accepted by the Catholic Church and by the Orthodox Church, but they've been rejected since the 1500s by Martin Luther.
Why the discrepancy? Part of it goes back to the Jewish understanding of what the canon is.
Josephus, writing back in the first century, says that there are 22 books in the Hebrew Bible because there are 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet.
Let's look at that Jewish arrangement.
The Hebrew Bible has, to this day, 24 books and not actually 22, like Josephus states.
No one can really figure out what those two extra books are, but the 24 that are received today are Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, no surprises there.
Joshua, Judges, Samuel, so 1st and 2nd Samuel are rendered as one book, Kings, rendered together, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel.
And then what they do is they take the 12 minor prophets and squeeze all those together into one book.
That's how their count gets a lot lower.
Then there are 11 books of the writings, that is the Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Canticle of Canticles, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Ezra,
which, as we saw in the previous video, includes Ezra and Nehemiah, and the book of Chronicles, which includes 1st and 2nd Chronicles.
So, Josephus says 22, modern Jews say 24, and it's not quite sure which books Josephus was not including.
Some people say he excluded Esther, or he excluded Daniel, or perhaps that Ruth was included in 2 Judges.
We don't really know, since he doesn't leave us a list.
What we do know is that the Dead Sea Scrolls and current discoveries reveal that there was no agreed-upon canon by the Jews as late as the 1st century.
That's right, there was no canon.
The only agreed part of the canon was the Torah, the first five books, Genesis through Deuteronomy.
And to these, the Sadducees, the Pharisees, the Samaritans, and the Essenes, they all agreed only on those first five books.
Most of you have heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and maybe even of the Essenes.
The Essenes were a Jewish ascetical movement, almost like a monastic movement, and they left behind many, many manuscripts.
And in those manuscripts, in the Dead Sea Scrolls, we find multiple versions of books that we recognize as deuterocanonical.
We found multiple scripts of Ecclesiasticus, Tobit, and Baruch.
These books of the Bible were being read before the time of Christ by the Jewish people.
They weren't added in later by the Catholic Church.
These were already being copied, circulated, and read in their liturgical assemblies.
So who had the right canon?
The short answer is, at the time of Christ, no one had the right canon.
It was up to Christ and the apostles to determine what books were in and what books were out.
And as we'll see shortly, the apostles were citing the deuterocanonical books.
Also, it's important to notice that the apostles are citing the Septuagint version of the Old Testament.
What's the Septuagint version? It's the Greek version of the Old Testament.
And although the apostles, when they're writing the New Testament,
sometimes are quoting the Old Testament with something that doesn't match the Septuagint,
66 or 67 percent of the time, that's two-thirds of the time,
they're quoting directly from the Septuagint version,
and not through a translation of the Hebrew into Greek, but the original Septuagint.
This shows us that the twelve apostles, as they were going about the world preaching,
when Paul was going about preaching, Peter, Andrew,
they had to preach from the Old Testament.
They believed in the Old Testament.
And what were they carrying with them into the world?
The Greek version, the Septuagint version.
And that Septuagint version, guess what?
It includes our seven books.
So this would explain why the apostles quote it occasionally,
why they have it with them, and why all the early church fathers,
as we'll see in just a moment, are recognizing these books as part of the Bible.
Let's take a look at that.
The first fact is that the New Testament refers to the deuterocanonical books.
In the notes of this video, I will include about 70 examples,
70 cross-references between the Deuteros and the New Testament.
Secondly, St. Clement of Rome, he is mentioned in the New Testament.
He is the fourth bishop of Rome.
We Catholics note him as the fourth pope.
He cites the Book of Wisdom as canonical in his letter, 1 Clement.
You can find that at 1 Clement 27, verse 5.
Also, the early Christian document, perhaps the oldest Christian document,
not in the Bible, is the Didache.
And the Didache cites Sirach 431 as scripture.
St. Polycart, around the year 135,
so we're talking about about 100 years after the death of Christ,
maybe 60 years after the death of the chief apostles,
he cites Tobit two times, Tobit 410 and Tobit 129,
in one of his epistles to the Christians in Philippi.
Bishop Melito of Sardis, around the year 177,
he states that Jews and Christians of his time period,
not just Christians, but Jews,
considered the Book of Wisdom as canonical, as part of the Bible.
That's 177.
St. Irenaeus, he is in Lyon, which is modern-day France.
In the year 180, he quotes the wider version of Daniel,
that is, the parts that have extra portions.
He's quoting that as scripture, so he's using the Septuagint version,
and he sees the Daniel, the Catholic Daniel, which has more verses in it,
as the authoritative one.
Origen of Alexandria, the year 240,
he includes in his canon Baruch and refers to 1st and 2nd Maccabees.
St. Augustine, we're getting a little bit later here, but around the year 397,
he includes the two Book of Maccabees, Tobit, Judith, Wisdom of Solomon,
and Ecclesiasticus as canonical books.
The big one that you need to know is the year 382.
In the year 382, the Pope, Pope Damasus, called a council in Rome,
and there was lots of questions.
What's in and what's out?
It wasn't just Old Testament books.
It was also New Testament books.
Like, hey, is the Gospel of Philip part of the New Testament?
And Pope Damasus and that council in the year 382
is the first time formally that the Church ever defined what is the canon.
And that canon is the exact canon that we Catholics use today,
and it included those seven deuterocanonical books.
So 382 is the first time any Christian defined the New Testament and the Old Testament.
It was Pope Damasus, and it happened in 382.
After that, there were a number of councils that affirmed the same canon
and the deuterocanonicals as had happened in Rome in 382.
The Council of Hippo in 392 and the Councils of Carthage in 397 and 417.
And then much later, the Council of Florence in 1442
and the Council of Trent in 1546 also established the exact same canon.
So your takeaway from this video is, look,
the Jews were reading the deuterocanonical books before the time of Christ.
They are reading them during this time of Christ.
The apostles refer to them, and the early church fathers and Pope Damasus
affirm this Catholic canon, the one that we are still using in this very year.
So you can be confident that these seven books do belong to the Old Testament.
They are part of the Bible, and I hope you can use some of the facts
and some of the information in the show notes below this video
when you have a Protestant friend say,
why do you have extra books?
You can go to these resources and explain it to them in full.
Thanks for being a member of the St. Thomas Institute.
We'll see you in lessons to come. God bless.