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Why is the Protest, Catholic, and Orthodox Bibles Different? · Health and Healing Dealing with Trauma and Addictions

• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: Hey guys once again, this your man Mike D.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: Let's talk a little bit today about why are Protestants, Catholics, and the Orthodox Bibles different?
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: Hmm, inquiring spiritual minds want to know.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: If you ever picked up a Bible from another Christian tradition, you might have been surprised to find it contains a slightly different book list than you're used to.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's true.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: While most of the books are the same, Catholic and Orthodox Bibles have just a few more than most Protestant Bibles, because they each have different canon.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: A canon is a collection of books of religious community recognized as scripture.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: Most Protestant Bibles contain sixty six books and Catholic Bibles contain seventy three, while Orthodox totals vary by church and counting conventions.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: These differences occur mainly in the Old Testament.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: The New Testament is identical across nearly all Christian traditions.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: The different canons develop gradually through ancient Jewish and Christian usage, the Septuagint translation, church transition, and the Protestant Reformation, the Torah as well.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: But why are those canons different?
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: Which books exactly are found in each book, and what do they contain?
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: The different Old Testament canons used by the Jews, the Protestants, the Catholics, and the Orthodox Churches developed through a gradual organic process largely based on language and translations.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: The Hebrew scriptures, or the Jewish biblical canon that was used by Jesus, Paul and Apostles had gradually emerged in the centuries leading up to Jesus' birth, with the few exceptions of still disputed books.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: The canon included all of the Hebrew Old Testament books found in the Protestant's Bible, no more, no less.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: The people who compiled the canons of the Old and the New Testaments, they had their own opinions on the matter, in the process of discerning which texts were genuinely inspired by God and which were not, but still spiritually edifying and which were spurious and even dangerous.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: Both of the Old and the New Testaments had some close calls.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: These are known as the Henti logomina, it's Greek for spoken against or disputed.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: What we now know as the Bible developed gradually over many centuries are required faithful Jews and Christians to carefully analyze and determine which books qualify for inclusion in the Holy Scriptures, even in some cases when they wished they didn't, the books they ultimately got included.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: The Old Testament canon, with a few exceptions, such as the five books of the Torah and Jeremiah Lamentations, each book of the Old Testament was written by a different author, sometimes hundreds of years apart from one another.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: Over time these books, or scrolls as they referred to them as, became unified into a canon, a widely agreed upon collection deemed to be inspired by God.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_00: In the case of the Old Testament, this matter had been largely settled by the time of Christ in at least two different forms.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: The Jews in the Holy Land who spoke Edomic and could still read Hebrew use all of the books now contained in the Protestant's Old Testament.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: Outside of Judea, Greek speaking Jews across the Roman Empire relied upon the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible that also contained a variety of books written in the intertestamental period.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: These became known as the Apocrypha or the Deuterocana, and are included in the Catholic, Orthodox, and some Lutheran and Angelical Bibles, but not used today by Jews or most Protestants.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: I will share two parts of the New Testament canon.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: And so the only difference was the order and numbering, where modern Bibles typically split first and second Kings into two books, the Jewish canon considers them one book or one scroll.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: It also combines the twelve minor prophets from Hosea to Malachi into a single scroll.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: So why Protestants count thirty nine Old Testament books and the Jews count twenty four?
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: They contain the exact same content.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: The Septuagint, a major difference arose when those Jewish books were translated into Greek.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: The resulting document known as the Septuagint also included a variety of books that had been written in Greek during the intertestamental period, that is, the centuries between the last Hebrew writings and the New Testament.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: Those books were never widely accepted among Hebrew speaking Jews in the Holy Land, but they were sometimes used by the Greek speaking Jews in the wider Roman Empire.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: When these Jews and their Gentile neighbors embraced the Christian message, they retained their own list of sacred scriptures contained in the Septuagint.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: And combined with the New Testament books, that list became their Bible.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: And since there were far more Greek speaking Christians across the Roman Empire than Hebrew speaking ones, the Septuagint took hold as the Old Testament of choice.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: Even after the Christian Old Testament book established, there were differences across different regions of the vast Roman Empire, many maybe not mentioned in places beyond the empire where enterprising apostles were sent.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: One such place, we recall, was Ethiopia, one of the earliest places Christianity was brought after Christ's ascension, Acts eight, twenty six through forty.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: This canon developed alongside the Western canon, but largely isolated from it, hence the extra books.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: In Rome, Latin speaking Christians needed their own Bible.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: Eventually the scholars Jerome produced the Vulgate, a complete Latin translation of the Bible that eventually became the defining versions used by the Catholic Church down into modern times.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: The Greek speaking Orthodox Church has continued to use the Septuagint even today, but minor regional variations in its books still persist, which is why different Orthodox churches continue to have slightly different Old Testament canons.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: Sounds confusing?
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: It is.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: The Protestant Reformation, how did we get the shorter version?
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: The Protestant list of Old Testament books we have today.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: During the Reformation or the Reforming period, when scholars and activists like Martin Luther and John Calvin had rejected the authority of the Roman Catholic Church, began to translate the Bible into vernacular language that went back to the original Hebrew Scripture.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, they found that some of the Old Testament books weren't in them.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: The Reformers, and this is how you get a lot of the different denominations as well, the Reformers handled this discovery in different ways.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: Some like Calvin rejected them altogether.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: Others, like Luther and King James translators, chose to somewhat begrudgingly retain them, but kept them in a separate section between the Old and the New Testaments, which they turned the Apocrypha.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: These books are not used in worship or liturgy, but may still be read or studied privately.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, I do have a separate copy of the Apocrypha as well in my library.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: Keep in mind I'm just giving you a taste of the differences of the Protestant, Catholic, and on the Orthodox Bible's differences, right?
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: There's so much more to this, guys, that I can't quite cover here, but I recommend highly that if you're looking to find some truths within the scriptures that you read, books that you use, look a little deeper and try and research and find out what this is all about.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: But I hope this is an encouragement and helps you to kind of understand some of the early history as it relates to the differences.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: So let's talk now about the New Testament canon.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: The books of the New Testament were compiled in a much shorter time frame than the Old Testament.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: The earliest books were written around 50 AD, and they were mostly compiled by the early second century church, or those church leaders.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: In those early years after Christ's resurrection, most Christians passed on the gospel orally or occasionally through the writings.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't until later as the first generation of apostles began to pass away the communities started to form and they began to compile these letters to preserve them.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: The Spirit was leading these communities.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: They reasoned.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: They prayed this would lead them generally to the same core text.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: Time of Christ, the Old Testament was well already established, but there were still a few writings that the rabbis were suspicious of and only grudgingly included.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: These included the Book of Aster, the Book of Ecclesiastes, Song of Psalms, and surprisingly, the major prophet Ezekiel.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: Ecclesiastics and the Song of Psalms are the least of the two preached, taught, thought about, writings and or books in Scripture.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I would ask those of you who study the Bible why.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: The Song of Songs and the Book of Ecclesiastics clearly speaks of love and the love language of God, but yet, once again, they're the least to preached and the least to that are taught.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: Some are some of the closest believers should be taught the most because of the reflection of the love of God to his people and unrelativity of man's suffering and the ultimate demise.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: Ask yourself what you know about those two books.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, I'll help you.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: Let's take a quick look at 'em.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_00: Ecclesiastes.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: Ecclesiastes paints a stark picture of reality as being a fundamentally evil, a Hebrew term usually translated as vanity, utility, or meaningless, but most literally meaning vapor or smoke.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: Some authorities worry this borderline, nihilistic perspective would confuse or corrupt readers.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: In the end, they chose to include it, perhaps because they saw in it as in Job, an acknowledgement of the inscrutability of God's will in the face of real human suffering.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: It remains a book that believers are powerfully drawn to and sometimes disturbed by.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: Sure, it is.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: What about the Song of Songs?
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: Why is there a time shockingly explicit, erotic love poem in the middle of the Bible?
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: Jews and Christians interprets have wrestled with that question in many different ways.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: Some have found that in the Song of Psalms an allegory of God and Israel or Christ and the church, or the spirit and our souls.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: More recent interpretations chosen to interpret it more straightforwardly as an affirmation of romantic yearnings and sexual union and human relationships.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's easy to see why Rabnica and church authorities were uncomfortable with it, but also easy to see how its rich layers of meaning demanded it finally be included.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: Let that marinate.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: The reality is that there was no single moment when every Christian accepted the identical Old Testament and one group subsequently changed it.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: The traditions developed from overlapping but not entirely uniform ancient collections, and it continues to be a source of ecumenical debates among earnest believing Christians of all denominations today.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: As we said, neither description tells the complete history or the why of writings removed or left out.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so in closing, Catholics understand the deuterocanical books as part of the scriptural tradition received and affirmed by the Church, the Catholic Church, that is, from its earlier days.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: Protestants view the Apocrypha as illegitimate additions to the original canon, recognizing only the shorter Jewish collection as the authoritative Old Testament.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: And Orthodox churches, largely unaffected by these Western debates, have continued using their broader collections shaped by the Septuagint, an ancient liturgy tradition.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: Second Timothy two, fourteen and fifteen it says repeat these basic essentials over and over to God's people.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: Warn them before God against pious nitpicking, which chips away at the faith.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: It just wears everyone out.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: Study to show yourselves approved unto God a workman that needed not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: Stay clear of pious talk.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: That is only talk.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: Words are not mere words, you know.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: If they were not backed by a godly life, they accumulate as a poison in the soul.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: Right, wrong, or indifferent, what we have is what we have.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: Protestants, Catholic, Orthodox Bibles, they are all different in some ways, some shapes and some forms.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_00: Some things were left out, others were not.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: But as Second Timothy chapter 2 says, you study to show yourself approved, a workman of God, not being ashamed of the gospel, okay?
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: Because you have to work out your own salvation.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: Make sure that you are on the right side and reading the right information.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: God bless.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: We'll talk soon.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: Bye now.