Hi Helen,
You wrote, The way I figure it, God is in charge of His own Word. He will make sure we have what He wants us to have. Men keep thinking they are in charge of stuff. We aren't... We have the Scriptures He wants us to have.
Well, it was "men" that chunked the Deuterocanonicals out of the Old Testament canon in the Middle Ages; and they weren't Catholics.
You finish your post with, "I know, but for what we know is inspired, I'll stick with the 66 books."
Let's be honest before the Lord. You stick to the shorter canon formulated by the authority of Jews after God had come in the flesh and established his Church.
All sorts of explanations will be given, but we know - both you and I - why you and other Protestants reject the Deuterocanonical texts: you inherited this shorter canon from your Protestant forefathers.
If you're a Protestant because you were raised as a Protestant or converted in the context of a Protestant community, then you naturally purchase and read a Protestant Bible (e.g. KJV, NIV). You don't go about a historical debate, figuring what books to include in your canon. You simply accept the canon handed to you in faith - faith that this, what you're reading, is God's word. For the most part, the defense and historical analysis comes after the fact of acceptance by faith.
On February 4, 1442 (75 years before the onset of the Protestant Revolt and 41 years before Luther's birth), the 17th Ecumenical Council of the Church listed the canon of Scripture as including the Deuterocanonicals. 75 years later, they were taken out of the canon by men without authority.
The seven deuterocanonical books were among those that were sometimes disputed in the history of the Church, but by and large they were accepted by most Christians, as Protestant scholar J.N.D. Kelley of Oxford confirms that the Old Testament "always included, though with varying degrees of recognition, the so-called Apocrypha or deutero-canonical books ... In the first two centuries ... the Church seems to have accepted all, or most of, these additional books as inspired and to have treated them without question as Scripture. Quotations from Wisdom, for example, occur in 1 Clement and Barnabas ... Polycarp cites Tobit, and the Didache cites Ecclesiasticus. Irenaeus refers to Wisdom, the History of Susannah, Bel and the Dragon, and Baruch. The use made of the Apocrypha by Tertullian, Hippolytus, Cyprian and Clement of Alexandria is too frequent for detailed references to be necessary." (J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrine, {New York: Harper & Row, 1960}, 53-4.)
Marvin Tate, Old Testament professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, writes, "It seems clear that the Protestant position must be judged a failure on historical grounds, insofar as it sought to return to the canon of Jesus and the Apostles. The Apocrypha belongs to this historical heritage of the Church." (Marvin Tate, "Old Testament Apocalyptica and the Old Testament Canon," in Review and Expositor 65, 1968, 353.)
You're correct Helen. God is in charge of His own Word. And He, through His Church, has preserved His Word and will continue to preserve His Word, which is His and His alone. We have the Scriputures that He wants us to have, and we will not dismantle His Scriptures by taking out what He has written, even if men suggest that we must or should. Christians do not stand over God's word. Christians stand under God's word, receptive and pliable to what He says.
You may be astounded by discovering and reading about the early Christians' use of Septuagint text in converting Jews, employing passages especially from those texts which you call "Apocryphal" and reject as a child of the Reformation. Here is a passage that was used quite often, which is fulfilled by Christ in Chapter 2 of the Wisdom of Solomon:
[12] "Let us lie in wait for the righteous man,
because he is inconvenient to us and opposes our actions;
he reproaches us for sins against the law,
and accuses us of sins against our training.
[13] He professes to have knowledge of God,
and calls himself a child of the Lord.
[14] He became to us a reproof of our thoughts;
[15] the very sight of him is a burden to us,
because his manner of life is unlike that of others,
and his ways are strange.
[16] We are considered by him as something base,
and he avoids our ways as unclean;
he calls the last end of the righteous happy,
and boasts that God is his father.
[17] Let us see if his words are true,
and let us test what will happen at the end of his life;
[18] for if the righteous man is God's son, he will help him,
and will deliver him from the hand of his adversaries.
[19] Let us test him with insult and torture,
that we may find out how gentle he is,
and make trial of his forbearance.
[20] Let us condemn him to a shameful death,
for, according to what he says, he will be protected."
and from Chapter 5:
[1] Then the righteous man will stand with great confidence
in the presence of those who have afflicted him,
and those who make light of his labors.
[2] When they see him, they will be shaken with dreadful fear,
and they will be amazed at his unexpected salvation.
[3] They will speak to one another in repentance,
and in anguish of spirit they will groan, and say,
[4] "This is the man whom we once held in derision
and made a byword of reproach -- we fools!
We thought that his life was madness
and that his end was without honor.
[5] Why has he been numbered among the sons of God?
And why is his lot among the saints?
In fact, the Rabbis of the Pastristic Period referred to the LXX as the "Golden Calf" because it was used so widely by Christians in winning Jewish Converts to a religion that they could only see as idolatry, as man-worship.
Yours in Christ,
Carson
[ October 20, 2002, 02:28 PM: Message edited by: Carson Weber ]
