Well, BOL, for your information, what you have just stated is also false.
It is not Protestants who rejected the whole Apocrypha (including those seven books you cling to). It was the Lord Jesus Christ Himself who rejected the Apocrypha. And I will leave you to study the NT and discover this for yourself. Chances are you still won't believe Christ because the RCC always trumps Christ.
Furthermore, long before the Protestants came on the scene, the Catholic scholar Jerome, who was well-versed in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin REJECTED the Apocrypha as Scripture. Yet he was compelled by the pope of that time to retain the apocryphal books in the Latin Vulgate.
Tobit
Judith
Wisdom
Sirach (Ecclesiasticus)
Baruch
1 Maccabees
2 Maccabees
After that the Council of Trent decided to call these books "Scripture" since the Protestants exposed the hoax which had been perpetrated.
The Apocrypha (what Catholics call Deutero-Canonical) are simply the uninspired writings of men. Some are OK but others are pure fantasy. And none of them talk about Purgatory. Maccabees talks about praying for the dead, but that has been fantasized into praying souls out of Purgatory -- a NON-EXISTENT imaginary place which Catholics are taught to expect. What a shame and what a disgrace.
I suggest you study your
history - and your
Bible because you are
DEAD wrong.
First of all - not
only did Jesus and the NT writers
NOT reject the
7 Deuterocanonical Books - which
YOU mistakenly refer to as
"Apocrypha" - they referred to or quoted them about
200 times in the NT.
For example - the whole discussion of armor, helmet, breastplate, sword, shield in
Eph. 6:13-17 follows
Wis. 5:17-20 almost
verbatim.
Secondly - Jerome
didn't reject these books either. I suggest you do your
homework to discover just
exactly what he
DID say about them - and
WHY.
When Jerome was translating the Bible into
Latin - he sought the assistance of
JEWISH SCHOLARS who rejected these books. Jerome was merely stating
THEIR opinions about them. Jerome not only
considered them to be
Sacred Scripture - he
quoted them in his many debates as
"Sacred Scripture".
Jerome wrote:
"What sin have I committed if I followed the judgment of the churches? But he who brings charges against me for relating the objections that the Hebrews are wont to raise against the story of Susanna, the Son of the Three Children, and the story of Bel and the Dragon, which are not found in the Hebrew volume (ie. canon), proves that he is just a foolish sycophant. For I wasn't relating my own personal views, but rather the remarks that they [the Jews] are wont to make against us" (Against Rufinus 11:33 [A.D. 402]).
Thirdly - the Canon of Scripture was
NOT declared first at
Trent in the 16th century - but at the
Synod of Rome in
AD 382.
It was confirmed at the
Synod of Hippo eleven years later
(393). At the
Council (or Synod) of Carthage (397), it was yet again confirmed. The bishops wrote at the end of their document,
"But let Church beyond sea (Rome) be consulted about confirming this canon". There were 44 bishops, including St. Augustine who signed the document.
7 years later, in
405, in a letter from
Pope Innocent I to Exsuperius, Bishop of Toulouse, he reiterated the canon.
14 years after that, at the
2nd Council (Synod) of Carthage (419) the canon was again formally confirmed.
The Canon of Scripture was officially
closed at the
Council of Trent in the 16th century because of the
perversions happening within
Protestantism and the random
editing and
deleting of books from the Canon.
Finally - yes, it
IS Protestantism that
rejected these Books along with their
POST-Christ, POST-Temple Jewish predecessors. Do your
homework . . .
