How are Catholic
Bibles different?Q. How are Catholic Bibles different from other translations of God's word? A. The difference is that the Catholic version of scripture has additional books contained in the Old Testament that other translations (NKJV, NIV, etc.) do not. These added books are known as the Apocrypha or the Deutercanonicals. They include such books as Tobit, Judith, I and II Maccabees, etc. These books were not preserved by the Jews down through the centuries, but certain Christians preserved them, seeing them as having spiritual value. The Jews, as well as Protestants (which use the same canon of the Old Testament), deny that they are inspired by God or have binding spiritual authority. The Catholics felt otherwise, and made them officially part of the canon of Scripture at the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century. This council is famous as the gathering which responded against the Protestant Reformation's arguments and charges against Catholicism, and which led the Counter-Reformation against early Protestants like Martin Luther. Early in the history of these books, indeed before the Roman Empire fell (476 A.D.), two of the leading Catholic writers, Jerome and Augustine, had a major debate over the Apocrypha. Jerome, who translated much of the Greek and Hebrew for the New and Old Testaments into Latin for the Catholics (the Latin Vulgate version), denied that these books were inspired. Augustine felt otherwise, and believed them to have canonical authority. However, Augustine's position didn't win out officially until over a thousand one-hundred years after his death. Some of the many problems with the apocrypha are its absurd stories, historical errors and contradictions. The literary quality simply isn't very good, and they fail what (say) Josh McDowell might call the "internal evidence" test. (You may find it worth tracking down his book The New Evidence That Demands A Verdict for further research in the area of Christian apologetics, or his More Than a Carpenter). For example, Tobit, which Catholics do accept, describes a story in which a Jewish father, blinded by bird's dung falling into his eyes, sends out his son to collect a debt. He gets a heart, liver, and gall of a fish on his journey. He runs into a widow who have married seven times, but had never consummated any of these marriages with her husbands because an evil spirit had killed each husband on their respective wedding nights. Tobias (the son) marries this widow, and by burning two of the the fish parts, drives off the evil spirit called Asmodeus. He then uses the gall from that fish to cure his father's blindness. If one is familiar with the canonical Old Testament books, one should then see how absurd this story's setting and miracles are by comparison. |