Читать книгу A Minute in the Church - Gus Lloyd - Страница 8

Canon of Scripture

Why does a Catholic Bible have 73 books, and a Protestant Bible 66? The canon of Scripture for the Christian Church was determined by Catholic Bishops at the Council of Carthage in 397 A.D. It included the Septuagint, or Alexandrian canon of the Old Testament - 46 books. For more than a millennium, this was the accepted canon of Scripture.

Now, around 100 A.D., Jewish leaders rejected seven of these books, mainly on the grounds that they could not find any Hebrew versions of these books. Their version of the Old Testament is called the Palestinian canon. In 1529, Martin Luther chose to accept the Palestinian canon, principally citing the lack of Hebrew versions of the seven books. Who could have known that nearly 400 years later, Hebrew copies of some of these books would be found in the Dead Sea scrolls at Qumran?

In the New Testament, 300 quotations from the Old Testament are from the Septuagint. The Septuagint was the translation used by Jesus and New Testament writers. If you’d like to read for yourself, check out the books of Wisdom, Sirach, Judith, Baruch, Tobit and 1 and 2 Maccabees.