Why did the Protestants remove some books from the Bible?

Answer 1

Answer The canon of the Catholic Bible was established before the canon of the Hebrew Bible was known, and included a number of Old Testament books, now known as Deuterocanonical (second canon) Books, that could have been considered for inclusion in the Hebrew Bible but which were ultimately rejected by the Council of Jamnia. The Protestants, being aware of the canon of the Hebrew Bible, removed the Deuterocanonical Books, while regarding them as inspired.

In addition to the above

These books are still very much available to the Protestant. In many Bibles, rather than being subsumed into the Old Testament (as with Catholic Bibles) they are often included in a separate section between the Old and New testaments called the 'Apocrypha'. These books, according to the 39 Articles of Religion of the Church of England, established in the 16th Century, "the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine". In other words, they are sound enough to be regarded as inspirational reading for the Christian, but should not be the basis, as would the rest of the Bible, for Christian belief.

They include:

The Third Book of Esdras,

The rest of the Book of Esther,

The Fourth Book of Esdras,

The Book of Wisdom,

The Book of Tobias,

Jesus the Son of Sirach,

The Book of Judith,

Baruch the Prophet,

The Song of the Three Children,

The Prayer of Manasses,

The Story of Susanna,

The First Book of Maccabees,

Of Bel and the Dragon,

The Second Book of Maccabees.

Psalm 151

Catholic AnswerThe reason given is that the Hebrew Bible did not contain them, but this does not hold up to the facts. Even the so called Council of Jamnia can not be historically proven. The main reasons are 1) they contain clear support for Catholic doctrines that have been rejected by the "reformers", and they are supported by the Catholic Church. For an exhaustive, scholarly, completely documented coverage of the whole story, read Why Catholic Bibles are Bigger, The Untold Story of the Lost Books of the Protestant Bible, by Gary G. Michuta . The books in the Bible, which Martin Luther and his followers scorned are:

Tobias, Judith, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, 1 and 2 Machabees as well as additional portions of Esther and Daniel (see below)

from A Catholic Dictionary, edited by Donald Attwater, Second edition, revised 1957

Apocrypha

Books erroneously held to be inspired and to be included in the canon of Scripture, but rejected as such by the Church, such as III and IV Esdras, III and IV Maccabees, Prayer of Manasses, 3rd Epistle to the Corinthians, and the Gospel of James. Books style "apocrypha" in Protestant editions of the Bible are not necessarily such in the eyes of the Catholic Church.

Deutero-Canonical books

Those books of the O.T. whose place in the canon was not admitted till after that of the other books. They are Tobias, Judith, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, 1 and 2 Machabees, ver. 4 of chapt. X to the end of Esther, and Daniel, ver. 24 of chap. Iii to ver 3 of chap 8v and chaps. Xiii and xiv. Their authority is equal with that of the other books of the bible and is so admitted by all the Eastern dissident churches, except that Greek and Russian Orthodox theologians have now for some time been questioning it. Protestants have always rejected them because they are not included in the Hebrew Bible of the Jews.

　

Canon of Scripture

Is the list of inspire books of the Old and New Testaments. Inclusion in the canon does not confer anything to the internal character of a book, but is only the Church's teaching of the fact of its antecedent inspiration. The N.T. canon is the same as that at present commonly received among non-Catholic Christians; the O.T. canon contains in addition the deutero-canonical books (see above). These books and fragments are usually called Deuterocanoica, or of the second canon, not because their inspiration is in any way different from that of the others, but because the inspiration of the books at present in the Jewish Bible was definitely proclaimed by the Jewish authorities previous to Christ, whereas the inspiration of the Deuterocanonica, tentatively held but later rejected by the Jews, was definitely proclaimed in the Christian dispensation. The Protestant reformers, denying the infallibility of The Church, returned to the Jewish canon; the Council of Trent reaffirmed acceptance of the Christian one. Doubts expressed by individuals in certain places and periods about the canonical status of Hebrews, Apocalypse (Revelation) and some canonical epistles in the N.T. and the Deuterocanonica in the O.T., were thus declared incompatible with Catholic faith.

from Catholicism and Fundamentalism - The Attack on "Romanism" by "Bible Christians" by Karl Keating, Ignatius Press, 1988

William G. Most discussing comments made in 1910 by Gerald Birney Smith, professor at the University of Chicago and speaker at that year's Baptist Congress...

Most notes that "what Professor Smith demonstrates is that for a Protestant there simply is no way to know which books are inspired. That means, in practice, that a Protestant, if he is logical should not appeal to Scripture to prove anything; he ha no sure mans of knowing which books are part of Scripture (William G. Most, Free from All Error, Libertyville, Ill.: Franciscan Marytown Press, 1985, 9-11)

One consequence of this inability to ascertain the canon has been that the Protestant Bible is an incomplete Bible, Missing are the books of Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, and the two books of Maccabees, as well as sections of Ester and Daniel. These are known to Catholics as the deutero-canonical works. They are just as much a part of the Bible as the rest of the Old Testament, the proto-canonical books. ...

However easy it may have been for the Reformers to say that some books are inspired and thus in the canon, while others are not, they in fact had no solid grounds for making such determinations. Ultimately, an infallible authority is needed if we are to know what belongs in the Bible and what does not. Without such an authority, we are left to our own prejudices, and we cannot tell if our prejudices lead us in the right direction.

The advantages of the Catholic approach to proving inspiration are two. First, the inspiration is really proved, not just "felt". Second, the main fact behind the proof - the fact of an infallible, teaching Church - leads one naturally to an answer to the problem that troubled the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8:31): How is one to know what interpretations are right? The same Church that authenticates the Bible, that establishes its inspiration, is the authority set up by Christ to interpret his word.

from A Biblical Defense of Catholicism by Dave Armstrong; Sophia Institute Press, 2003

They were included in the Septuagint, which was the "Bible" of the Apostles. They usually quoted the Old Testament Scriptures (in the text of the New Testament) from the Septuagint.

Almost all of the Church Fathers regarded the Septuagint as the standard form of the Old Testament. The deuterocanonical books were in no way differentiated from the other books in the Septuagint, and were generally regarded as canonical. St. Augustine thought the Septuagint was apostolically sanctioned and inspired, and this was the consensus in the early Church.

Many Church Fathers (such as St. Irenaeus, St. Cyprian, and Tertullian) cite these books as Scripture without distinction. Others, mostly from the East (for example, St. Athanasius, St. Cyril of Jerusalem, and St. Gregory Nazianzen) recognized some distinction, but nevertheless still customarily cited the deuterocanonical books as Scripture. St. Jerome, who translated the Hebrew Bible into Latin (the Vulgate, early fifth century), was an exception to the rule (the Church has never held that individual Fathers are infallible).

The Church councils at Hippo (393) and Carthage (397, 419), influenced heavily by St. Augustine, listed the deuterocanonical books as Scripture, which was simply an endorsement of what had become the general consensus of the Church in the West and most of the East. Thus, the Council of Trent merely reiterated in stronger terms what had already been decided eleven and a half centuries earlier, and which had never been seriously challenged until the onset of Protestantism.

Since these councils also finalized the sixty-six canonical books that all Christians accept, it is quit arbitrary for Protestants selectively to delete seven books from this authoritative Canon. This is all the more curious when the complicated, controversial history of the New Testament is understood.

Pope Innocent I concurred with and sanctioned the canonical ruling of the above councils (Letter to Exsuperius, Bishop of Toulouse) in 405.

The earliest Greek manuscripts of the Old Testament, such as Codex Sinaiticus (fourth century) and Codex Alexandrinus ©. 450) include all of the deuterocanonical books mixed in with the others and not separated.

The practice of collecting the deuterocanonical books into a separate unit dates back no further than 1520 (in other words, it was a novel innovation of Protestantism). This is admitted by, for example, the Protestant New English Bible in its "Introduction to the Apocrypha".

Protestants, following Martin Luther, removed the deuterocanonical books from their Bibles, due to their clear teaching of doctrines that had been recently repudiated by Protestants, such as prayers for the dead (Tob. 12:12; 2 Mac. 12:39-45; cf. 1 Cor. 15:29), the intercession of dead saints (2 Mac. 15:14; cf. Rev. 6:9-10), and the intermediary intercession of angels (Tob. 12:12, 15; cf. Rev. 5: 8, 8:3-4). We know this from plain statements of Luther and other reformers.