Catholicism For Dummies. Rev. Kenneth Brighenti
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even in the Bible. Do a word search on your computer, and you’ll see that nowhere from Genesis to the Apocalypse (Revelation) is the word bible ever mentioned. But the word Scripture appears 53 times in the King James Version of the Bible, and the phrase Word of God appears 55 times. So if the word itself isn’t in the Bible, why call it the Bible? The word comes from the Greek biblia, meaning “a collection of books,” and the origin goes back even farther to the word biblos, meaning “papyrus.” In ancient times, the paper from trees to write on didn’t exist — only stone or papyrus. Imagine — stone books.
The Catholic Church gave the name Bible to the Bible — to the collection of inspired books known as the Old and New Testaments. The Church also decided which books belonged in the Bible and which were left out, because nowhere from Genesis to Apocalypse (Revelation) can you find a list of which documents belong and which don’t. Modern-day Bible publishers and editors have added the table of contents, but the contents weren’t disclosed in the sacred text itself. Why does the Bible contain four Gospels? Who decided that Matthew should come before Mark? Why isn’t the Gospel of Thomas or the Gospel of Peter in the Bible? Who says that the New Testament contains only 27 books? What happened to the Apocalypse of Moses and the Apocalypse of Adam? The Bible doesn’t tell you what books belong in it, so the Church had to use her authority to make that decision. You can read more on this subject in the nearby section “Trusting the authority of the Catholic Bible.”
Trusting the authority of the Catholic Bible
What follows is a snapshot of how the Bible was created and how different versions evolved — the Catholic versions and the Protestant versions. If you’re eager for more information on the Bible, however, check out The Bible For Dummies by Jeffrey Geoghegan and Michael Homan (Wiley).
To understand the history of the Bible, you really have to go back to around 1800 B.c. when the oral tradition of the Hebrew people started, because Abraham and his tribes were nomadic people and didn’t have a written language of their own. Mothers and fathers verbally (orally) handed down the stories of the Old Testament about Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, and so on. (The Latin word traditio means “to hand down,” and it’s the root of the English word for tradition.) The stories of the Old Testament were all told by word of mouth, which we call oral tradition.
Moses appeared sometime around 1250 B.c., when God delivered the Hebrew people from the bondage of slavery in Egypt, and they entered the Promised Land. The era of Moses opened the road to some of the written word because Moses was raised in the court of Pharaoh, where he learned how to read and write. But the predominant bulk of revelation was still the oral tradition, handed down from generation to generation, because the rest of the Hebrews were slaves, and most were unable to read or write at that time. Substantial writings weren’t saved until 950 B.c., during the reign of King Solomon. But after his death, King Solomon’s kingdom was divided between the northern and southern kingdoms of Israel and Judah, respectively.
The Assyrians conquered Israel in 721 B.c., and the Babylonians conquered Judah in 587 B.c. During the time of the Babylonian captivity and exile, the Jews of the Diaspora (forced exile of Jews) were spread all over the known world. Some retained their Hebrew language, but most lost it and adopted the common language: Greek. (If you could read and write at this time in history, most likely you were reading and writing Greek.)
Consequently, in the year 250 B.c., an effort was underway to translate all Jewish Scripture into the Greek language. The thing is, more Jews lived outside of Palestine than within it. In the third century B.c., nearly two-fifths of the population in Egypt alone, especially in Alexandria, was Jewish and yet unable to read and write in Hebrew. These Greek-speaking Jews were known as Hellenistic Jews. Seven books of Scripture were written in Greek by these Hellenistic Jews and were considered as inspired as the 39 Scriptural books written in Hebrew before the Diaspora.
The Greek version of the Old Testament was called the Septuagint (symbolized by the Roman numeral LXX for the number 70) because it took 70 scholars allegedly 70 years to complete the task. They met in Alexandria, Egypt, and translated 39 Hebrew Scriptures into Greek and included 7 other books originally written by Jews in the Greek language. These seven books — the Books of Baruch, Maccabees I and II, Tobit, Judith, Ecclesiasticus (also known as Sirach), and Wisdom — were known and used by Jews even in the Holy Land, including Jesus and His disciples. The early Christians likewise accepted the inspired status of these seven books because no one had refuted them during the time of Christ. Because they were later additions to the more ancient Hebrew writings, however, these seven books were called the Deuterocanonical Books (meaning second canon); the 39 Hebrew books were known as the Canonical Books.
Jewish authorities in Jerusalem had no explicit objection to these seven books until the year A.d. 100, well after the Christians had split from formal Judaism and formed their own separate religion. The Temple of Jerusalem was destroyed in A.d. 70, and in the year A.d. 100, Jewish leaders at the Council of Jamnia sought to purify Judaism of all foreign and Gentile influence, which meant removing anything not purely Hebrew. Because the seven Deuterocanonical Books were never written in Hebrew, they got pitched.
By now, though, Christianity was totally independent from Judaism and didn’t doubt the authenticity of the seven books, because these books were always considered equal to the other 39. (Much later, Martin Luther would initiate the Protestant Reformation in 1517 and choose to adopt the Hebrew canon [39 books] rather than the Greek canon [46 books], also called the Septuagint.)
So, in the listing of the Old Testament, a discrepancy exists between the Catholic and the Protestant Bibles. Catholic Bibles list 46 books and Protestant Bibles list 39. Recently, many publishers have reintroduced the seven books in Protestant Bibles, such as the King James Version, but they’re carefully placed in the back (after the end of the canonical texts) and are identified as being part of the Apocrypha, which is from the Greek word apokryphos meaning “hidden.”
So, what the Catholic Church considers Deuterocanonical, Protestant theologians consider Apocrypha. And what the Catholic Church considers Apocrypha, Protestants call Pseudepigrapha (meaning “false writings”), which are the alleged and so-called Lost Books of the Bible. These Lost Books were never considered as being inspired by the Church, so they were never included as part of any Bible, Catholic or Protestant. Such books as the Assumption of Moses, the Apocalypse of Abraham, the Ascension of Isaiah, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Peter, the Acts of St. John, and others were all considered uninspired and therefore never made it into the Bible.
Interestingly enough, Catholics and Protestants have never seriously disputed the list of the New Testament books, and both the Catholic and the Protestant Bibles have the exact same names and number (27) of books in the New Testament. (For more info about the New Testament, see Chapter 4.)
Faith in the spoken word: Sacred Tradition
God’s word is more than letters on a page or sounds to the ear. His word is creative. When God speaks the word, it happens. For example, the book of Genesis in the Bible tells us that God created merely by saying the word: “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light” (Genesis 1:3).
Catholics believe that the Word of God is found not only in the Bible but also in the unwritten or spoken word — Sacred Tradition. In this section, we show you what Sacred Tradition is and introduce you to the single most important part of that tradition, the Creed.
Filling in the gaps of the written word
Before the word was written, it was first spoken. God first said, “Let there be light,” and later on, the sacred author wrote those words on paper. Jesus first spoke the word when