Did Catholics Add 7 Books to the Bible? Or Did Protestants Remove Them?

[Music] welcome back to Samus potpourri I'm Joe heshmeier so today I want to explore what ought to be a really easy historical question namely at the time of the Reformation did the Catholic Church add seven books to the Bible in response to the reformers or did their Protestants remove seven books from the Bible the reason I say it should be an easy historical question is if Scholars are unanimous on this because you simply need to read the evidence and you'll see there were clearly seven books in the Bible that were removed by the reformers another way to pose this would be to say how many books were in the Bible at the time of the Reformation so it's not just Catholic but also Protestant Scholars secular Scholars and moreover simply the writings prior to the Reformation themselves so I'll give you a couple examples first the Council of Florence in 1442 this is an ecumenical council that's one reason it matters another reason it matters is this is a reunion council at which the Catholic church and the Orthodox church and the Coptic Church are trying to get back together under the leadership of the of the Pope and for a while it looks like it's going to succeed and while they're doing that they have to say things like what they believe in common and so in 1442 in the bowl of Union with the cops this is from session 11 of the Council of Florence they're declaring the church's belief that one God is the author of both the Old and the New Testament and that these books are you know they're inspired by God and we're told the church accepts and venerates their books whose titles are as follows and then you get a full list of all of the books of the Old Testament and then all of the books of the New Testament and it is clearly the entire 73 book Catholic Bible so there's seven books that are going to be present on this list that are in Catholic Bibles today that aren't in Protestant Bibles today Tobit Judith wisdom the book they call ecclesiasticus which is also called ecclesias means like church book uh Baruch and then first and second Maccabees those seven books along with two different uh debates about the whether we go at the shorter or longer versions of Esther and Daniel that's what the entire debate is about and it's very clear that Florence has what we would call the deuterocan and what Protestants would call the Apocrypha now someone could say I think Florence is wrong I think the Catholic church and the Orthodox church and the Coptic Church didn't know which books were in the Bible but nevertheless that's not the question the question is did we add seven books to the Bible or did Protestants remove them and historically we have to say Protestants removed seven books that were universally in the Bible at the time of the Reformation and in fact when I say Protestants I'm careful here not to just say Luther or the reformers because as the Methodist scholar Ben witherington III points out the Geneva Bible uh the first to produce an English Old Testament translation entirely from Hebrew this is a Protestant Bible under Anglican Authority like its predecessors included what he calls the Apocrypha he says in fact the King James Bible 1611 also Incorporated the Apocrypha including then he includes the longer form of Daniel and the prayer Vanessa so it's not just that Catholic Bibles had these seven books like they were tacked on or something early Protestant Bibles also did and then witherington goes on he says in fact none of the major Bible translations that emerged during the German Swiss or English reformations produced a Bible of Simply 66 books he says it is true that beyond the 66 books these other seven are more reviewed as deuterocanonical hints the term Apocrypha but nonetheless they were still seen as having some Authority so you don't have the production of the modern 66 book Protestant Bible prior to the Reformation and you don't even have it really at the time of the Reformation at least not in the early days we'll get in a little bit into Who removed those books and why and by what Authority but for now it's just to establish the really basic question that hey these books were removed by Protestants not added by Catholics now the reason I feel it necessary to say that is because there are Protestants who say the opposite in in spite of all of the evidence so I'll give you an example Todd Friel who has uh the show wretched which has like half a million subscribers on YouTube he's going to just make total hash of this history and just say one falsehood after another it's a fairly short video so I'm going to reply to the whole thing but here's Friel um in his own words he's responding to a reader who wrote it from Brady why did the reformers remove some books from the Bible that's a loaded question I have a friend who says one of them supports purgatory and that's why ah the importance of knowing are Biblical history please do not be deceived by people who will tell you on the YouTube machine the Bible wasn't concocted until the fourth Century it was the Council of nicaea that put those books together otherwise the whole thing was a hash that is not biblically historically accurate inside of the first century we know that the books that you and I have in our new testament were the books that were recognized by the early Church in the first century hold on a second speaking no this entire video he assumes quite obviously incorrectly that the seven books in question are seven New Testament books none of them are the New Testament is identical between Catholic Protestant Orthodox Coptic Bibles the entire debate is about the Old Testament so that should be the first red flag that something is really wrong with this line of argumentation that he doesn't even know which part of the Bible we're dealing with Old Testament or new testament but second the reader wrote in and said hey it sounds like the reformers removed seven books from the Bible why did they do that and he starts talking about oh don't listen to people who say there was no Bible prior to the Council of nicaea that's not the question at all no one asked about nicia the question is about the Reformation the reader isn't saying there was no Bible the reader you know the writer is saying there was a Bible and it seems like Protestants removed some books from it why'd that happen and so what he's saying here is is just not it's not even remotely right were they codified meaning did somebody put a binding around them and go that's it stamp of approval no these books were assumed to be Apostolic in Authority in the first century now I could quibble with some of his history here but I'm not going to because I think he's actually making an important point one that he's going to violate later namely there is an important difference between whether a book is recognized as canonical as inspired as sacred text and whether it's officially declared such you can have a lot of things that you believe as a Christian that are never officially declared particularly if they're uncontroversial so we can get into the whole history of the New Testament Canon and how it was figured out there's a little more debate about it than he's letting on but that's not really the point because again we're not supposed to be talking about the New Testament this is the question about the Old Testament and the Old Testament was not clearly settled by the close of the first century there was a great deal of debate about it nevertheless I'll let him continue yeah as time passes which it does and we sometimes fail to remember that when we're thinking about history Interlopers came along some good books some not so good some claiming to be from Peter others claiming to be from Paul but were they really that is why then in the fourth Century the church went that's we really there's just too many Challengers coming in causing a whole lot of confusion some of them weren't so terrible like the dedicay but some of them were heretical and the church recognized we just have to codify this using a read five standards to determine these are the books that are in to keep the others out it wasn't as much about which ones are in but blocking others out so I have no idea where he's getting this or what he's talking about because again he still thinks we're in the New Testament which we're not uh but also the Council of nicaea you can look for yourself you can go online the First Council of nice he had the canons of the council are online and they don't say anything about which books are in the Bible now there's an interesting uh detail in Saint Jerome's writing where He suggests they do consider which books are canonical but if they do we don't have any record of it and so this whole thing they had a five-point standard they were looking at is apparently just made up out of whole cloth now you can say as a general rule when early Christians considered which books were and weren't canonical they were looking at certain traits particularly when we're talking about New Testament books which again we're not but you can't say the Council of Nicea did that that it didn't and you can go read that for yourself I'd give you a quotation here but it's hard to quote nothing so really the person who should be giving you a quotation saying here's the canon in the council First Council of nicaea that does this would be tough real and he doesn't because there is no such Canon and so you'll find a lot of times Skeptics will make this claim you know this is really famously Dan Brown's argument uh in DaVinci Code and it's just so obviously untrue that all you have to do is just go to Google and just type in canons of the First Council of nicaea it's not like we're looking at some esoteric text you know this 19th century Monastery has one copy in Greek no no no this is an extremely important Church Council that has been widely translated into English we know the canons we regularly pray the Nicene Creed it is not secret what it didn't didn't say and it didn't say anything one way or the other about which books belong in the Bible however history is not done a fellow named Jerome commissioned to write a Latin version of the Bible using Greek and Hebrew he translated it into Latin did he include the books that the Roman Catholic church has in their Canon today and the answer is he translated them with a note saying but these aren't actually the Bible they can be profitable for understanding how people before us did things but these are not inspired writ that's from the Latin Vulgate okay so this has elements of Truth in it but it's still getting a lot of things wrong uh so let's talk about the fourth Century church because he mentioned earlier this is the church that figures out which Bible is the right Bible right like it's got all these Interlopers and it's saying he says it's the Council of nicaea but not really then uh which books are and aren't in the Bible and it's true the 4th Century Church makes a really important set of contributions to this but when you read what the fourth Century Church actually has to say it's not anything like what he's saying and instead you've got things like the third Council of Carthage in 397. that now this is a regional Castle it's not an ecumenical council it's not binding on all Christians it's a North African Council but North Africa at the time is a major Hub of Christianity and it's listing which books are in the Bible and it says it was also determined that besides the canonical scriptures nothing be read in the church under the title of divine scriptures the canonical scriptures are these and then it lists the entire Catholic Bible including Maccabees including Judith including Tobit including all of these books that Protestants today deny so when he talks about how great the fourth Century church is well he doesn't actually I think they got this right he thinks the fourth Century Church he's actually wrong Saint Augustine says the same thing he talks about this he gives a whole list in on Christian doctrine and he explicitly mentions uh judah's segment of Magnus he actually mentions all of the seven and then in city of God he talks about how these books he looks particularly the two books of Maccabeats he says they are not considered canonical by the Jews but they are considered canonical by the church so there's no question that there's a widespread belief in the fourth century that these 73 books are the books that make up the Bible and this is what leads to the Latin Vulgate you might notice that Friel said oh Jerome was commissioned to like translate the Vulgate into Latin and you might say well commissioned by who commissioned by the Pope because there was enough clarity about which books should be considered canonical that it was important to bind them into a single volume called book or Bible and that's what he did but Jerome disagreed with what everybody else said now that part is where friel's path right but I think Jerome's position gets exaggerated and misrepresented enough that it's worth kind of reading what Jerome has to say for himself and his prologue to the book of Judith he argues that this he he wasn't going to translate the book he said but because this book is found by the 19 councils to have encountered among the number of the Sacred Scriptures I've acquiesced to your request indeed a demand so he's been told to do it so he's going to do it and also he says First Council of nicaea says this is scripture now again I don't know what Jerome's talking about but Jerome is reading about 80 years after the first Council of nicaea now I don't think Todd Friel has some special knowledge of the First Council of nicaea that is not widely known because he's gotten everything else you know factually wrong here but I would not be shocked to learn that Jerome writing 80 years after the first Council of nicaea knows details about the proceedings of the council that didn't make it into the final acts of the council or the final canons of the council that's purely historical speculation we're left with this strange situation where Jerome claims that this book Judas which Catholics accept and Protestants reject was affirmed by the First Council of nicaea we don't know what he's talking about again but it's an interesting kind of intriguing historical detail and it also complicates the picture going on Jerome writing against Rufus one of his kind of Frenemies uh talks about which version of Daniel to use and he uses the longer form of Daniel and he writes about this two Rufus he says well we've got four versions to choose from he says the churches choose to read Daniel in the version of Theodosia what sin have I committed in following the Judgment of the church so he follows that version when figuring out you know which base text to use for translation and to make this all even a little more complicated so you'll notice he's even he's got his private theological judgments he's got his own views about which books shouldn't shouldn't be considered scripture but he's willing to defer to what he calls the Judgment of the churches this is an important detail that gets misrepresented because you have this idea that oh sure the third Council of Carthage oh sure the pope oh sure the broader church maybe even the First Council of nicaea and now lost cannons all say these books are inspired but Jerome he's going to Trump all that well Jerome doesn't think Jerome trumps all of that he expresses in his very blunt kind of style his own views but nevertheless he defers and he goes along he could have not translated the Latin Vulgate right he you might notice translates these seven books to include in the Latin version of the Bible that's used for the next thousand years as the standard Bible throughout all of Western Christianity so I just think that's worth including additionally and beyond all that Beyond his references to nicia's apparent endorsement of Judas Beyond his personal deference to the Judgment of the churches on these matters you also have him in numerous places citing to these books as scripture even though elsewhere he says they're not scripture so Jerome's position is way more nuanced complicated than I think Protestants give it credit for so yeah sure you get half a point for Jerome but Jerome is virtually alone on this question you have Jerome you have Rufus and you have What's called the ordinary gloss which is a Biblical commentary that was popular in the Middle Ages that argued against the canonicity of these seven books outside of those three sources I don't know of anyone else prior to like the 16th century who's making an argument that these seven books shouldn't be in the Bible and I would have a good deal of difficulty making any kind of principled case that an ecumenical council says X in Jerome says Y and we should go to Rome instead of the council and as I said I don't think Jerome would make that argument because we see from his own conduct that he didn't view himself as greater than a church Council okay back to free fast forward we enter into the Protestant Reformation it is now okay I just want to point out this is like standard Protestant history where there's just you skip a thousand years fine okay we'll do it the 16th century and justification by faith alone it is sweeping western civilization and the books that were recognized at that time were these same 27 that you have in your new testament today why then does the Roman Catholic church today have more and did Protestants take them out first of all the Catholic Church doesn't have more books than the New Testament open a Catholic Bible one time we have the same books in the same order this question is like saying why do Protestants have five legs it's like I don't know how to answer that because it's an absurd hypothetical no one who has even a little bit of knowledge about this would make this claim but go on historically no because they were never codified as being biblical the apocryphal books a collection of writings that were actually rejected early by the church were now suddenly a courtesy of the Council of Trent in 1545 which took about four years to complete they started to add those books to the Canon Protestants did not remove them the Roman Catholic Church added them and that is simply historical fact I again none of that is historical fact first of all we know these books were not rejected by the early church as we've just seen you've got to guess then you've got third Council of Carthage there's plenty of other old citation even people who don't seem to include them on their canonical list will regularly cite them and call them scripture and use them to prove Doctrine and so no it's just not true these seven books weren't included or they were rejected in Antiquity but you'll notice that he's gone back saying well they weren't codified but he already called that out as a cheap trick early on right that people say well the Bible wasn't codified until the 4th Century therefore we didn't know what books were in it and he rightly said you can know what the books were even before they're codified well so here right they knew what the books were even prior to them being codified that's not just a special argument that you could only use for the New Testament that's also true of Christianity's knowledge of the Old Testament that we knew which books were in the Old Testament even before they were codified now sure there were debates there were debates about the New Testament as well but the idea that there was a general consensus is something that I think is important to preserve it and something he's just getting historically wrong here now again you heard him just make the claim that the Catholic Church added these books to the Council of Trent now you already saw the Council of Florence about a century prior so ask yourself how could that claim possibly be true how could we say the Catholic Church add seven books to the Council of Trent that it had already affirmed and codified a century earlier and that we find regularly cited to buy popes that we find regularly cited to by church councils and church fathers and everything else all down through history and then we find on these biblical canonical lists like Saint Augustine's list like the third Council of Carthage and the like and the answer is you can't make sense of that this is a nonsensical kind of just false historical claim act why did they do that well men like Martin Luther understanding justification by faith alone recognized Purgatory doesn't even make sense if we are totally forgiven imputed with Christ's righteousness why do we have to go burn off our bad works or earn our way into Paradise if it's already been earned for us so he started looking through his new testament and couldn't find a single verse that even comes close I suppose you could argue First Corinthians 4 but that has more to do with Works than it does salvation there was no support for Purgatory so what what did the Roman Catholic Church do before we get his answer to his own rhetorical question let's just get a couple things straight first I know this is at the risk of picking nits but he's wrong about the passages First Corinthians 3 not First Corinthians four uh in First Corinthians 3. now remember he says there's nothing in the New Testament that sounds like your Works might get burnt up after you die well listen to First Corinthians 3 for yourself and see if the Catholic church is just making this up Saint Paul Begins by declaring himself a skilled master builder and says he lays a foundation which is Jesus Christ then he says quote now if anyone Builds on the foundation with gold silver precious stone wood hay stubble each man's work will become manifest for the day that's Judgment day we'll disclose it because it will be revealed to Fire and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done Paul then lays out two categories of Saved people number one if the work which any man has built on the foundation survives he will receive a reward number two if any man's work is burned up he will suffer loss though he himself will be saved but only as through fire so look I agree with Todd Friel that there's no room for this kind of theology if you accept imputational justification by faith alone and it should be pointed out here that the early church didn't we'll get into that in a little more but this is not what the early church believed about how one was saved they didn't believe justification by faith alone they didn't believe in imputation Protestant authors are really clear about this Alistair McGrath really famously a new stizzio Dei says this is a theological novelty of the 16th century a theological novum so that idea this is a brand new Theology of how we're saved that's inconsistent with the belief in purgatory and inconsistent with First Corinthians 3.

First Corinthians 3 is there in the Bible so the idea oh there was nothing there in the Bible and so we had to go and make some texts up about uh Purgatory well that's that's where he's going to go next so we'll let him go there find some books that do talk about it and they added those to the Canon and okay so that's just and not true well let's talk a little bit about the books and then about why we can trust the books now I've already seen they were already there you've got the early Christians talking about them you've got the Council of Florence talking about them this is not something they were inventing in response to celofide long before anyone was claiming the 16th century doctrine of imputed justification by faith alone you've got a clear belief both in purgatory and a belief that these seven books are in the Bible now of those seven books there's one in particular that's going to be relevant for this debate and that's second Maccabees so second Maccabees 12 tells the story about Judas maccabeas first and second Magnus both tell this story but there's a particular moment in second Maccabees 12. that's really relevant because Judaism is men they're going to fight against the Greek persecutors and many of the Israelites fall in battle and they find under the tunic of everyone who had died sacred tokens of the idols of jamnia which the law forbids the Jews to wear in other words these are men who on the one hand had died defending Israel these were people who died fighting against Gentile oppression but on the other hand they still had these superstitious amulets and so the question is what do you make of that theologically what do you make of somebody whose life is kind of a model of righteousness and sin and look I don't think they're the first people to ask that question about loved ones who have died or you know fellow Believers who've died where you say yeah I can see lots of really promising things but I can also say some things that give me some Paws and things that really troubled me and what do they do well we're told first they bless God because he knows you know all things and this was revealed in this moment very profoundly to them second we're told they turn to prayer beseeching that the sin which had been committed might be wholly blotted out now if you don't have something like Purgatory this doesn't make any sense they're either in heaven and don't need your prayers or in hell and can't make use of your prayers and so praying for the dead makes no sense without purgatory and yet here they are very clearly praying for the dead and then they don't even just do that dude it's not going to be us and then tells the people to keep themselves free from sin so this doesn't happen to them and then they collect a sin offering he goes around collects a collection man-to-man to the amount of 2 000 drachemas of silver then we're going to return to what this matters because Hebrews is going to talk about this we'll get there I'm getting a little ahead of myself but then we're told the author then comments on this so instead of just mentioning these things happened where we could say Well it depicted it sometimes scripture depicts things that are actually evil well the author here is very clear this was good he says verse 43 and doing this he acted very well and honorably taking account of the Resurrection for if he were not expecting that those who'd Fallen would rise again it would have been Superfluous and foolish to pray for the Dead but if he was looking to The Splendid reward that is laid up for those who fall asleep in godliness it was a holy and Pious thought therefore he made atonement for the dead that they might be delivered from their sin this is the kind of theology that Todd Friel is saying is bad and wrong well the problem with that is that this is the kind of theology the New Testament is steeped in so I'm going to give you a couple examples now remember this is first and second mechanism stories in that if you want to understand the epistle to the Hebrews it's really important to read those two books why do I say that Christian Brady has an uh it's like originally a Blog article I think that he turned into an actual essay the original article is called Hebrews 11 is a mid-rash of First Maccabees two and you'll find a nearly verbatim form of this and a published essay form later but he argues that if you look at the flow of it Hebrews 11 has that famous kind of Hall of Fame and in which uh the author of Hebrews says by faith our ancestors received approval and then proceeds to list individuals in a roughly chronological order and that this really closely mirrors what we find in First Maccabees chapter 2 with matathias's dying declaration to remember the Deeds of the ancestors which has a very similar kind of list now Brady actually argues that there's a way that we should read it with and against First Maccabees 2 the Hebrews 11 is both intentionally patterned off of First Maccabees 2 but is also going maybe a little deeper going beyond that it's not enough to just hope for Earthly Glory we're also setting our eyes on something greater that as you move from the Old Testament to the New Testament the promises you know are bigger this is an explicit part of Hebrews that with Christ comes greater promises but let's get a little sense of what we're talking about here because he he mentions this First Maccabees two if you've never read it this section goes from verse 49 to verse 6 68 but I'm going to quote just a little bit of the middle part 51 to 55. matafaya says remember the Deeds of the fathers which they did in their generations and received great honor and everlasting name was not Abraham found faithful and tested and it was reckoned to him as righteousness Joseph in the time of his distress kept the commandment and became Lord of Egypt Phineas our father because he was deeply zealous received the Covenant of everlasting priesthood Joshua because he fulfilled the command became a judge in Israel not goes on from there but if you've ever read Hebrews 11 that should sound really similar only where First Maccabees 2 is focusing on their their Mighty Deeds Hebrews 11 is focusing on the profundity of their faith these two of course go hand in hand we could get into the whole faith and works thing again but these two are going hand in glove but first the Hebrews 11th list which goes all throughout the entire uh Hebrews 11 but then also it kind of leads to the culmination in the first couple verses of Hebrews 12.

end of it it's interesting for another reason it's not just that it looks a lot like First Maccabees looks like it was patterned off of it but the final examples that he gives he says what more shall I say for time would fail me to tell if Gideon Barack Samson and so on and so on and then he includes this line some were tortured refusing to accept release that they might rise again to a better life wait a second he's given all these biblical examples and if you've got a Protestant Bible you might be saying what's that last example he gave this is in chronological order seemingly I don't know that going well it's because you don't have second Maccabees second Maccabees chapter six this is eliasar he is told to eat pork he refuses to and then he is killed this is also present in second maccabe seven there's a woman who has seven sons who's presented the same uh option you can eat pork and live you know live as a gentile and you'll be fine or you can be a religious exemption and you'll be killed for that if you're a conscientious objector you're not going to live and so for example second McAfee chapter seven verse 7 the second of the seven sons is brought forth they tear the skin of his head with the hair and ask him will you eat rather than have your body punished limb by limb he then replies in Hebrew no therefore he in turn under when tortures as the first brother had done and when he was at his last breath he said you accursed wretch you dismiss us from this present life but the king of the universe will raise us up to an everlasting renewal of life or the Vulgate has in the resurrection of eternal life because we have died for his laws now remember here are the things Hebrews is saying there's some kind of example in Salvation history where the faithful word tortured and refused to set accept release that they might rise again to a better life so we're looking for three things number one the person has to be tortured number two they have to be offered release and say no and number three this has to be because of a belief in the resurrection second McAfee seven has all those three things in those order very explicitly and I don't know another passage that has those three things in that order except for maybe second that could be six so I'm not the only person to notice this this is again pretty widely accepted I think scholarly opinion uh Matthew C Easter who teaches a Missouri Baptist I believe he is Baptist he talks about this and it's one of the essays in the zondervin academic book reading Hebrews and context this is a mainstream Evangelical kind of Publications it's not some weird Fringe kind of thing he says given the number of parallels to Second Maccabees six to seven in Hebrews 11 and 12. the author's introduction of God as Creator in Hebrews 11 3 likely parallels the maccabean mother's words this is the mother of the seven sons if Hebrews 11 3 parallels the scene of martyrdom in second Maccabees 7 and the author introduced goddess Creator to substantiate the hope of Resurrection we see later in Hebrews 11. now that's a lot there I totally understand if all of that is a little more detailed than you're hoping for or wanting but the basic gist is this Hebrews appears to be both patterned in its most famous section off of first specifics 2 and seems to include reference to scriptural examples from second Maccabees because they're historically true not because they're canonical that would make it really unique because all the other examples are coming from scripture these appear to all be scriptural examples but fine if you just say second Maccabees is historically true you still have to say well historically the Jewish people believed in something like Purgatory which if you read the Jewish encyclopedia article in purgatory you'll find they did and still do this is why Jews pray for the dead when someone dies and they sit Shiva 10 men gather around and pray for the soul of the dead person why because they believe in an intermediate State there's some differences in the Jewish and Catholic view but they clearly don't believe in anything like the Protestant View okay in order to support their doctrines that had actually no biblical support that's history that's that's reality Protestants did not take out books it was the Roman Catholic Church in the middle of the 16th century who added them good okay so uh I think you can see all of that was false that it is not the case that the Catholic Church added seven books it's not the case that they added them in the 16th century and it's not the case that they added them in response to the Protestant Reformation and it's not the case they added them to try to invent a justification for purgatory what's amazing about all of this is that he's really if you were to take all of these claims and just assume that the opposite of everything he says is true you would have a really good case against the Protestant Bible by that I mean there is somebody who is removing books from the Bible because he doesn't like their Theology and that's Martin Luther and you don't have to take my word for it you can take Martin Luther's words for it and his preface to the Epistles of Saint James and Saint Jude in 1522 in his German translation of the Bible he says he likes he says though the Epistle of Saint James was rejected by the Ancients that's a gross mischaracterization of the debate about Saint James but nevertheless I praise and considered a good book because it sets up no doctrines of men but vigorously promulgates the law of God however to State my own opinion about it that without prejudice to anyone I do not regard it as the writing of an apostle and my reasons follow the event says in the first place it is flatly against Saint Paul and all the rest of scripture describing justification to works now he explains you know that it appears to contradict Romans 4 based on Luther's reading of Romans 4.

it says now although this Abyssal might be helped in an interpretation devised for his justification by works it cannot be defended in its application to works of Moses's statement in Genesis 15. in other words even if you could invent some work around where you can harmonize the Epistle of James with silafide which later Protestants have tried to do that still he says wouldn't do it and he says this fault therefore proves this epistle is not the work of any apostle so let's break that down Luther realized that it wasn't just second Maccabees that contradicts his solofide it's also the Epistle of James famously in James 2 24 it says so you see the justification is not by faith alone Luther adds the word alone to Romans 3 28 to say that justification is by faith alone where the actual uncorrupted text says justification is by faith apart from works of the law which is what Catholics believe we believe in justification by faith we don't believe in justification by faith alone because the only time the phrase faith alone appears is when James tells us in James 2 justification is not by faith alone you can go check this do a little uh search and Bible Gateway or wherever you read your Bible online look up the phrase faith alone and you'll see it appears one time and as James telling us that's not how justification Works Luther admits this this is a defeater for his whole theology and so his solution is it must not be written by James it must not really be an inspired book and then he goes on in his uh preface to the Book of Revelation this is the first one he's going to change this View later but originally in regards to Revelation he says let everyone think of it his own has his own Spirit leads him my spirit cannot accommodate itself to this book and he says for me this is reason enough not to think highly of it Christ is neither taught nor known in it and then he says therefore I stick to the books which present Christ to me clearly and purely so I mentioned this before but I want to just give some uh biblical or give some excuse me historical support for this Philip schaef who's a Protestant Theologian and one of the finest historians of the early church from the 19th century meaning he's in the 19th century but he's dealing with early Christianity he's uh responsible for the anti-nician fathers or no no he's exceeded the United postnatian father series which is a massive undertaking of just translating these Works into English and so he's really important figure for all of this he knows the church fathers very well and in his own work history of the Christian church he says if anyone expects to find in this period or in any of the church fathers Augustine himself not accepted the Protestant justification of justification by faith alone as the article upon which the church stands or Falls be greatly disappointed it says you just don't find it the closest you get according to him Saint Clement of Rome who joins it with the doctrine of James in other words even Clement even when he sounds like he's getting close to solifide then says all this stuff that agrees with James and doesn't endorse The solofide View so you don't have anyone in the early church believing what Luther does about justification but you do have them believing in these seven books and you do have them believing in praying for the dead I mean all of that is abundantly supported so yes there is someone who changes the Bible because they don't like the belief on Purgatory but it isn't the Catholic Church doesn't like the belief on Purgatory so we add some books to add purgatory Luther doesn't like the belief on purgatory and doesn't like the belief on justification and so if he takes books out out of the Old Testament and the New Testament the very thing that we just got accused of by Todd Friel is actually true of Martin Luther and not of the Catholic Church that Luther tries to remove four books from the New Testament tries to remove seven books from the Old Testament that's just historical fact now closing thoughts I want to turn back to the Ben witherington the third article from Christian history from 2017 where he talks about how the early Protestant Bibles despite Luther having these doubts about them despite him lowering seven books to a second-tiered status he doesn't totally remove them and I said we'd get back to this and say okay so how did those books get totally removed from Protestant Bibles because they're they're in all the original Protestant Bibles you'll find the deuterocan in the so-called Apocrypha in the German Swiss and English Bibles that the reformers produced so what happens well according to witherington this is accurate it's not just his own private View he says so when and where does the Protestant Bible of 66 books show up this practice was not standardized until 1825 when the British and foreign Bible society in essence threw down the gauntlet and said these 66 books and no others then he says but this was not the Bible of Luther Calvin Knox or even the Wesley the wesleys who used the authorized version that's the KJV so if you're reading a KJV today and it has 66 books in it it's not the original KJV if you're reading a Protestant Bible that has 66 books it's not the one used by the reformers these were books that were removed and and Bible used by the reformers it's not the Bible used by the early Christians it's not the Bible used for the Thousand Years and more preceding the Reformation that as a matter of sheer historical fact Protestants gave themselves the authority to just randomly remove books from the Bible by their own authority Martin Luther felt free to both discard four books from the New Testament and left it up to each of our individual spirits which books we would add or remove I mean that is total wildness he's right there in text talking about that and you have Protestants today actually he was just accepting the books that he'd already been given and then the Catholic church was the one doing this that this Wild Spirit of biblical Anarchy to say it's not the Bible that rules over me I rule over the Bible I can add books and remove them as I please that's not the Catholic Church's view of the Bible that's not what the Catholic Church did with the Bible that's what Martin Luther and later Protestant reformers did with the Bible so there you go on the simple question of whether it was us who added them or the Protestants Who removed them I hope that leads the matter to rest and I hope it gives my Protestant readers and listeners something to think about something to really Ponder did they have the authority to take those books out of the Bible and if they can take them out who else can take books out or add books God bless you thank you for listening to Shameless potpourri a production of the Catholic answers podcast Network find more great shows by visiting catholicanserspodcast.