The Catholic Church added seven books to the Old Testament at the Council of Trent, following Martin Luther’s Reformation in the 16th Century. Then you say.. This is totally false. These seven books, Baruch, 1 and 2 Maccabees, Judith, Tobit, Wisdom of Solomon, and Sirach were put into the Bible by Pope Damasus I way back in the late 4th Century. They were approved at the Councils of Hippo in 393 AD, and the Council of Carthage in 397 AD. Look it up! They were written in Greek, so the Hebrew speaking Jews didn’t consider them to be from God. However, the Greek speaking Jews at the time did, and they remain in their bible to this day. Luther, some 1100 years later, removed them from the Bible, under his own authority (infallible?), because they didn’t agree with his own personal opinion of what the Bible should have said. The Council of Trent, which corrected all of the abuses that started the Reformation (the selling of indulgences), in response to Luther taking them out of his personal bible, merely reaffirmed that they were scriptural. As proof of this, in the century before Luther, these books were published in the Gutenberg Bible. Protestants adhere to the Catholic Tradition of having 27 books in the New Testament, which was also decided at the Councils of Hippo and Carthage in the late 4th Century, but then strangely disbelieve the Catholic Church when it comes to the Old Testament. The Wisdom of Solomon is actually mentioned in the New Testament, in Luke 11:31 and Matthew 12:42. An interesting coincidence is that the Protestant Bible has 66 books in it. Six is the number of incompleteness in the Bible, as in 666. The Catholic Bible has 73 books in it. 7 is the number of completion (God rested on the 7th day after creation, 7 Sacraments, 7 days in the week, forgive someone 7 times 70, etc.). Three is the number of the Blessed Trinity.
Posted on: Sat, 25 Jan 2014 06:13:05 +0000