While I
do believe that the books contained in The Holy Bible were Divinely
inspired and written by men, I do not necessarily hold to the idea
that only the 66 books we now have in our (Protestant) Bibles are the
sole Divinely inspired books of antiquity. For instance, the King
James Version (on which I was raised) used to have 80 books in it.
Today, we only have 66. Many editions of the Bible throughout the
centuries contained or left out different books. Therefore, the fact
that there have been so many different "canons" of
Scripture over the centuries proves to me that the acquisition and
accumulation of Scripture has not always been Divinely inspired.
I also do not believe that any one
version of our English Bible is 100% correct and accurate in its
TRANSLATION. Granted, some are better than others. But Hebrew, Greek
and Aramaic are all very complex languages and it is often hard for
English as a language to do the text justice. Thus, I find that
comparing different English translations can help show us a variety
of ways of looking at what was originally written.
I hope this does not hinder you in
any way and that you shall continue to view this website and find it
interesting, enlightening and encouraging to you.
The Books of the Bible are listed
differently in the canons of Judaism and the Catholic, Protestant,
Greek Orthodox, Slavonic Orthodox, Coptic, Georgian Orthodox, Armenian
Apostolic, Syriac, Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox churches, although
there is substantial overlap. A table comparing the canons of some of
these traditions appears below, comparing the Jewish Bible with the
Christian Old Testament and New
Testament. For a detailed discussion of the differences, see the
definition of "Biblical canon".
The Eastern Orthodox, Oriental
Orthodox and Eastern Catholic churches may have minor differences in
their lists of accepted books. The list given here for these churches
is the most inclusive: if at least one Eastern church accepts the
book it is included here.
The disputed books are often
called the Biblical apocrypha,
a term that is sometimes used specifically (and possibly
pejoratively in English) to describe the books in the Catholic and
Orthodox canons that are absent from the Jewish Masoretic Text (also
called the Tanakh or Miqra) and most modern Protestant Bibles.
Catholic Christians, following the Canon of Trent, describe these
books as deuterocanonical, meaning of "the second canon,"
while Greek Orthodox Christians, following the Synod of Jerusalem
(1672), use the traditional name of anagignoskomena, meaning
"that which is to be read." They are present in a few
historic Protestant versions: the German Luther Bible included such
books, as did the English 1611 King James Version.
Note that this table uses the
spellings and names present in modern editions of the Bible, such as
the NABRE, RSV and ESV. For the Orthodox canon, Septuagint titles are
provided in parentheses when these differ from those editions. For
the Catholic canon, the Rheimish titles are provided in parentheses
when these differ from those editions. The spelling and names in the
1609-1610 Douay-Rheims Bible and the 1749 revision by Bishop
Challoner (the edition currently in print) differ from those
spellings and names used in modern editions. Likewise, the King James
Version references some of these books by the traditional spelling
when referring to them in the New Testament, such as
"Esaias" (for Isaiah). In the spirit of ecumenism more
recent Catholic translations (e.g. the New American Bible, Jerusalem
Bible, and ecumenical translations used by Catholics, such as the
RSV-CE) use the same "standardized" (King James Version)
spellings and names as Protestant Bibles (e.g. 1 Chronicles as
opposed to the Rheimish 1 Paralipomenon, 1-2 Samuel and 1-2 Kings
instead of 1-4 Kings) in those books which are universally considered
canonical, the protocanonicals. The Talmud in Bava Batra 14b gives a
different order for the books in Nevi'im and Ketuvim. This order is
also quoted in Mishneh Torah Hilchot Sefer Torah 7:15. It is not
clear why the present order of the books in the Tanakh does not match
the order given in the Talmud (nor does it match that of the Christian Old
Testament).
Empty table cells indicate that a
book is absent from that canon.
Several of the books in the Eastern Orthodox canon are
also found in the appendix to the Latin Vulgate, formerly the
official Bible of the Roman Catholic Church.
In general, among Christian denominations, the New Testament Canon
is an agreed-upon list of 27 books, although book order can vary. The
book order is the same in the Greek Orthodox, Catholic, and
Protestant tradition. The Slavonic, Armenian
and Ethiopian traditions have different New Testament book orders to this.
Catholic, E. Orthodox, Protestant, and most O. Orthodox
The Ethiopian Orthodox Church has
a few additional books in its canon: Jubilees,
Books of Enoch, 4
Baruch along with three books of Meqabyan that are unique to
their canon.
The Third Epistle to the
Corinthians and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs were once
considered part of the Armenian Orthodox Bible, but are no longer
printed with modern editions.
The New Testament has different
orders in the Slavonic, Ethiopian, Syriac, and Armenian
traditions. Protestant Bibles in Russia and Ethiopia usually follow
the local Orthodox order for the New Testament.
The
Influence is designed and maintained by
Jon Anderson
Established January 2012
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