re deuterocanonicals esp sirach in may athos rutgers edu mdw uxa cso uiuc edu michael d walker writes that last paragraph just about killed me the deuterocanonicals have always been accepted as inspired scripture by the catholic church which has existed much longer than any protestant church out there it was martin luther who began hacking up the bible and deciding to remove certain books not the fact that the catholic church decided to add some much later that is the reason for the difference between catholic and protestant bibles this is misleading at best the question really has to do with the status of the greek septuagint versus hebrew scripture and the issue predates the reformation by quite a bit jerome was negative about the deuteroncanonicals and in fact even though he transalted them he put them after the hebrew canon reordered from the greek ordering to the hebrew one his translations of them were quick and dirty also he reports having done one of them in one day and another overnight just dictating his translation to an amanuensis that is to say it is the vulgate and all of its massive importance in western christianity along with the veneration of jerome which took the first steps in reducing these books from the status they had and have among the greeks furthermore it is inaccurate to say that the reformers threw out these books basically they just placed them in a secondary status as jerome had already done but with the additional warning that doctrine should not be based on citations from these alone i think that the emphasis on the hebrew originals is sound though it seems somewhat arbitrary to disallow on the face of it a translation as part of a collection whose principles of selection in hebrew or greek are confused or unknown and likely fraught with accident it also seems to play into a tendentious notion of the original languages being somehow more inspired as if magical and conveying a message untranslatable than a translation as if we could not hear god s word to the jews in greek or german or english this tendency seems to have got a big boost in sola scriptura protestantism even to the point of current inerrancy bizarreness despite the more basic underlying tendency of the reformers to see that the texts should and could be translated if we can profit from an english rendering of hebrew and greek there is surely little reason to keep sirach at least out of our bibles and of course anglicans don t do so for texts originally in greek it would seem more to be anti greek prejudice notably by the time the hebrew canon is fully attested including anti christian prejudice which led to the jewish abandonment of the septuagint which is operative btw readers may enjoy some lectures of bruce metzger on the issues of translation of the bible including some of what i said about jerome above in the current numbers of the journal bibliotheca sacra two of four have been published so far michael l siemon i say you are gods sons of the mls panix com most high all of you nevertheless or you shall die like men and fall mls ulysses att com like any prince psalm
