All right, well let's begin right off the bat, as you can see, if you have your notes in front of you. We've got five pages of notes. There's so much to talk about for this lesson. It's lesson six.
How did we get the Bible? Where did the Bible come from? And this is a really, really important question because there are so many fundamental questions. We just simply can't take for granted at all.
We have this beautiful Bible in our hands, you know, whatever translation you might have, the new American Bible, or the revised standard version, or the English standard version, or the Duet Reams, or I don't know the King James version, or there's so many out there, right? We have these Bibles and we go to the bookstore, we pick it up, we order it online, or wherever we get our Bibles. But there are so many other questions that we need to ask before we even interpret the scriptures. Like how do we get the Bible?
How do the Old Testament and the New Testament develop over the centuries, right? This is really, really important. How do we get the Bible that we have now? Yes, we're holding it, we buy it from a bookstore.
But honestly, if you think about it, it just didn't fall out of the sky in perfect King James English. It didn't fall down a rainbow, like perfectly translated in English or French or Italian or Chinese or whatever translation you have with its index and its glossary and its Bible tabs and its gilded edges and all of this stuff. Like it really developed over the centuries until what we have now. And so we have all these books open up to the table of contents.
You've got the books of the Old Testament, the books of the New Testament. How do we know which of these books belong to the Bible and which ones don't? Because there are all kinds of other things that have been written, the epistles, gospels, and the first centuries of the church and even in the Old Testament, different things that have been written. How do we know what belongs to the Bible we have today?
And how do we know that the ones that weren't included should have been included? Or maybe should not have been included, you see? And who has the final authority to make this decision? You have to have an authority, really an authority, established by God himself to give us the official green light or the thumbs up that these are the books that belong to the Bible and everything else just doesn't make the cut.
Who has that authority? Another question that we ask is why does the Catholic Bible, bigger or different than other Bibles, such as the Jews and the Protestants? Why are they different? Did Catholics really add seven books?
These are often called the Apocrypha or the Deuterical Canonical books. We'll talk about this as we go through the lecture, but the Catholics add these books, these Apocryphal texts, so mysterious and secretive, right? The Illuminati type of stuff. They add these books, the Apocrypha.
Or by considering it from the reverse side of the coin today, Protestants and the Jews for that matter, remove the seven books. What about all of those other writings that we have, like the Dead Sea Scrolls, other ancient gospels or epistles, Old Testament writings, New Testament writings? What about all of those I had mentioned previously? Again, why did they make the cut?
Should they? Are they really scripture? Do they give us an insight into the secret life of Jesus as a history channel would want us to believe? So you can see all these questions are very much related to ask the question, the general big question, the umbrella question.
How did we get the Bible? And what confidence do we have that the Bible that we're carrying today and quoting from and interpreting and people getting degrees and reading it in the liturgies, of masses, and you've got Protestant pastors preaching from the Holy Scriptures? How do we know? These are important questions.
Okay, so this is what the subject of today's lecture or this lecture is all about, right? How do we get the Bible? Okay, by what authority do we have this Bible? So just a clarification in terms of that question, why are Catholic Bibles bigger or fatter or larger?
Why do we have seven books and Protestants and Jews do not? Just so you can see here, I have a very, very simple description of the different biblical canons. We'll talk about canon to find that word in just a bit. But the Jewish Bible has 24 books, which is equivalent to the Protestant 39.
It's just organized in a slightly different way to get a total of 24. Obviously the Jewish Bible, the Hebrew Scriptures, do not have the New Testament. The Protestant Bibles have the same 39 books or 24 books however you want to look at it. And 27 books of the New Testament.
In the Catholic Bibles have 46 Old Testament books. That was the question of the seven. Like, did Catholics add seven or did Protestants take them away? And how did that happen?
We'll discuss all this towards the end of the lecture. And then of course we share the same list for the New Testament books. Also the Orthodox Church, they have a slightly different canon as well. Just because of the sake of time ahead of the side, we're just going to leave the Orthodox, you know, table of contents, the Orthodox canon of scripture to the side for the moment.
I mean, in the future we'll spend some time on this in another context. But for right now, we just really want to understand these three major religious groups, the Jewish Bible, the Protestant Bible and Catholic Bible. And really as we move forward, those seven disputed books because that's a huge question. Another time, again, I promise we'll do the Orthodox canon of scripture.
Alright, so part one that we want to look at is how did the Old Testament canon develop? Okay. Before we look at this question, how the Old Testament Bible, the Old, really the Hebrew Scriptures, if you want to call them that, justifiably, the Hebrew Scriptures, how they develop, we want to do some review of basic questions first. Okay, or back to the basics really.
The Hebrew Scriptures developed, if you remember we talked about this even in lesson one of this course, the Hebrew Scriptures developed slowly and in stages for approximately 1500 years. If Moses lived and wrote the five books of, or at least the substance, the bulk, the mean structure of the Pentateuch, the five books of Moses sometime around 1450, up until the time of Christ, that's approximately 1500 years. That is a generalization because on the one hand on the early side you could say, with Moses had different sources that he had used to compile the five books, that's a completely legitimate question. He might have had written in oral sources that he used to compose as five books, or at least the bulk of the substance of it.
Then getting closer towards Christ, you didn't really have a lot of text, maybe C.R.A.C. closer to Jesus. But more or less, I think you'll pardon me if we generalize it as 1500 years. That is a long time for the Hebrew Scriptures to develop.
The languages are Hebrew, Aramaic, and in some cases Greek, like 2 Maccabees is in Greek, but basically Hebrew and Aramaic, it's like basically the same like Spanish and Italian, they're back close together. Those are the original languages for the old covenant scriptures. Their categories are organized with a little acronym called the Tanakh, T-A-N-A-K, the Tanakh. This is the threefold structure of the traditional Jewish Bible as it exists today.
The T in Tanakh stands for the Torah, that's the books of Moses, the law or the instruction or the teaching of Moses, Torah. Then the end stands for Nevim, which are all of the historical books like Samuels and the kings, Joshua, the judges with all those, and the prophets, Elijah, Jeremiah, Daniel, all the rest of them. Now the historical books that you do is called the former prophets, and then you've got the traditional prophets. They categorize it all as the Nevim.
Then the K stands for the Ketuim, the wisdom writing, Psalms and Proverbs and all of those, like Job, Ecclesiastes, etc. So Torah, Nevim, Ketuim, the acronym is the Tanakh. That is the threefold structure of the traditional Jewish Bible. So another thing that we have to clarify for these review of the basics is the definitions.
We're going to be using a lot of different words in this particular lesson, and we want to understand what they mean, these various categories of writings. The first of which is the Canon. I've already used this word a couple of times. What does the Canon mean?
It's not like a boom, Canon, where you're shooting out all of these big massive bowling ball people, this K-A, C-A, and O-N, C-A, and O-N, Canon. And really what that comes to us, it means read or measuring rod or standard. This is the official list of all the inspired books. Really you can think of the Canon as the inspired final definitive table of contents.
Because it is the final read, it's a read because you would break off or read according to a certain length, and that would become the standard for measurements. So this is like the standard or the measurement by which you say this is the inspired word of God and you measure everything against it. So that's the Canon that inspired authoritative table of contents. So with that word, it brings us to two other very important words.
The first of which is the proto-canonical books. Proto means first, and then Canon of course is what we just said. The standard is the first Canon, the proto-canonical books. These are all the books of the Old Testament that are accepted by Jews, Protestants, Catholics, as well as Orthodox Christians for that matter.
So they're the first Canon, those 39 books from Genesis, all the way down to Malachi, all of these religious groups except them. The proto-canonical, it's given that term because it's meant to distinguish between those and the Deutero-canonical books. The Deutero means second, Canonical is canon, so it's the second canon. Deuteronomy, just to give you a reference here, Deuteronomy means the second law, Deutero-nomos.
So Deutero-canonical books are the second canon. It doesn't mean it's a lesser state or a lesser status. It's a very misleading term as I'll explain later on. It distinguishes between the seven disputed books that the Jews and the Protestants don't accept.
These are listed here in your notes, Tobit, Judith, Wisdom of Solomon, Cirac also known as Ecclesiastica, and Latin, Baruch, 1st and 2nd Maccabees. Then there are some additional content, additional sections of Esther and Daniel. So these seven books are accepted by Catholics and Orthodox. They are not accepted by Protestants as well as Jews.
And then so they're meant, unfortunately, like I said, a very misleading term because it doesn't have a second lesser status as I'm going to demonstrate to you. It's always been accepted by the church as original, inspired works of God that go hand in hand and decide by side with the rest of the Old Testament books. But these are the terms that are used, the protocol books, those 39 we discuss, and then the Deutero-canonical books, which really are those seven disputed books we'll talk about. All right, so then we also have a term that's thrown around a lot, which is called the Apocryphal books.
Apocryphal literally means like hidden or secret writings. These are allegedly just for the wise and learned scribes, for the sages for their private reading. It's hidden from the world, and only if you have the chops that you're able to read these things. Apocryphal hidden secret writings.
Then there's also known as the Suda-Pigrifa. The Suda-Pigrifa means quite literally from the Greek here, false writings. These essentially are four documents written in the name of some other authority to figure. So if you're going to forge a document and you realize I need some authority for this, you're going to say, oh, this was written by Peter, or oh, this was written by one of the apostles, or whoever it is.
Even if Peter and one of the apostles, long dead, you're going to write this and you're going to say, oh, it was written actually in his name. Try to give it some sort of authority. So these are the words that we have that are very important. And then there's this distinction between the protocol and the Deutero-canonical books.
And then these other two types of writings that circulate in the Old Testament world, as well as the early New Testament world, apocryphal writings in Suda-Pigrifa, these false writings. So it's really important to know what those mean. Okay, so as we move into the Roman numeral, too, that's kind of a review of the basics and some definitions of the threefold structure and the threefold structure that we have of the traditional Jewish Bible.