I am an athiest. I recently decided to find an online complete text of the bible for GD debates, and found one in RSV and KJV. (As an aside, let me say “wow” at how much easier the RSV is to read than the KJV I grew up on.) I found the Apocrypha there, and presume this is some portion of the bible not generally included, as I was unfamiliar with those texts.
A couple questions:
Who uses the Apocrypha? I’ve been told Catholics use part of it, but I don’t know which part, and that Jews may use part of it also.
What’s with the 151st Psalm? It’s in the Apocrpyha for the RSV but not the KJV. Did they just think it was more neat-o to end Psalms with the 150th about all the praise the Lord stuff rather than end it with the 151st about beheading a Philistine? And why is it in the Apocrypha for one version and not the other?
Thanks for your helpful answers in advance,
Rex Dart
I’m not sure if this helps, but I went to a Catholic high school, which meant taking religion classes. The standard Bible we were told to purchase for my freshman religion class included the 13th chapter of Daniel and the Book of Tobit. Offhand, though, that’s all I’m aware of.
The Protestants use only those books accepted in the Hebrew canon.
Catholics include, beyond those works:
[ul][li]Wisdom of Solomon [/li][li]Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) [/li][li]Tobit [/li][li]I Maccabees [/li][li]II Maccabees [/li][li]Judith [/li][li]Baruch [/li] Letter of Jeremiah (Baruch 6)
[li]Additions to Esther (a lot of glosses, scattered throughout, found in the Septuagint)[/li][li]Song of the Three Hebrew Children (Daniel 3, following v 23)[/li] Suzanna (Daniel 13)
Bel & the Dragon (Daniel 14)[/ul]
And the Orthodox include everything held by the Catholics plus:
[ul][li]I Esdras [/li][li]II Esdras [/li]Prayer of Manasseh[/ul]
Any idea why fun stories like Susanna and Bel and the Dragon were omitted? Is that the same Daniel in the stories who they consider a prophet or dreamer or some such?
Daniel presents a lot of odd things for scholars to ponder. The oldest copy of the book begins in Hebrew, switches to Aramaic, and concludes in Hebrew through chapter 12. Then the sections of Daniel that are considered Apocrypha are found in the Septuagint (the Greek translation of Jewish Scriptures written in Egypt), but are not found in the Hebrew/Aramaic version.
I believe that the traditional view was that the Aramaic section was a reconsruction of what had been destroyed (it has long since been translated to Hebrew).
The views of the documentary hypothesis advocates are all over the page (as one might expect with such odd clues), with some believing an ancient Hebrew text was expanded upon in Aramaic and the Greek tacked on, later, and some believing that an older Hebrew text was enlarged upon in Greek, with the principal stories re-worked in Aramaic and the later stories excluded. (In both of the final stories, Daniel, who has already had many adventures in the first 12 chapters, is described as “very young” strongly suggesting that the stories were independent of the rest of the work and were grouped according to his presence in the stories.)
I think that all four of those are considered Apocrypha by everyone, although Orthodox may still use one or more of those as devotional (non-Scriptural) literature.
You’ll probably find the New American Bible even easier to read. I do. It was extensively and recently updated with the latest linguistic and historical discoveries. The “study bible” version has some rather neat bits of scholarship.
In the introduction it explains the Catholic divergence:
“The reason for this divergence is that earliest Christianity used an ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament (called the Septuagint) as its Bible. This Greek version of the Bible included 46 books. Since most of the early Christians were Greek-speaking, this is the Bible they preferred. But when Judaism officially set out to determine its canon at the end of the first century, it drew up a shorter list of 39 books: those written in Hebrew. In the Reformation period, Protestants went back to this shorter, Hebrew canon, considering it more authentic.”
www.theherald bulletin.com
My local paper ran this article, headlined, “If you like the four Gospels, how about 34 gospels?” by Richard N. Ostling, AP religion writer. Perhaps it will be useful. I’m not a theologist, and I cannot distinguish this stuff from organic fertilizer.
My church is Pentecostal (sort of enthusiastic protestants with a big “nay” on the hate thing) and we use the apocrypha sometimes. Wisdom’s just wisdom, y’know?
Funny, you must go to a pretty enlightened Pentecostal Church. Most Pentecostals I know are not exactly welcoming to those who have different ideas of morality or religion from them.
Granted, they aren’t as bad as most Southern Baptists!
“Most Pentecostals I know are not exactly welcoming to those who have different ideas of morality or religion from them.”
There’s nothing in any of the standard apocrypha that suggests a different morality or religion.
Traditionally, there are 150 Psalms. However, two of the manuscript traditions number them differently, with one group dividing Psalm 9 into 9 and 10, and treating Psalms 114 through 116 as two Psalms instead of three. The other group reverses those divisions. Thus, each group has 150 Psalms, but if each possible Psalm is treated individually, the number is 151.
In many bibles, the Psalms are layed out in one preferred method with the alternative given in parentheses. If the publisher of the particular book that RexDart was looking at decided to forgo the parentheses, but note each possible psalm separately, they would wind up with 151 psalms.
If the “151st” psalm is
then they have simply used a non-traditional numbering and Psalm 151 is actually Psalm 150 under either of the alternative numbering schemes.
The Orthodox do have a Psalm 151 which is not the classic 150th you quote.
It’s worth noting, for anybody who cares, that “Apocrypha” is a term for “books we don’t consider Scripture, or at least not first-class Scripture” – the Catholics (and Orthodox?) term them “deutero-canonical” as being part of the “second canon” of Scripture accepted by the Seventy but not by the Synod of Jamnia. The term for books like the Gospel of Thomas and III Maccabees that nobody considers Scripture is “pseudopigrapha” and when a Catholic speaks of Apocryphal works, he means them, not the ones he considers deuterocanonical.
I could find a rabid fundamentalist to debate you on that point, but what I was actually commenting on was your characterization of Pentecostals as `ethusiastic protestants with a big “nay” on the hate thing’. To wit, I once had a Pentecostal yell in my face that I was damned to hell simply because I had suggested that the universe was a few orders of magnitude older than 6000 years old.
Well, perhaps that was his unique way of expressing love.:rolleyes:
“3 Maccabees” is used by the Russian and other Orthodox Churches; Ethiopian Orthodox use the deuterocanonicals plus “Enoch” and the “Book of Jubilees”.
