The books which follow: Tobit, Judith, Baruch, Wisdom, Sirach are not in the
Hebrew Bible, nor in the Bibles of Protestants. This was also true for the books
of the Maccabees. This raises a very serious question: if there is disagreement
about some books, what were the criteria for accepting the other books? Should
we not go beyond that and admit there is no certainty for any book, but only a
common opinion?
Here we should repeat that we have not always had the Bible. For centuries,
God¡¯s Word was primarily what the priests and the prophets passed on orally. The
very concept of a Bible, a collection of sacred writings, appeared only little
by little, after the return of the Old Testament Jews from the Exile, starting
especially with Ezra. The Bible originated with the prophets and also with the
believing community, Jewish at first, then Christian. In Jesus¡¯ days, everyone
considered the books of Moses as Scripture. The Sadducees gave the prophetic
books a lower ranking even though all the other religious groups, including the
Pharisees themselves, considered them to be inspired. With time, however, other
books grouped under the name of Writings, or Wisdom Books, were added to the
first books without any particular sequence, and without clearly knowing what
degree of authority they should be given.
Some of these books were not written in Hebrew but in Greek, because most Jews
were living in Greek-speaking countries. Therefore these books were added in the
Greek translation of the Bible before appearing in Palestine where many people
understood Greek. As a result there were more books in the Greek Bible used
abroad and often even in the synagogues of Palestine.
It was only when the Romans destroyed their nation that the Pharisees called a
council in Jamnia in order to recognize the Jewish community (in the year 95).
At this council they established a list of inspired Scriptures and
systematically excluded all the books written in Greek: as they perceived, God
could only have spoken in the language of the Jewish people.
The early Christian church already had its own practice. The apostles used the
Greek Bible without differentiating between the various books, and their
discussions were focused in the newly written Christian books to determine which
ones should be included in the New Testament. In 384, a decree of Pope Damasus
definitively established the canon of the Christian Bible, already generally
accepted. They kept some books from the Greek Bible, books which the Jews had
rejected in Jamnia. They are the so-called deuterocanonical books, that is to
say, the books of the second collection.
Twelve centuries later, when the Protestants broke away from the chruch, they
did not dispute the ¡°canon,¡± namely the choice of the New Testament books. They
did disagree, though, about the deuterocanonical books. In the end, they thought
it would be safer to exclude them and called them ¡°apocryphal,¡± that is to say,
not authentic.
If we accept that God gradually taught his people all through the Old Testament
times, then we can understand the importance of these books which are products
of the last three centuries before Christ. They are the connecting links between
the Hebraic books and the New Testament books written in Greek. They witness the
beginning of the belief in the resurrection of the dead and the first insights
that prepare the revelation of the Word and the Spirit.
The discussions concerning the deuterocanonical books remind us that if there is
not a Church to determine safely which are the inspired books, no one will be
able to say what is word of God and what is not. For a Christian Bible to exist,
there must first be a Church which is the heir of the apostles.