If the Septuagint was good enough for Jesus than it is good enough for me.

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The Protestants attempt to defend their rejection of the deuterocanonicals on the ground that the early Jews rejected them. However, the Jewish councils that rejected them (e.g., School of Javneh (also called "Jamnia" in 90 100 A.D.) were the same councils that rejected the entire New Testatment canon. Thus, Protestants who reject the Catholic Bible are following a Jewish council that rejected Christ and the Revelation of the New Testament.

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I think this is the key insight. The story of the Greek Old Testament books or "deuterocanon" is winding and complicated. So excuse the long post.

As has been mentioned in other threads, the various Jewish sects of the Second Temple (or Third Temple!) period used various books in their canon. Everyone followed the Torah, which consist of the first five books of the OT. The priests and Levites were mostly Sadducees, and they stopped there. At least when considering books as divinely inspired and inerrant. After all, those books were from Moses, and Moses talked to God directly. The Pharisees considered the Torah as the most authoritative, but they also had a concept of Tanakh (a Hebrew acronymn of Torah, Prophets, and writings). The scripture of the Pharisees would look very familiar to Christians today. Things like Joshua, Judges, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Psalms, Kings, etc were all there. However, there was some gray area around the fringes that we will get into later. The Essenes are tricky. They have some other writings, but we don't really know what they considered Holy Scripture. Feel free to correct me if there's something I don't know about them.

So let's talk about the fringe Scriptures of the Pharisees. Our "deuterocanon" fits this category. These are books that are present in the Septuagint, which is a Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures which could get it's own thread in itself. However, these books were not present in the Hebrew Masoretic text, which also deserves it's own attention. Not getting into either of those here. There were also other books like Jubilees, the books of Enoch, Baruch, Esdras, and many others.

The pivotal point about these fringe Scriptures of the Pharisees is that they also included some of the letters of the Apostles like Peter and Paul and maybe Acts. Until the formal split of Judaism and Christianity after the destruction of Jerusalem, they were really not separate religions. There was tons of overlap between the groups, and that included Scripture.

So the split becomes the key issue here. The Sadducees would not have had a problem, because they stopped after the Torah. But Post-Temple Judaism was controlled by the Pharisees, and they had to determine how to keep all of their accepted Scriptures while simultaneously denying the validity of early Christian Scripture. Since the transition from Old Testament to Second Temple to Christian scripture is seamless, it becomes very difficult to make rules or draw lines to say that these books are okay and these books are not. So the Pharisees came up with certain rules. First rule, all prophecy stopped after the time of Ezra and Nehemiah and the construction of the Second Temple. Second rule, Hebrew is the original language of God and humanity prior to Babel, and therefore all Scripture has to be in Hebrew. This had the desired effect of giving them a consistent theological justification for outright rejecting Christian writings.

This is where the Deuterocanon gets caught in the crossfire. Tobit, Judith, Maccabees, Sirach and the others are only present in the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Pharisee's Scripture. They were not present in the Hebrew Masoretic text, and they had no known Hebrew originals. By the new rules of Judaism, these books no longer qualify.

So why do Christians care? Many early Christians including Jerome and Origen made friends with local Jews, learned Hebrew, and studied Old Testament scripture with them. While doing so, they found that Christians used Old Testament books that were not found in the Hebrew Bibles. They asked the Jews about this and were told that these books were unfit to be Scripture, but apparently they didn't go into the reasoning or history of this. So it's common to find early Christian writings among Jerome, Origen and others that relegate the Deuterocanon to a lesser status based on these interactions with the Jews.

In their zeal to reexamine everything, the Reformers came across these writings. They were also sticklers for original languages over translations, and naturally favored the Hebrew Masoretic text over the translated Greek Septuagint. The combination caused them to again relegate these books, and later editions have removed them completely.

TLDR:
The whole thing is a little comical to me to be honest. Christians are relegating and disregarding Scripture due to the beliefs of Jews. And the Jews hold those beliefs soley so they can discount Christian Scripture. So Christians are basically using anti-Christian rules to define their own Scripture. The funny thing is that Jews still know these books better than many Christians. Hannukah comes straight out of Maccabees. Sirach is still widely known. There is nothing in any of these books that contradicts modern Christianity or modern Judaism. They were literally just collateral damage in the initial separation of Judaism and Christianity.

Good post.

However, to me this issue is far from comical because for 1500 years the Christian church accepted these writings as Scripture. Today they are not considered Scripture by the vast majority of Protestants, who then claim Scripture to be their ultimate authority.

Win At Life said:

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Yeshua tells us which grouping of books He considered to be scripture and that did not include the OT Apocrypha. The only way you can NOT know this is by throwing away Yeshua's Jewish roots of the faith, which the western church did at the earliest times and continues to do so to this day.

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Hmmm....Interesting. As a Christian, I spent 30 years in the Protestant Church and the last 20 in the Catholic Church. I still can't find in the NT where Jesus or the disciples present a complete list of the OT. The 73 books of the OT & NT were being used up until the 16th century.