Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
THE DEUTEROCANONICAL OR APOCRYPHAL BOOKS
It is important at the very outset to define some terms, for the lack of agreement over terminology between Catholic and Protestant works on this subject invites confusion. The books which Catholics customarily call ‘deuterocanonical’ correspond, or very nearly correspond, to what Protestants call the apocryphal books. The term ‘deutero-canonica is contrasted with ‘protocanonical’. Now the protocanonical books are identical with those of the Hebrew Bible of Palestinian Judaism, and are the only ones which the Protestants officially accept. The deuterocanonical books appear in the Greek version of the Bible, the Septuagint. These two ancient collections of sacred writings, the one preserved in Hebrew, the other handed down in Greek, differ appreciably from one another. Apart from differences in the order of the books, and often quite important textual variants, the Septuagint is not a simple reproduction in Greek of the Hebrew Old Testament. It contains several writings which do not appear in the Hebrew canon at all, and these are the ones which the Catholics call deuterocanonical. The adjectives ‘protocanonical’ and ‘deuterocanonical’ applied to the Scriptures were not used before the sixteenth century, and are generally believed to have been invented by Sixtus of Siena (1520–1569) in his Bibliotheca Sacra of 1566. Catholics recognize seven deuterocanonical books: Judith, Tobit, 1 and 2 Maccabees, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus and Baruch. To these must be added the Greek portions of Esther and the Greek additions to Daniel, i.e., the Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Young Men (called in the older English versions the Song of the Three Holy Children), the story of Susanna and the story of Bel and the Dragon.
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