2226.—Catholic and Protestant Bibles.
Is it true that the Catholic Bible has forty-five books in its Old Testament, and the Protestant only thirty-eight? And is it true that these books missing are found in the Septuagint version, from which Jesus and His apostles quoted? What is the Septuagint version? It is also said to me that Catholics claim that the Protestant translation is not correct. W. V. (1) The common Bible of Protestants contains thirty-nine books in the Old Testament, as you will learn by counting them. (2) There are in many other Protestant Bibles, placed between the Old and New Testaments, what is called the Apocrypha, the hidden books. Some of them contain most excellent moral reading. One or two of them may be inspired books, but are not so considered generally. They were books that were written between the time of Malachi and the time of Christ. (3) The Septuagint is a translation of the Old Testament in Greek. It was made by Jews in Alexandria, Egypt, about two hundred years before Christ. Later on these other books were placed with the Septuagint, but not necessarily considered a part of the Scriptures. You do not find Jesus or the apostles quoting directly from these books called the Apocrypha, so the Protestant Bible really includes all that is known to the New Testament as the Holy Scriptures. (4) The Catholic version is not the Septuagint version. It is a translation made at Douay, France, called the Douay Bible. It is not a translation from the Hebrew and Greek, the original languages of the Old Testament, but is a translation from the Latin Vulgate, an imperfect Latin translation. Our English translation is not a perfect translation by any means, and yet there is absolutely nothing in it that would lead souls astray into grievous error. (5) The American Standard Revision, published by Nelson & Sons, frequently used in the SIGNS OF THE TIMES, is considered by the very best scholars to be the best translation of the Holy Scriptures in the world, because more uniform. But the comparison of the Common Version with this shows us how strong and beautiful the Common Version is, and also shows that the things believed before the revisions were made were not cunningly devised fables of men, but were the words of God. The American Standard Revision was made from the very best Hebrew and Greek copies that the world has, by some of the very best scholars of America. Our common English translation is a much better translation than that of the Douay Version. Some Catholics have admitted this. The American Standard Revision is a better translation still.