In one of her college mid-terms, my daughter April was asked, "Why and when did the Catholic Church add seven books to the Old Testament?" It was an interesting question that, as Protestants, piqued both her curiosity and mine. She had several questions to choose from, but she picked this one. We had no idea that answering it would signal a change in our perspective about the Bible and that "cult" we called Catholicism.
Indeed, why and when did the Catholics add books to the Bible? Certainly the answer would be another proof that Catholics were not Christian. As Evangelicals we knew you couldn't mess with the Bible. We revered it, refusing to place another book upon it, or turn over a corner of its pages. Sacred stuff. So, how could Catholics so easily sacrilege God's Holy Word? It seemed unfathomable, so arrogant, so wrong. Adding books to the Bible was certainly proof that Catholicism was a permutation of Christianity that could not be trusted.
April's research question came to her before the Internet was widely available, so we combed through my rather extensive library of Bible reference books for a little pale orange pocketbook that I had never read. In fact, it always seemed heretical to even own it — The Apocrypha: An American Translation by Edgar J. Goodspeed (Vintage Books, NY 1959). The Apocrypha was, of course, the collection of books that Catholics had added to the Bible.
Cracking the cover we read together the opening sentence of Goodspeed's Preface. It was one of those moments when a few simple words would change forever my vision of the Holy Bible, as a monolith of writings that Jesus must have pulled from his knapsack and handed over to the Apostles moments before his ascension: "Here! Read this. It'll help." (What was I thinking?) With 26 simple words, Goodspeed let his lead foot drop on the accelerator as he laid rubber across my sanctimonious vision.
"THE APROCRYPHA FORMED AN INTEGRAL part of the King James Version of 1611, as they had of all the preceding English versions from their beginning in 1382."
Whoa, there, Goodspeed! Slow down. This is not what I was expecting. He sped ahead:
"They [the Aprocrypha] were part of the Bible of the early church, for it used the Greek version of the Jewish Bible, which we call the Septuagint, and these books were all in that version."
Tell me this couldn't be! How is this possible? For God's sake, what Bible did Jesus use? Then:
"They passed from it [the Septuagint] into Latin and the great Latin Bible edited by St. Jerome about A.D. 400, the Vulgate, which became the Authorized Bible of Western Europe and England and remained so for a thousand years."
Pages later, I read how the Bibles had remained essentially unchanged until 1827, when the British and American Bible Societies politically forced Bible publishers to stop including the Aprocrypha in their printings of the Bible.
Good Grief! How could this be? Is Goodspeed pulling a fast one on us, staying true to his name? April and I hurried off to the local library, checked some other references and discovered that Goodspeed's account was true.
This totally unnerved me for two reasons. First, the Bible that I had revered my whole life suddenly wasn't the Bible that I had thought it was. In the college Bible classes I took at Greenville College (a Christian Evangelical school), I learned how one could trust the accuracy of a translation in all its delicacies. But, there was nothing delicate about totally deleting seven entire books from the Old Testament, which also included parts of my favorite Old Testament book of Daniel! My trust in what Protestant scholars had led me to believe for 40 years was over as quickly as a jet-fueled quarter-mile drag race.
Second, I was unnerved because April needed a good grade on this paper to keep her G.P.A. up so she could stay in school. Certainly, if she told the truth about what she had found, she'd get a failing grade on the paper. The Bible teacher at the Evangelical College she was attending would never settle for what we discovered — that Catholics didn't add seven books to the Old Testament, the Protestants took them out. Who could I trust, now, about the Bible, I wondered?
What Century?
Years later, after Pam and I had become Catholic, I was working on a television documentary about the Protestant Reformation. Pam and I took a break from our work with a romantic train ride from Detroit to Chicago for Valentines Day weekend. While in Chicago, we made a walking tour of The Loop and thought we'd drop in on art galleries and old bookstores. We found the art galleries, but the closest thing to an old bookstore was the Newberry Library (http://www.newberry.org). When we entered, we were surprised to be greeted by a burly security guard behind a large round counter and a staircase; but no books. We probably looked a little dumbfounded. The guard looked us over and asked "Are you here to do research?" A sign caught my eye that explained that this was a privately funded research library open to the public but only accessible by registration. Having just earned a Ph.D. I straightened a bit and pontificated in my best academic demeanor: "Ah, yes, we are."
"What century?" the guard asked.
I had no clue. In fact, I distinctly recall how I could never remember if we were in the 20th or the 21st century…or was it the 19th? Recovering, I declared, "Uh, the 1500s." I did a quick examination of conscience — I had not lied. Indeed, I was writing a teleplay on the early 1500s.
The Guard pushed a registration card toward me and asked for my picture ID. I glanced at Pam. She was intrigued. We had no idea what awaited us, but we were game. On the 6 x 8 inch card it asked what books we wanted to examine. You don't check books out of this library, but are given access to them for a short time in a supervised reading room. I had no clue at first, but I wrote down some choices.
Thirty minutes later, in a reading room, a librarian placed on the table before us an original parchment from Guttenberg's first edition of the Bible (1455), a complete original edition of Miles Coverdale's (English) Bible from 1535, an original Martin Luther (German) Bible (1535), and a first edition of the King James (English) Bible from 1611 — all 30 pounds of it. The KJV was perhaps 10 inches thick, with elaborate color paintings that included Mary and the saints and gold leaf decorations on many of the pages. Holding this book in my hands was like being transported back in time; I wondered who, that I had read about in history, had held this very book as I was holding it now. Perhaps King James?
And guess what? Of the three Bibles we flipped through, the Apocryphal books (or Deutercanonical books as I now know them), were fully integrated within the Old Testament canon. Had they not been accepted as inspired, why would have ever been included in these Reformation Bibles? The Deutercanonical books were not missing or even separated as some reports described. Protestants, indeed, had taken books out of the Bible. Catholics, true to their word, had defended the faith and kept it pure and true. It was a day Pam and I will never forget. We now had "first hand" experience — albeit with the special gloves they provided for "researchers".
Irrelevant Appeals
Again, we have a story that helps illustrate two irrelevant fallacies, one from the emotional appeal category and the second from the objective appeal category.
The irrelevant emotional fallacy is called Appeal to Tradition. In its vernacular form, you'll hear people say, "But, we've always done it this way." The story above prompts us to look at tradition two different ways. What April and I understood as Evangelicals was based on a tradition that went back less than 200 years. We had never questioned it, and why would we, especially when it might call into question the authority of God's Word? But, here was historical fact, that in the early 1800s the Deutercanonical books (or the second canon, as Catholics term them), were removed. The flip side of this is that in our research we discovered another tradition, perhaps one better spelled with a capital "T" that reached back 2,000 years to the Greek Septuagint, the Bible that Jesus and the Early Church used. We discovered that it matters a great deal what you put your trust in; is it a tradition that comes from man, or a Tradition that comes from God?
The second fallacy that this story illustrates comes from the irrelevant objective category; it is called Drawing the Wrong Conclusion. This is very simple, but also unfortunate, because it is so easy to do. As Evangelicals, we came to the wrong conclusion about what constituted the Bible. We never had reason to question it. There is, among devout Christians, an unfortunate tendency to trust those in authority without question, without critical thought. It is a charge that is leveled against Catholics by anti-Catholic sects all the time. What we need to remember, all the time, is to always ask "why" — with Christian love and a zeal for discovering what is true. Sometimes what is explicitly true and taught by the Church must be taken on faith. But in every instance, the teachings of our faith will be consistent with reason, and the knowable facts of history.
And did I tell you? April got an "A" on her paper. The Evangelical professor had purposely put a trick question on the test, to see if students really understood the difference between personal opinion, and historical evidence.
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