There are seventy-three books in the Canon of the Bible, not 66; forty-six in the Old Testament and twenty-seven in the New Testament. All 27 books of the New testament were written by Catholics. The missing books were removed by Luther because he wrongly concluded that no to be canon they had to be in Hebrew and he believed that no Hebrew copies existed and they contradicted many of his heresies.
"The Roman Catholic church hid the Scriptures from us and murdered us for translating into languages we could understand."
What you are purporting is the figment of the imaginations of the Protestant propaganda machines. The Bible was available to all who could afford it and who could read Latin. Let me educate you. All of the following can be corroborated if you sincerely desire to know the truth.
The Vulgate was translated into many languages by the Church, but until the 17th and 18th centuries many regional languages and dialects had no written languages and not translations were possible. The first vernacular translations into English were printed in 734, the first German translations were in 748 (after the Church created a written German language we now call Hochdeutsch). The Goths had a vernacular Bible in approximately 360, the Armenians in 411, and multiple Egyptian dialects at approximately the same time.
Translations into Old Church Slavonic in 836. A number of passages of the Bible circulated in the vernacular English in around 900 in the reign of Alfred the Great which he prefixed to his legal code. In approximately 990, a full and freestanding version of the four Gospels in idiomatic Old English appeared, in the West Saxon dialect.
The Church did ban several unauthorized translations because they were written so as to endorse the Pope Innocent III in 1199 banned unauthorized versions of the Bible as a reaction to the Cathar and Waldensian heresies, however several other vernacular French versions available at the time were left untouched. The complete Bible was translated into Old French in the late 13th century.
The West Midland Psalter, written between 1340 and 1350. Further the 14h and 15th centuries saw the publication of Bibles or portions of the Bible in Norwegian, Finnish, Hungarian, Cymric (Welsh), and multiple Spanish dialects.
Who told you that there are 66 books? Martin Luther?
Can you give me the true identities (not just the traditional names) of even the NT authors (who formed the first generation of the Church)? How many people collaborated on individual books? How do you know? Who told you?
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Some Roman Catholic apologists will not believe anything that impugns the claims of Romes, and require that, 1. Establishing books as being Scripture requires a perpetual assuredly infallible magisterium, as per Rome. 2. Being the instrument and steward of Scripture assures that the former (via a supreme magisterium) will always be infallible in its definitions and worthy of assent of faith. 3. That assurance of the claim of Rome to perpetual formulaic infallibility, that whatever the church will ever speak on faith and morals to the whole church, will be infallible (incapable of being in any error), is not based upon itself. 4. That this assuredly infallible magisterium is necessary for the preservation of Truth. 5. The canon was infallibly settled prior to the Reformation, thus precluding debate, and thus Roman Catholics had a infallible canon for most of her claimed history, and thus enabling an infallible canon to have been given to the Protestants prior to Trent, and which canon was not debated by notable Catholic scholars therein (with a vote of 24 yea, 15 nay, with 16 abstaining (44%, 27%, 29%) as to whether to affirm it as infallible — an article of faith with its anathemas on those who dissent from it.) 6. The first canon (that is asserted to have been) published by the Catholic Church approx 300 years after the resurrection of Jesus represented the entire church, and so its Old Testament canon was consistent with earlier lists such as by Melito (c. 180), Cyril of Jerusalem (c. 350) Athanasius (367), Jerome (347 – 420) prologue to his translation of the Old Testament, and "Against Rufinus", and placed the apocrypha separately in his Vulgate) and John of Damascus, Gregory the Great, Walafrid, Nicolas of Lyra and Tostado and others who continued to doubt the canonicity of the deuterocanonical books, and possibly (debatable) the canon of the Council of Laodicea (A.D. 364). 7. That there is no debate as to whether the canon of Trent is exactly the same as that of earlier canons such as that of Carthage and Hippo, or that all that Trent declares is infallible, including the attribution of Biblical authors. 8. That the Vulgate has the same authority as they original text (Divino Afflante Spiritu, #17), and that there is no dispute as whether any verse in the Vulgate is properly Scripture. 9. That there is no dispute as to whether all that Trent declares is infallible, including the attribution of Biblical authors. 10. That the infallible magisterium of Rome is effectively not the supreme authority on earth for Catholics. 11. That Roman Catholics have an infallible canon of all infallible decrees by the infallible magisterium, and thus how many there are is never a matter of interpretation. 12. That Protestants cannot be at least as certain as to what books belong in their canon as Roman Catholics can be as to how many infallible pronouncements there are. 13. That Luther had no support from church fathers or Roman Catholic scholars in questioning or rejecting certain books as Scripture (which as with Jerome and the Apocrypha, he nonetheless included in his Bible, as of a lesser rank than Scripture.) 14. That the Protestants could not have rather quickly overall coming to affirm a 66 book canon (more than Luther had), out of a prior disputed canon, as Rome claims to have done with that of the Jews, without being bound to accept all that the entity held to through which the prior canon came. 15. That the Christian church was itself not born out of division, and that the authenticity of the church is based upon formal decent, versus effectual Scriptural faith, (Mt. 3:9; Rm. 2:28,29) primarily attested to by effecting manifest regeneration, (1Thes. 1:3,4ff) and by which the true church exists and has its members, (1Cor. 12:13) as the kingdom of God is not in self-declaration, but in power. (1Cor. 4:20) 15. And that those who Rome treats and will bury as members today are far more liberal than their evangelical counterparts. 16. That the catholic church of the 1st century was the same church as that of the later ages, defined by holding to an supreme head claiming supreme (basically autocratic) power over all Christianity and the world, and using the sword of men to chastise (including torture) Catholics and kill theological dissenters, and universally officially consenting with the “fathers” (as is required) to such things as the use of images, the perpetual sinlessness and virginity of Mary, and the papacy being infallible whenever speaking in accordance with her criteria, etc., and otherwise being consistent with herself, without resorting to her claim that she defines what is a contradiction, and the extrapolations of her development of doctrine. |