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To: what's up
To be useful, your information would have to be a good deal more specific. You can't just say "the" "Jews" believed this or that without saying which Jews, because they did not have a centralized Magisterium and had differences of opinion among themselves.

The Sadducees and the Samaritans held that only the books of Moses--- the first five books of the Bible --- were inspired: if you took them as your guide, the Old Testament would consist of five books. They considered the Nevi'im (the Prophets) and the Ketuvim (the Pslams, Proverbs, poetic and Wisdom literature) to be "apocryphal".

The Essenes in Judea had some books not found in other groups (see Dead Sea scrolls). The Jews of Ethiopia had approx. the same "broader" canon as the Ethiopian Orthodox Christians.

So you've got the Pharisees vs the Sadducees vs the Essenes: Hillel vs Gamaliel; all these groups had different opinions. Look at all the Jewish controversies about the 1, or 2, or 3, or 4 books of Esdras!

So it's fair to say some Jews efore Christ's birth considered the seven deuterocanonical books to be inspired, and some didn't. The ones who DID, significantly coincided with the ones who in the early A.D. period accepted Jesus Christ as the Messiah. The more conservative, Torah-only Jews were at the other end of the spectrum: they didn't accept a "broad canon," and didn't accept Jesus as Messiah, either.

There was no canon of scripture in the early Church; there was no "Bible" as we now know it n the early Church. The Church developed the canon, principally by liturgical practice and not by some kind of pre-emptive decree. The Church existed, developed and grew for the better part of 4 centuries without an "official" authoritatively defined canon of Scriptures.

Pope Damasus, 366-384, in his Decree, listed the books of today's Roman Catholic canon. So did the Council of Hippo, 393. So did Pope Innocent I (405). So that list was in use for roughly 10 centuries before some (but not all) of the Reformers started disputing all over again.

To answer the (subset of) Reformers who rejected seven Old Testament books, the Council of Trent in 1556 made its formal re-iteration of what had already been accepted for 1000+ years.

25 posted on 03/25/2012 6:15:56 PM PDT by Mrs. Don-o (Peace!)
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To: Mrs. Don-o
You can't just say "the" "Jews" believed this or that without saying which Jews

Jews in general. You'll have a hard time finding Jews who believed the Apocrypha to have been inspired.

For example...one of the reasons they denied the books as inspired was the advent of the Maccabees as kings in 1, 2 Maccabees. Jews considered the Davidic line to be anointed by God and knew the Messiah would spring from that line. Thus, they did not think the Maccabbees to be anointed in the same way as the Davidic Kingship of the OT, thus the books were not in the same vein as the God-breathed scripture of the OT.

28 posted on 03/25/2012 10:10:17 PM PDT by what's up
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