“and were not included in Scripture by any body of Christians until the Church of Rome arbitrarily decided to include them at the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century.”
i realize not many Baptists have a clue about Church History before the 16th century, ( when they appear on the world stage for the first time ), but the above statement is down right IGNORANT.
The Greek Orthodox split from the Latin Church in 1054, and therefore do not accept Trent as a Church Council.
what is the OT canon of the Greek Orthodox?
what books of the OT were in the Latin Vulgate in the 4th century?
what OT books were declared canonical in the 397ad council of carthage?
the oriental orthodox split from the Catholic Church in the 5th century, how many books are there in their OT canon?
this post is embarrassing in its ignorance of Church history.
If scripture is considered good for correction and reproof, then many in the Roman Catholic church held that the Apocrypha was not scripture.
Writing prior to the canon decision at the Council of Trent, Cajetan wrote:
“Here we close our commentaries on the historical books of the Old Testament. For the rest (that is, Judith, Tobit, and the books of Maccabees) are counted by St Jerome out of the canonical books, and are placed amongst the Apocrypha, along with Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus, as is plain from the Prologus Galeatus. Nor be thou disturbed, like a raw scholar, if thou shouldest find anywhere, either in the sacred councils or the sacred doctors, these books reckoned as canonical. For the words as well of councils as of doctors are to be reduced to the correction of Jerome. Now, according to his judgment, in the epistle to the bishops Chromatius and Heliodorus, these books (and any other like books in the canon of the bible) are not canonical, that is, not in the nature of a rule for confirming matters of faith. Yet, they may be called canonical, that is, in the nature of a rule for the edification of the faithful, as being received and authorised in the canon of the bible for that purpose. By the help of this distinction thou mayest see thy way clearly through that which Augustine says, and what is written in the provincial council of Carthage.”
-Cardinal Cajetan (16th century)
However, the author of the posted article would have done well to point that out, rather than just assert that the Apocrypha was “not included in Scripture by any body of Christians until the Church of Rome arbitrarily decided to include them at the Council of Trent”.
Sirach is preserved in a Greek translation but was originally written in Hebrew. It came to be called Ecclesiasticus because excerpts from it were so frequently used in the Mass.
**one Lord one faith one baptism**
Your name is in this next Sunday’s second reading — Ephesians!
With apologies to George Santayana, as I’ve written before: those who cannot remember Church history are condemned to make it up.