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5 Myths about 7 Books  MARK SHEA Here are the answers to five common arguments Protestants give for rejecting the Deuterocanonical books of the Old Testament. People don't talk much about the deuterocanon these days. The folks who do are mostly Christians, and they usually fall into two general groupings: Catholics — who usually don't know their Bibles very well and, therefore, don't know much about the deuterocanonical books, and Protestants — who may know their Bibles a bit better, though their Bibles don't have the deuterocanonical books in them anyway, so they don't know anything about them either....

Catholics are sometimes puzzled when they hear their non-Catholic friends speaking of the "Apocrypha." If they question them they discover that they understand by that term the Books of Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Tobias, Judith, Baruch, First and Second Machabees and portions of Esther and Daniel. If further questioned, their friends should be able to say that at the Reformation the churches which separated from Rome and followed the lead of Luther and others decided that the above Books were not of equal authority with the rest since they are not to be found in the Hebrew Bible, but only in...

What is the Hebrew canon and are the deuterocanonicals/apocrypha a part of it? During Jesus' time, the Jews, as a whole, did not officially have a list of inspired books or canon. For example, the Sadducees accepted only the Pentateuch as Scriptures while the Pharisees accepted prophetic writings as well as other wisdom books, like Job and Proverbs as inspired. Which canon of Scriptures was known to Jesus, His followers and the first Christians? The answer is that they knew both Palestinian Canon and the Greek Septuagint translation. Greek-speaking Jews also lived in Palestine and were known as Hellenists (Acts...