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Manuel
wrote:
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Hi, guys —
I usually go to a Baptist church but I am
very interested in becoming Catholic. I have
a question about the Catholic Old Testament
that I have been confused about for a while.
- Was the prayer of Mannases and 2
Esdras ever in the Septuagint?
- If so, why aren't they in the Catholic
Old Testament?
Manuel
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Was the 'prayer of Mannases' and 2 Esdras in the Septuagint and, if so, why aren't they biblical? }
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Eric
replied:
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Hi, Manuel —
Excellent question.
The answer is that there was no one
standard canon of Septuagint books.
They are included in some canons,
but not others. They never made it
into the canon of the West for reasons
that are lost to time. They are, however, accepted
in most of the Orthodox churches.
Eric
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Mary
Ann replied:
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Hi, Manuel —
2 Esdras is indeed in the Catholic
Canon: it is called Nehemiah. If
you mean 3 Esdras and
4 Esdras, they were considered apocryphal
even by the Greek-speaking Jews who
composed the Septuagint.
In other words, they were not part
of either the Palestinian or Greek
Jewish canon. The terms canon and Septuagint do
not have the same meaning, though
the Septuagint formed the basis of
the commonly-accepted Scriptures
at the time of the early Christians
and became the basis of the accepted
canon of the Old Testament in the
Church. As the Old Catholic Encyclopedia put it:
Reasoning backward from the status
in which we find the deutero[canonicals]
books in the earliest ages of
post-Apostolic Christianity, we
rightly affirm that such a status
points of Apostolic sanction,
which in turn must have rested
on revelation either by Christ
or the Holy Spirit.
Mary Ann
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