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Day 296: Know Your Heart
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A Daily Defense
DAY 296 “Adding” the Deuterocanonicals
CHALLENGE: “Catholics violate the prohibition against adding to Scripture (Rev. 22:18–19) by including the Apocrypha (what Catholics call the deuterocanonicals) in their Bibles.”
DEFENSE: The passage in question does not mean what is supposed, and if it did, it would create a problem for Protestants.
The passage in Revelation states: “I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book, and if any one takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away his share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book.”
The term “book” (Greek, biblion) refers to an individual scroll, which was a work much shorter than the Bible. In the ancient world, it was impossible to fit the entire Bible into a single scroll.
Physical constraints limited the size of a scroll to not much longer than an individual Gospel. Therefore, the passage in question refers to deliberately adding or removing words from the book of Revelation, not the Bible as a whole.
Of course, one should not add or subtract books from the Bible, but this is not what the passage is discussing. Even if it was, the Protestant community would have a problem.
The challenge supposes that at an early stage in Christian history the Bible consisted of only the books included in the Protestant canon and that the Apocrypha (i.e., the deuterocanonicals) were added at a later date.
This is false. The early Christians treated the Bible—including the deuterocanonicals—as Scripture, and it was at the time of the Protestant Reformation that a movement began denying their canonicity. Prior to this point, only some individuals did so, but the majority recognized the deuterocanonicals’ place in Scripture.
Thus Protestant church historian J.N.D. Kelly writes that, although some early Christian writers had different views regarding the status of these books, “For the great majority, however, the deuterocanonical writings ranked as Scripture in the fullest sense” (Early Christian Doctrines, 5th ed., 55).
It would therefore have been Protestants who removed these books from Scripture, violating the prohibition on taking away from God’s word.
Jimmy Akin, A Daily Defense: 365 Days (Plus One) to Becoming a Better Apologist
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