66 Books in the Bible
So Miles and I have been doing a kind of devotional time this summer. We looked for a couple things online, but finding nothing all that great, we decided to read the daily Mass readings and talk about what we read. Sometimes a big discussion gets started, sometimes it doesn’t. But it’s still cool.
As we were talking on the phone last night, I was looking ahead and saw that on Saturday the First Reading comes from the book of Wisdom. THE BOOK OF WISDOM?! I have never heard of such a book. I said something to Miles and he matter-of-factly said, “The book of Wisdom, yeah.” WHAT?! “I have never heard of the book of Wisdom. What Bible do you use?” “The New American Bible.” Sounds regular…like New International Version or King James Version. After a bickering of sorts, he made me get out my Bible and tell him the order in it. I knew that it wasn’t in there…what did I need to prove? “Song of Songs, Isaiah”. “Song Book of Songs, Wisdom, Sirach, Isaiah”. WHAT?! This was getting a bit extreme.
After some research, The New American Bible actually is a Bible used by Catholics. Not just a different version of the Bible like what I use. We went through the indexes of our Bibles and found that there are 7 extra books. They’re all in the Old Testament. Tobit, Judith, 1 Maccabees, 2 Maccabees, Wisdom, Sirach, and Baruch. I’ve always been taught that 1) there are 66 books in the Bible and 2) there are two books by women (Esther and Ruth). This teaching is probably due to the fact that I am not a Catholic.
July 14th, 2006 at 10:29 am
Actually, it’s not called the Book of the Song of Songs. It’s just called the Book of Songs.
I guess that means that the Catholic Bible has 10.6% more Satan-fighting beef.
July 14th, 2006 at 10:30 am
I have fixed it. My bad.
July 14th, 2006 at 4:13 pm
Do you know why your book doesn’t have those 7 books in ‘em?
July 14th, 2006 at 4:21 pm
I’m not sure. Miles had some introductions to each book in his. One of them wasn’t accepted by Protestants as being the word of God. I don’t remember why. There were reasons for some of the others too. But some had no explaination in his Bible.
July 15th, 2006 at 8:46 am
heathens didn’t want books in the bible that say, “you have to be good and go to church and stuff” in their bibles so they all got together and said, “well, hey, lets rip em out, sing a little louder in church, make everyone sign up for communion, but only give it to em like once a month. with a little bit of a tease in there people will be lining up down the STREET! And my wifes been bitching, can we add a couple tidbits written by women?”
anyways, thats how it went down. i should know. i was there.