
Protestants say that the Bible alone, as it is understood by each individual, is the sole source of Divine revelation and guidance. Well, never ever in the biblical texts Our Lord or the Apostles said "if you want to be saved, grab a Bible and study it by yourself". Quite the opposite, in fact.
The only, if I may say so, person in the Bible who claims the right to private interpretation is the Devil, in Lk 4:10. It can be noticed that when the Devil says to Jesus "Scriptum est" ("it is written"), showing that he is basing his lie on the biblical text, Our Lord Jesus Christ answers with another Bible quote, but starting with "Dictum est" ("it is said" - Lk 4:12), showing us that the right answer to misinterpretation of the written text of the Bible is reading it according to the (Oral) Tradition: _dictum est_, not just _scriptum est_. What is written can be misinterpreted by ignorant people (2Pd 3:16), and without the help of what is _said_ we'd get nowhere (Acts 8:31)...
There is also another "little" problem with the modern Protestant bible: There are seven books missing in it.
a - As far as I know, the first editions of the KJV had all th books, including those trashed by Luther.
b - The funniest thing about the Protestant canon of the OT is that it has been made by people who wanted to protect themselves against Christianity!
When the Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 A.D., Judaism was left without a center for its faith. When the Temple was there, Saducees, Pharisees and Am Ha'Aretz (non-sectarian Jews; litterally, "people of the Land") worshipped at the Temple. Only Essenes did not, for they considered the Temple to be defiled since the Maccabees. Essenes lived more or less like the the Israelites lived in the Desert.
It is interesting to notice that the Essenes had an extra book added to the Pentateuch specifying where and how should the Temple be built (you can notice there is a lot of explanations on minutiae of the Temple service, but no explanation at all about how the Temple should be in the Pentateuch!), and according to this book, the Calvary is precisely on the spot where sacrifice should be done.
The Pharisees then decided to write down the Oral Law, to assure the survival of Judaism without the Temple. Many famous Rabbis assembled in Jamna (or in Hebrew Yavneh), a little town in Galilee, and started compiling the Oral Law.
In order to assure that all Jews would have the same faith, they forbade the use of Greek (or any other language) in the prayers and study, making Hebrew mandatory. They also decided to write down a list of the books that composed the Bible.
Their main problem at the time was, guess who? Christianity, converting Jews by thousands. Christians used the Greek Septuagint instead of the Hebrew Bible, and had other books they wouldn't accept (the New Testament). So they decreed that for a book to be held as part of the Jewish canon, it should:
1 - Have been written in the Land of Israel (So the Gospels were out);
2 - Have been written in Hebrew, and have the Hebrew original available (what ruled all of the deuterocanonical books of the OT out, and all of the NT). The funny thing is that in our century the Hebrew original of Ecclesiasticus (how do you call it in English? The Wisdom of Jesus Ben Sirac) has been found in the Genizah of Cairo (a Genizah is a burial place for old Jewish Bibles). If they had found it 1900 years earlier, they would have it in their Bible.
3 - Have been written before Ezra (circa 400 b.C.), what ruled out all of the NT too.
Luther, some 1500 years later, used this OT canon, assembled by the Pharisees as a protection against Christianiy, as an excuse for taking the books that conflicted with his ideas out of his bible. For the NT canon, he also wanted to take out some books, but he couldn't find a decent excuse and these were put back in the heretics' canon by his followers.
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