Tag: Dead Sea Scrolls

Quick Apology: The Deuterocanon

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A couple of days ago I posted some of the important dates concerning the setting of the Biblical canon. Closely related to the subject of the canon is the issue of the deuterocanon, the books referred to by Protestants as “the apocrypha”, which were removed from the canon at the time of the Reformation.

I haven’t done a “Quick Apology” post this week, so here goes. However, rather than dealing with just one objection in this post, today I’m going to provide a series of brief rebuttals of the top ten most common objections raised….

Tobit

Protestants typically say that the deuterocanonical books shouldn’t be included in the Bible because…

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The Genesis of Genesis

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Name the movie in the Comment Box…

Have you ever wondered how the Bible as we know it actually came to be? Why do we only have four Gospels? Why is the Gospel of Peter not included? Why is the letter of Clement to the Corinthians not included? Who decided this and when?

I remember a train ride in my early twenties when I got into conversation with a fellow passenger who was reading “The Da Vinci Code”. This was quite some time before Dan Brown’s book became well known so, in ignorance, I asked her what it was about…

She told me a little bit of the story line and then, seeing that I was reading a book about Scripture, asked me why it was that the Dead Sea Scrolls were not also included in the Bible. I can’t remember exactly what I said, but I remember thinking at the time that my explanation wasn’t very articulate or didn’t sound convincing…

If your faith has its foundation in Sacred Scripture, shouldn’t you know where it came from?

The Dead Sea Scans

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Once I had accepted employment at Cynergy Systems  in the US, I visited San Diego for a week to try and get a sense of what it would be like to live in America. While I was there I found out that the Dead Sea Scrolls, those ancient Jewish manuscripts found in the caves at Qumran, were currently on display in the Natural History Museum. It was quite a special moment to be standing in front of the oldest manuscript of the Prophet Isaiah and this encounter began to foster within me a desire to learn the original languages of the Scriptures.

Last month I read that, thanks to Google, there are now available five high-resolution scans of the scrolls:

If you would like to know more about the Dead Sea Scrolls and their contribution to our understanding of the Bible, I would encourage you to listen to the talk on this subject given by Sebastian Carnazzo at the Institute of Catholic Culture.