BetweenThieves

I noticed several errors in Dr. Taylor Marshall's letter to Protestants. So I offer a corrected version below, addressed to Catholics. Dear Catholics, Your Bible contains 7 non-canonical books, added by the Council of Trent in 1546 over the objections of your own best bible scholar. Marshall says Jerome "changed his mind" about the deuterocanonical books around 402 AD in obedience to Pope Damasus. I've read Jerome's prefaces. This doesn't hold up. Damasus died in 384. Jerome wrote his famous Prologus Galeatus in 391. It excluded the deuterocanonicals as part of the canon. He labels these books as apocrypha. That's 7 years after Damasus was gone. That's not obedience to a living pope. The quote Marshall uses from Against Rufinus, which reads "What sin have I committed if I followed the judgment of the churches?", isn't about the canon. It's about Jerome's decision to translate from the Hebrew instead of the Septuagint. Rufinus attacked him for it. Jerome defended himself. In context, he's talking about translation method, not about which books belong in the Bible. And Jerome didn't stop his take. I've quoted these before, but here he is for the next 24 years of his life: 391: "Whatever is outside of these is set aside among the apocrypha." 398: The Church reads Tobit and the Maccabees "not for the authoritative confirmation of ecclesiastical doctrines." 405: Tobit is excluded from "the catalogue of Divine Scriptures." Judith is "considered among the apocrypha." 406: Cites the Book of Wisdom with "if one wishes to accept this book." 415: Still distinguishing Wisdom ("lest you gainsay this volume") from Ecclesiastes ("about which there can be no doubt"). This is one of his last works. Gallagher, a top scholar on Jerome on the canon, explains, "All of our evidence indicates that he always considered them outside the canon." Jerome never retracted. He never published a revised list. Never wrote "I was wrong." He translated Tobit and Judith under pressure, finished each in a single day, and attached prefaces denying them canonical status. That's not submission. That's a scholar doing what he's told while making sure everyone knows what he thinks. Dear Catholics, please drop the fan fiction that Jerome submitted to Rome on the canon. He held the same position from 391 until he died in 420. And Trent overruled him 15 centuries later by a vote of 24(Y)-15(N)-16(A). It passed by 44%. Not exactly a passing grade. Surely not one I'd write letters to Protestants about.