The Greek Addition

Witness Five in the investigation The Sealed Count — back to the case.

Where the Extra Books Came From

If Israel’s Scriptures were counted as twenty-two books, and the church’s own scholars kept that count for three hundred years, then the extra books in the Catholic Old Testament had to come from somewhere. They did not come from the Hebrew scrolls. They came from Greek.

Those books are Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, and First and Second Maccabees, along with added chapters in Esther and Daniel. Every one of them reached the church through Greek copies of the Old Testament. To see how they got into the Bible, the Greek copies have to be traced back to where they began.

Old Testament Books in Greek, Not the New Testament

A word on terms before going further. When this study speaks of “Greek books” or “the Greek additions,” it means Old Testament books and chapters that were carried in Greek copies of the Old Testament, such as Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, and Maccabees. It does not mean the apostolic writings, the eyewitness accounts and letters gathered into what is called the New Testament. Those writings are a separate question, and this investigation takes no position on them here. The case on trial concerns only the Scriptures committed to Israel.

What the Septuagint Is

The Septuagint is the name given to the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures. The work began in Alexandria, Egypt, in the third century BC, where a large Jewish community had grown up speaking Greek. The five books of Moses were translated first. The rest of the Scriptures were translated in stages over the following generations, by different hands, of uneven quality.

A famous legend, told in a writing called the Letter of Aristeas, says seventy-two translators produced the Greek in seventy-two days. The name Septuagint, meaning seventy, comes from that story. Even the legend concerns only the five books of Moses. It says nothing about the rest, and nothing at all about Tobit, Judith, or Maccabees.

No Fixed Greek List

Here is the point that is rarely told. There is no single “Septuagint canon” handed down from the Jews of Alexandria. No list survives from them. The oldest complete Greek Bibles that exist today are Christian books, copied in the fourth and fifth centuries AD, and they do not agree with each other.

• Codex Vaticanus, from the fourth century, includes Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, and Sirach, but has no books of Maccabees at all.
• Codex Sinaiticus, also from the fourth century, includes Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, and First and Fourth Maccabees.
• Codex Alexandrinus, from the fifth century, includes First through Fourth Maccabees, and its table of contents even lists the Psalms of Solomon.

Three great Greek Bibles, three different collections. Not one of them matches the list that the councils later adopted, and not one of them matches either of the others. What is called the Septuagint Old Testament is, in practice, whatever a Christian scribe of that era chose to bind together in one volume.

What the Greek Did to Esther

The Greek copies did not only add whole books. They also added to books already in the Hebrew. The clearest case is Esther. The Hebrew book of Esther never names Yahuah and never uses the word God. The Greek version adds six long passages, among them prayers of Mordecai and Esther, and with them it names God again and again. The translators supplied what the Hebrew book never said. A book that had to be rewritten in Greek to sound like Scripture is a witness against the Greek copies, and it raises its own question about Esther, which Witness Four takes up.

Twenty-Four Greek Letters

The logic of the twenty-two letters did not die when the Scriptures went into Greek. It was bent. Hilary of Poitiers, who himself counted twenty-two books, recorded that some added Tobit and Judith to reach twenty-four books, to match the twenty-four letters of the Greek alphabet.

That one remark says a great deal. The count of the Hebrew Scriptures was so well known that even those who wanted a larger Bible felt they needed a matching alphabet to justify it. They did not argue that Tobit and Judith were spoken by the prophets. They made the list fit a foreign alphabet. The sealed count was answered to Hebrew letters. The enlarged count was answered to Greek ones.

What Yahushua and the Apostles Quoted

Yahushua and His apostles quoted the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms again and again, introducing them with “it is written,” “the Scripture saith,” or “that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet.” Not once do they introduce Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, or Maccabees that way. Echoes of thought or phrase can be argued here and there, but no passage of the Greek additions is ever cited as Scripture.

Paul gave the reason in one sentence. The oracles of God were committed to the Jews (Romans 3:2). The books that were committed were the Hebrew Scriptures, the twenty-two. The Greek additions were never part of what was entrusted.

The Councils

In 393 a council of bishops met at Hippo in North Africa, and in 397 another met at Carthage. Augustine, who read no Hebrew and leaned on the Greek and Latin copies, pressed for the larger list. The councils wrote the Greek additions into the Old Testament. Jerome, the one man in the Western church who knew Hebrew well, set those books outside the Scriptures, and his judgment was set aside.

More than eleven hundred years later, in 1546, the Council of Trent made the larger list binding on every Catholic and pronounced a curse on anyone who rejected it. The vote became dogma.

The Protestant side carries its own history here, and it should not be skipped. Martin Luther’s German Bible of 1534 kept the extra books, gathering them in a separate section between the Testaments as useful to read but not equal to Scripture. The King James Version of 1611 printed them between the Testaments as well. For more than two hundred years, most English Protestant Bibles still carried them. They were dropped from most printings only in the 1800s. And a popular Protestant teaching today holds that “the Septuagint was the Bible of Yahushua,” as though the Greek copies made in Egypt were what He read in the synagogue. The case that His message was first spoken and read in Hebrew is answered in full in the investigation Spoken in Hebrew.

The Two Mistakes

The Catholic mistake was to add. It took books from Greek copies that never agreed on a list, set them beside the Hebrew Scriptures, and then claimed that the church’s vote made them Scripture.

The common Protestant mistake was to accept the premise. Many Protestants rejected the Greek additions while still teaching that the church settled the canon at those same councils, or worse, at Nicea, which never discussed it. If the church’s vote made the canon, then the church’s vote could make it larger. The only firm ground is the one Paul gave. The oracles were committed to Israel, and the count was closed before the church existed.

Where the Pulpit Buried It

The pulpit rarely explains where the extra books came from. Catholic teaching presents them as part of the Bible the church always had. Protestant teaching often treats them as a minor disagreement and moves on, without telling believers that their own King James Bible once carried them, or that the Greek copies behind them never agreed on what they contained.

The record is clear. The Scriptures of Israel were counted as twenty-two in Hebrew. A Greek translation made in Egypt grew larger in Christian hands, with no fixed list. Councils voted on what the Greek copies held, against the judgment of the one scholar who could read the original. The Hebrew count never changed. Proverbs 30:6 warns what happens to those who add to His words: they are reproved and found liars.

Revelation, the prophecy Yahuah gave to John, describes the people who stand at the end: “Here is the patience of the saints: here are they that keep the commandments of God, and the faith of Yahushua” (Revelation 14:12). They are known by what they keep, not by what was added for them.

One of five witnesses in a single case. The five together make the case of The Sealed Count.