The JOYS of the Canon of Scripture

Below are three videos that support my own personal research.

When I first heard the claim by Catholics that their Bible was the original, I had to see for myself. So, for years my husband and I went on a quest to actually see first hand as many older Bibles as we could find.

We went to several Bible mecca's in the US including Bob Jones University and Pensacola Christian College where there are King James Version shrines. We went to museums in our trips overseas. We looked online for scanned manuscripts. We read every possible book on the making of the Bible we could find. Then we hit gold.

During the time we lived close to DC, I had a rare opportunity. I petitioned the Library of Congress to see the Ancient Bible Archives. Under very close supervision I was allowed to actually look through ancient copies of scripture. At the time the curator was stationed nearby to keep an eye on me. For hours, wearing gloves and on a velvet lined podium, I leafed through the latin manuscripts--finding the books of Baruch and Judith and the Maccabees and Tobit.... They were all there, those seven books the Protestants had taken out. (Course most of the manuscripts were in Latin... but I had researched how to recognize their Latin names.)

Questioning both the LOC curator and also with extensive conversations and emails with curators in England, English Bible translators and scholars, I found out that indeed, the Catholics were right. Since the beginning, the Bible has had 73 books and only with the Reformation did the Protestant Bible become smaller--only 66. Those who did not like the "Catholicism" of certain books simply took them out.

Hope you will take the time to watch the videos. They were what I discovered years before becoming Catholic.

The Origin of the Bible Preview, part 2, by Dr. Brant Pitre

The Origin of the Bible Preview, part 1, by Dr. Brant Pitre

The Bible: A Brief History