16. The Canonical Scriptures

INFERNAL INTERNET

My dear Helbib,

Sorry it has taken me so long to get back with you, events in Washington, D.C. have been attracting my interest. A young demoness is making quite a name for herself by her influence upon the passions of a young woman and her boss, a fellow who lives in a big white house. Muhahaha! Now she is desensitizing the consciences of millions so that they will excuse his deceit and adultery. Any way you look at this one, we win. I especially like the situation with little children receiving their sexual education on the evening news. Absolutely wonderful.

Turning toward your own work, I am quite pleased. The anti-Catholics on the Internet are proliferating at a staggering rate. Everyone is getting into the act. Great! The subject of your immediate letter is indeed important. Do not allow your new subject, Dave Nimbus, to suspect that his KJV bible is incomplete. He is aware that there are differences with Catholic bibles, but assure him that this is because Catholics have always distorted and added to Scripture. He has only recently fallen away from the clutches of the enemy in the Catholic Church and we would not want him to return. He is now a bible Khristian! Stress this over and over again. Tell him that Catholics altered the Scriptures, particularly the Old Testament, as understood by Jews and Protestants. Between us, you know the Catholics are right, but this is an easy matter to win. Ignorance is bliss.

Let me give you background information. Except for the first five books, the Torah, the Jews do not have the same appreciation of canonicity as Catholic Khristians. One cannot link them with the Protestants who would subtract the Catholic books from the bible as Apocrypha. Back in 393 AD, the Catholics had a council in Hippo (Northern Africa) which determined which books were inspired and should be included in the Scriptural canon. All councils have since confirmed this listing. The Protestant bibles subtracted Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, 1 and 2 Maccabees, and parts of Esther and Daniel. Of course, Martin Luther also wanted to remove the Letter of James because it talked about the value or merit of good works. Indeed, he also eliminated Hebrews, Jude, and the Book of Revelation, but later Protestants reinserted them. Curses on them! Unlike the Catholic Church, the only authority they had to edit the bible was from our boss, the Master Fiend, himself.

The reason for the difference in the Old Testament books is actually very simple. The Jews living just prior to the coming of Khrist were delineated into two groups: the Palestinian Jews who spoke Hebrew and the Jews of the Diaspora (scattered throughout the Roman Empire) who spoke Greek. The Palestinian Jews re-evaluated their books and eliminated some based on four criteria:

1. They had to be in harmony with the Pentateuch [Torah] as then interpreted. (It should be noted that even Jesus challenged the conventional interpretation of the Law.)
2. They had to be written prior to the time of Ezra. (This was to stem the tide of ever expanding Scriptures.)
3. They had to be written in Hebrew. (This was a slap in the face to the many Jews living elsewhere who spoke Greek.)
4. They had to be written in Palestine. (Some of the New Testament would have failed this requirement; indeed, the Scriptures of the new dispensation would fair poorly under most of these conditions!)

This EDITED text is the one the Protestants used for their bibles. Unfortunately, for their argument, if one looks at the oldest texts of the New Testament, Jeezus and his apostles never use this Hebrew Old Testament. All of the New Testament, except for Matthew, was written in Greek. All the Old Testament quotations are from the Alexandrine Canon. This makes it important to keep your subject way from true authorities of the Greek text who might reveal this fact. Remember, we must have our clients treat the biblical texts as if English is the original and that counting how many times Jeezus quoted this or that book actually means something. Much of the accepted Old Testament in both the Catholic and Protestant bibles is never quoted by Khrist. From the very first century, in the days of the Acts of the Apostles, the Greek or Alexandrine Canon with the missing Catholic books was used by the Church. Until the Protestant reformation, all Christians everywhere agreed that the Greek-Roman canon was the true bible. The Jews themselves did not generally accept the abbreviated canon until about a hundred years after the coming of Khrist. It has even been suggested that they accepted this text because the Khristians had so thoroughly made the other their own. Those books not preserved in Hebrew (the original tongue of the Old Testament) have in some cases only survived fully in Greek. Wisdom and 2 Maccabees were written in Greek, as were portions of Daniel, Ezra, Jeremiah, Esther, all of Tobit, and Judith. The Gospel of Matthew was originally composed in Aramaic.

Your head of affairs,
Slubgob