Jesus & His Apostles accept deuterocanononical books which discarded by Martin Luther, precursor of non-Catholics identical Bible interpretation

“If anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God will take away that person's share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book.” (Revelation 22:19)

All Christians (at least for Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant) agree that the Books in the Bible are the inspired, written Word of God, but disagree on which Books belong in the Bible. The Catholic Old Testament Canon includes Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, I and II Maccabees together with the sections of Esther and Daniel which are absent from the Protestant Old Testament. Protestant Christians rejected these Writings as inspired by God referring to them as the "Apocrypha". The Catholic Church agrees that there are ancient writings which are "apocryphal, which survived to the present day such as the Apocalypse of Peter and the Gospel of Thomas, which are regarded as spurious writings that don't fit in Scripture.

It’s interesting to note that the Jewish Scriptures were used in the early Church. Around the first century A.D., there were two Jewish Bibles  circulated - the Hebrew Bible which was popular in Judea and the Septuagint Bible which was a Greek translation of the Jewish Scripture and which included these deuterocanonical books.

Based on writings posted on Facebook, the fallacies are presented in this manner:

FIRST FALLACY:  The Roman Catholic Church did not officially canonize the Apocrypha until the Council of Trent (1546 AD). This was in part because the Apocrypha contained material which supported certain Catholic doctrines, such as purgatory, praying for the dead, and the treasury of merit.

Not one of them is in the Hebrew language, which was alone used by the inspired historians and poets of the Old Testament.

These books were never acknowledged as sacred Scriptures by the Jewish Church, and therefore were never sanctioned by our Lord.

ACCORDING TO THE FALLACY, Jesus and the Apostles, being Jews, used similar Bible that the Jews use today. Subsequently, muddled hierarchs began affixing books to the Bible either because deficient knowledge or such books facilitated to support an assortment of off the wall Catholic traditions that were inserted in the gospel.

The fallacy adds that as the Reformation (the first protestant) progresses in the 16th century finally read their Bibles without ecclesial propaganda from Rome. Discerning that the Jewish and Catholic Old Testaments differed with medieval addition, they scraped them off. Rome, ever bad-tempered, countered by officially attaching the deuterocanonical books at the Council of Trent (1545-1563) and began informing the Catholics that "they had always been there."

THE TRUTH: The first theory relies on the ERRONEOUS CONCEPTION that the modern Jewish Bible is the same with the Bible used by Jesus and the Apostles. Actually, the Old Testament was still extremely unsteady on Jesus’ time and the canon of Scripture was not yet fixed during the apostolic period.  Others assume/tell that there must have been since, claiming that Jesus help people to comply with the Bible, which is a FALSE ASSERTION. In reality, Jesus held populace responsible to abide through their conscience.

Think about the Sadducees who only looked upon the first five books of the Old Testament as inspired and canonical. Other books of the Old Testament were taken by them in much the same manner the deuterocanon is viewed by Protestant Christians today as “good, but not God-inspired Word,” which is evident to their dispute with Jesus against the reality of the resurrection in (Matthew 22:23-3) wherein they couldn't find it in the five books of Moses and they did not look upon the later books of Scripture which articulated it clearly (such as Isaiah and 2 Maccabees) as inspired and canonical. Neither did Jesus say to them that they committed a mistake or clueless about Isaiah and 2 Maccabees" nor constrain them to recognize these books as canonical. Jesus simply holds them answerable to grasp earnestly the part of Scripture they do recognize; He argues for the resurrection based on the five books of the Law, that is. Certainly, this doesn't mean that Jesus commits Himself to the Sadducees' curtailed canon.

On the other hand, Jesus did the same thing when addressing the Pharisees (another Jewish faction) at the time, who seem to have held to a canon similar to the modern Jewish canon, one much bigger than that of the Sadducees but not as big as other Jewish compilations of Scripture. Hence, Jesus and the Apostles with certainty disagree with them from the books they recognized as Scripture. But as with the Sadducees, this doesn't mean that Jesus or the Apostles restricted the canon of Scripture only to what the Pharisees recognized.

Jesus and His apostles used an even bigger collection of Scripture (the Septuagint - a translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek) when addressing Greek-speaking Diaspora Jews.  These books were regarded as inspired Scripture by majority of the Jews. In fact, the New Testament is packed with references to the Septuagint with its specific translation of various Old Testament passages as Scripture. Paradoxically, one of the favorite passages used in anti-Catholic arguments over the years is (Mark 7:6-8). In this verse, the Lord condemns "teaching as doctrines human traditions." This passage has created the basis for countless complaints against the Catholic Church for supposedly "adding" to Scripture man-made traditions, such as the "merely human works" of the deuterocanononical books. In reality, the minority recognizes that in this verse the Lord was quoting Isaiah’s version that is found only in the Septuagint version of the Old Testament.

Two thirds of the Old Testament passages that are cited in the New Testament are from the Septuagint. The deuterocanonical books are not in today's Jewish Bible because the Jews who devised the modern Jewish canon were not concerned in apostolic teaching and motivated by a very different set of concerns from those stimulating the apostolic community.

Prior to the closing stages of the apostolic age, the Jews who sought a new focus for their religious practice in the wake of the destruction of the Temple zeroed in with zealousness on Scripture and refurbished their canon at the rabbinical gathering, known as the "Council of Javneh"  (sometimes called "Jamnia"), about A.D. 90. Earlier, there had never been any official attempt among the Jews to "define the canon" of Scripture. In fact, the Scripture does not point out that the Jews had a crystal-clear notion that the canon should be concluded eventually.

The canon disembarked by the rabbis at Javneh was fundamentally the mid-sized canon of the Palestinian Pharisees, not the briefer version taken by the Sadducees, who had been practically wiped out during the Jewish war with Rome. This new canon was not coherent with the Greek Septuagint version, which the rabbis considered rather xenophobically as "too Gentile-tainted." These Palestinian rabbis were not in better frame of mind for multiculturalism after the catastrophe (carnage, defiled temple and turn down, shuffled religion) they had endured at the time of hostilities. 

Therefore for these rabbis, the Greek Septuagint went by the board and the mid-sized Pharisaic canon was adopted. Although not all, sometime soon this version was adopted by the vast majority of Jews. To this day, Ethiopian Jews still use the Septuagint version, not the shorter Palestinian canon settled upon by the rabbis at Javneh. 

Javneh discarded the books which had been used by Jesus and His apostles, which were in the edition of the Bible that the apostles used in daily life - the Septuagint. The group of Jews who congregated at Javneh turned to be the prevailing group on the later part Jewish history, and today most Jews embrace the canon of Javneh. Nevertheless, some Jews, such as those from Ethiopia, adhere to a different canon which is equal to the Catholic Old Testament and includes the seven deuterocanonical books. Simply put, the Old Testament canon acknowledged by Ethiopian Jews is similar to the Catholic Old Testament, including the seven deuterocanonical books (compare with Encyclopedia Judaica, vol. 6, p. 1147).

By the time the Jewish council of Javneh rolled around, the Catholic Church had been in existence and using the Septuagint Scriptures in its teaching, preaching, and worship for nearly 60 years, just as the Apostles themselves had done. In effect, the Church could difficultly sense the obligation to agree with the wishes of the rabbis in eliminating the deuterocanonical books any more than they felt compelled to obey the rabbis in discarding the New Testament writings. After the birth of the Church on the day of Pentecost, the rabbis no longer had authority from God to settle such issues inclusive of the authority to define the canon of Scripture which had been given to Jesus’ church.

Hence, the Church and the synagogue went their separate ways, not in the Middle Ages or the 16th century, but in the 1st century. The Septuagint, complete with the deuterocanononical books, was first embraced, not by the Council of Trent, but by Jesus of Nazareth and His Apostles.

Lastly, around the first century A.D., there were two Jewish Bibles in widespread use, the Hebrew Bible which was accepted in Judea and the Septuagint Bible which was a Greek translation of the Jewish Scripture where deuterocanonical books could be found. Both of them were used by the early Christians, but recent studies have sanctioned the longer Septuagint version. According to the Church authorities, when the New Testament writers quoted the Jewish Scriptures, they used the Septuagint version about 80 percent of the time and quoted parts of the seven deuterocanonical books in their writings. From that time until the Reformation, there was only one Bible used in the Church which was approved by the Council of Hippo in 393 A.D. -The Septuagint Old Testament.[2] 

SECOND FALLACY: Not one of the writers lays any claim to inspiration.

The second myth says that Jesus and the Apostles commonly cited Old Testament Scripture as their authority, but they neither cited from the deuterocanonical books, nor did they even talk about them as part of Scripture.

THE TRUTH: First, numerous non-canonical books are cited in the New Testament which include the Book of Enoch and the Assumption of Moses (cited by St. Jude), the Ascension of Isaiah (alluded in Hebrews 11:37), and the writings of the pagan poets Epimenides, Aratus, and Menander (cited by St. Paul in Acts), 1 Corinthians, and Titus.

Second, if quotation equals canonicity, books of the protocanonical Old Testament  (the Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Obadiah, Zephaniah, Judges, 1 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Lamentations and Nahum) would have to be excluded as not one of these Old Testament books is ever quoted or alluded to by Jesus or the Apostles in the New Testament.

Third, far from being disregarded in the New Testament (like Ecclesiastes, Esther, and 1 Chronicles) the deuterocanonical books are indeed quoted and alluded to in the New Testament. Take for example Wisdom 2:12-20 which reads in part, "For if the just one be the son of God, he will defend him and deliver him from the hand of his foes. With revilement and torture let us put him to the test that we may have proof of his gentleness and try his patience. Let us condemn him to a shameful death; for according to his own words, God will take care of him."

The passage mentioned was undoubtedly in the minds of the Synoptic Gospel writers in their reports of Crucifixion account: "He saved others; He cannot save Himself. So He is the king of Israel! Let Him come down from the cross now, and we will believe in Him. He trusted in God; let Him deliver Him now if he wants Him. For He said, ÔI am the Son of God'" (compare with Matthew 27:42-43).

Likewise, St. Paul alludes evidently to Wisdom Chapters 12 and 13,  in Romans 1:19-25. Hebrews 11:35 refers clearly to 2 Maccabees 7. Jesus Himself repeatedly drew on the text of Sirach 27:6, which reads: "The fruit of a tree shows the care it has had; so too does a man's speech disclose the bent of his mind." Likewise, the Lord and His Apostles observed the Jewish feast of Hanukkah also called the Feast of Dedication (compare with John 10:22-36) but the divine institution of this key feast day is accounted only in the deuterocanonical books of 1  and 2 Maccabees, which is not mentioned in any other book of the Old Testament. 

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