Reading today in my Psalter (which happens to be Catholic), I found this passage that I have never read in my Protestant Bible.... a beautiful song of praise. I said to myself, I have never read this in 40 years of reading the Bible. Why is that? Is it Apocryphal or Deuterocanonical?
It turns out that yes, it is. There are three sections of Daniel left out of Protestant Bibles. I wondered why....
I guess in an argument around Purgatory, Luther claimed Maccabees 2 was non canonical. From what I read he was going with Jerome on this who was skeptical of certain books of Scripture because they were not included in the MT-The Hebrew Masoretic Text.
However, they were included in the Greek Septuagint, the version of the Apostles, and the version based on a lost older copy of the Hebrew Bible.
Jerome didn't know there were other copies of the Hebrew Bible circulating in the old days, so he based his conclusions on the one he felt was most reliable when he created the Latin Vulgate.
The MT is a complete Hebrew text, whereas, the Septuagint is a Greek version of an older (than MT) Hebrew text. Which was is more accurate has been the question.
That being said, now I know why I never heard the "Song of the Three Jews," but it's quite beautiful and it reminds me of St. Patrick's Lorica especially when it says:
"all winds, bless the Lord.
Fire and heat, bless the Lord;
chill and cold, bless the Lord.
Dews and rains, bless the Lord;
ice and frost, bless the Lord...
Ice and snow, bless the Lord;"
--It would have made a nice addition to my Field Study classes' nature journals last year.
