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Post #692938

Author
darth_ender
Parent topic
Ask the member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints AKA Interrogate the Mormon
Link to post in topic
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/692938/action/topic#692938
Date created
28-Feb-2014, 1:43 AM

RicOlie_2 said:

If Christianity became corrupt soon after the death of all the apostles, then why do Mormons accept the New Testament as Scripture since it wasn't affirmed as such until the fourth century or so?

The extent of the corruption was not so severe, and the inspiration of good men continued as the New Testament canon was formulated, in spite of the deaths of the apostles.

Also, do Mormons use the Protestant Bible rather than the Catholic one (the difference I am referring to being not the translation, but the books included in the Old Testament)?

Yes, we accept the Protestant version of the Bible, that is, minus what is generally termed among Protestants as The Apocrypha.

If so, then why accept Martin Luther's changes to the Bible which were made long after you believe Christianity became corrupt? Those books were affirmed as Scripture and included in the Bible at the same time as the books in the New Testament, so why reject the seven OT books but not the NT ones?

 Remember first what your church calls such books: deuterocanonical, meaning secondary canon.  Implicitly they are not valued as highly in Catholic canon either.  These books were never included in Jewish canon.  They were part of the Greek Septuagint, coming from Jewish texts but already of dubious authenticity, and ultimately rejected by Jewish authorities, though Christian authorities did ultimately accept them.  That said, we do not reject them wholly, but believe them to be somewhat unreliable, some more than others:

https://www.lds.org/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/91?lang=eng

https://www.lds.org/scriptures/bd/apocrypha

I happen to have a parallel translation of I believe eight different translations of the Apocrypha, 4 Protestant, 4 Catholic, and it includes a few other books not found canonical by either, but esteemed as canon by Oriental Orthodox branches.  I've actually enjoyed collecting such books, and I hope to obtain a few books that contain large collections of pseudepigriphial Old and New Testament writings.  There is something to learn from many of them, even if some are very inaccurate.