Demspotis
Posts: 61
Joined: 3/11/2005 Status: offline
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On "omissions" from what Christians call the Old Testament, & Jews call "the Bible" or "the Tanach": There's a standard group of texts that is included in the Bibles used by most Jews today (and for many centuries), and shared by most Protestant Christians. In ancient times, there were many more sacred texts to be found among Jewish people, but at some point, the canon we know was accepted by the authorities of that time, and other texts deemed either bogus or simply less authoritative or sanctified. Some of these texts were accepted by various of the Catholic & Orthodox (ie, pre-Protestant) churches. These various texts are categorized as "apocrypha", "deuterocanonical" and "pseudepigrapha", so those who are interested can easily search for those as keywords. There were also texts from non-mainstream sects, such as some of the Dead Sea Scrolls; and the many Gnostic scriptures (Gnostics & their scriptures came in Jewish & "pagan" varieties, & Christian, too, once they showed up). Many of these types of texts can be found (in translation), in the following books: The Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books: The New Revised Standard Version; published by World Bible Publishers The Lost Books of the Bible and The Forgotten Books of Eden; published by World Bible Publishers The Dead Sea Scrolls in English, by G. Vermes; published by Penguin Books The Other Bible, edited by Willis Barnstone; published by Harper San Francisco The Gnostic Scriptures, edited by Bentley Layton; published by Doubleday Also interesting is that several sections of the Torah/Pentateuch seem to explicitly identify themselves as extracts from earlier texts.
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