The Protestant version did not exist until the 16^th century with the arrival of the Protestant Reformation. Until that time, the Catholic version was the commonly accepted version. The Commandments, as written in the Old Testament, are not numbered; therefore any subsequent numbering of them could be rather arbitrary. The Catholic version takes a very logical approach to the numbering of these commandments. St. Augustine advocated this version in the fourth century, a version that had already been in use from well before his writings on the Book of Exodus, wherein he talks about the Catholic numbering system. The Protestant version splits the first commandment (Deuteronomy 5:6-10) into two; the first forbids the worship of false gods (Deut. 5:6-7) and the second forbids the making of graven images (Deut. 5:8-10). The Protestant version then lumps the ninth and tenth commandments (Deut. 5:21) into one commandment. The Catholic version divides verse 21 into a commandment forbidding the desire (lust) to commit adultery and a commandment forbidding the desire (greed) to steal.

Protestant apologists claim that the Catholic Church dropped the Second Commandment in order to allow its common practice of worshiping images, alleging that the Catholic Church condones the worship of images. To the Catholic this makes no sense. No good Catholic worships images. The reason that images are explicitly forbidden in Deuteronomy is because some of the ancient Jews really worshiped them, the images themselves, as gods. No Catholic worships statues or any kind of images. So to command that no false gods be worshiped in one commandment and then to command that images are not to be made in another commandment is very redundant. The single commandment not to worship false gods obviously covers the worshiping of images. And God does not forbid the making of graven images; see below.

Dividing Deuteronomy 21 into two commandments makes sense because lust and greed (avarice) are two different things; this division is more logical than lumping them together into one commandment. This lumping together also comes very close to categorizing women as property, which they are not. The Protestant reformers adopted their version of the Ten Commandments when they adopted the Jewish Bible as a replacement for the Catholic Bible. The Jewish Ten Commandments is similar to the Protestant because the Jews retained their traditional version which goes back to the time when image worship was a big problem. [The next article will address the difference between the Protestant and the Catholic Bibles]. When the early Church numbered the Ten Commandments, image worship was not a problem among the early Christians and a commandment to forbid their creation was deemed unnecessary.

Images and statues, to a Catholic, are no different than photographs of loved ones who have passed away. They simply serve to remind us of them and to help us focus on their memory and hence they are a way of venerating loved ones, of giving reverence. This is not worshiping. To a Catholic, only God is worthy of worship and adoration. [There are different levels of worship: latria versus dulia and hyperdulia; latria being the highest form, that reserved for God alone, which is what is being talked about here. The expression, "He worships the very ground she walks on" is an example of dulia, i.e., worship at its lowest level; English is handicapped by having only one word, "worship," while Latin has more words for "worship"]. To look at some Catholics before some images, you might think they are worshiping. Perhaps there are some misguided Catholics who do attribute divine power to a saint represented in an image or statue. But this is wrong and these Catholics are in error. The teaching of the Church is always against the worship of false gods and attributing divine power to any saint would be false worship. The only "power" a saint possesses is that of intercession wherein a saint can pray for us, just as we can ask anyone to pray for us. For to a Catholic, the saints are not dead, but alive in heaven and, as part of our family, they can hear our prayers and pray for us just as any loved one can pray for us.

There are numerous places in the Old Testament where God commands the making of graven images ("graven" simply means "sculpted"): Exodus 25:18-21 (angels), Numbers 21:8-9 (a bronze serpent), 1 Kings 6:23-28 describes statues of angels in the temple, as does Ezechiel 41:17-25. So God does not forbid the making of graven images, but only the worship (latria) of them. Catholics do not even give dulia to graven images.

After Alexander III, the Great, conquered the Middle East and Egypt, that region became Hellenized and ultimately the Greek language became the principle international language. Many Jews lived outside of Palestine and they were not literate in Hebrew, the language of most of the Old Testament. Greek became the most common language in Alexandria, Egypt, and that city also possessed the largest Jewish population outside of Palestine. These Jews were Greek speakers and readers. Therefore a need arose for a Bible that could be read by these Greek-reading Jews. Hence, between 275 and 100 B.C. the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek. Because legend says this was done by 70 (or 72) Jewish scholars, the name for this Bible became the "Septuagint" meaning "Seventy." This "Septuagint" Bible included seven books which were expunged from the Bible by Martin Luther. These seven were written in Greek. These are the Books of Sirach (sometimes called Ecclesiaticus), Tobit, Wisdom (of Solomon), Judith, 1 and 2 Maccabees, and Baruch. The Books of Daniel and Esther also have sections which were expunged by Luther. All of these remain in the Catholic Bible.

At the time of this Septuagint translation, many versions of the Bible, or Torah, as it is known to the Jews, were in circulation. Some versions had books which other versions did not, and so forth. Such books as Esdras, the Letter of Jeremiah, the Prayer of Manassah, and Psalm 151 are examples of Old Testament books which never made it into the canon of the Septuagent. There are numerous apocryphal Old Testament books. These Septuagint translators left these out of the Torah but accepted the above seven. So by the time of Christ, the Torah that was commonly in use was the Septuagint version. This is the version used by Christ and the Apostles and all the Evangelists. This can be verified by a long list of New Testament verses which derive directly from or make reference to verses from these seven books. Therefore, the earliest Christians were using the Septuagint Bible and this was the Bible that was used by Christians until the Protestant Reformation when Martin Luther threw out these seven books which he called Apocrypha and which the Catholic Church calls Deutero-Canonical. I refer you to the web site www.cin.org/users/james/files/deutero3.htm which lists all the references to the Deutero-Canonicals in the New Testament. For example, here are all the references in Ephesians:

Ephesians 1:6 Sirach 45:1

Ephesians 1:6 Sirach 46:13

Ephesians 1:17 Wisdom 7:7

Ephesians 4:14 Sirach 5:9

Ephesians 4:24 Wisdom 9:3

Ephesians 6:12 Wisdom 5:17

Ephesians 6:14 Wisdom 5:18

Ephesians 6:16 Wisdom 5:19, 21

The writers of the New Testament, and Jesus, were obviously very familiar with these seven books. It is true that there are no direct quotes from these books in the New Testament but there are many other Hebrew Old Testament books which are also not quoted in the New Testament so that means nothing. It is true that St. Jerome initially wanted to exclude the Deutero-Canonicals from his Vulgate (Latin) Bible, but ultimately he changed his mind and put them in. One opinion of one Father of the Church does not an argument make. It is true that these books are different from the other books of the Old Testament because they were written in Greek, not Hebrew, and this is why the Church gave them the name Deutero-Canonical, "deutero" meaning "other."

And this is the gist of the Jewish Council of Jamnia, which reputedly met in the year 90. After the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70, some Jewish scholars under Yohanan ben Zakkai moved to the city of Jamnia (Yavne) and founded a school of Jewish law there which replaced the Sanhedrin. By the year 90, the tension between Christians and Jews and grown to such a degree that these Jewish leaders wanted to have a Torah that was purely Hebrew and that was not being used by the Christians. So they threw out the seven books which were in Greek. Although there has been some debate as to the existence of this Council, it is usually recognized that it created the official canon of the Jewish Bible (Torah) to differentiate it from the Christian Bible (Septuagint).

The Wikipedia says this:

Today, there is no scholarly consensus as to when the Jewish canon was set. Nevertheless, the outcomes attributed to the Council of Jamnia did occur whether gradually or in a definitive, authoritative council. Several concerns of the remaining Jewish communities in Israel would have been the loss of the national language, the growing problem of conversions to Christianity, based in part on Christian promises of life after death. What emerged from this era was two fold:

1). A rejection of the Septuagint or Koine Greek Old Testament widely then in use among the Hellenized diaspora along with its additional books not part of the Hebrew language Masoretic Text.

2). The inclusion of a curse on the "Minim" which probably included Jewish Christians (Birkat ha-Minim). According to the Jewish Encyclopedia article on Min: "In passages referring to the Christian period, ‘minim’ usually indicates the JudFo-Christians, the Gnostics, and the Nazarenes, who often conversed with the Rabbis on the unity of God, creation, resurrection, and similar subjects. In some passages, indeed, it is used even for ‘Christian’; but it is possible that in such cases it is a substitution for the word ‘Nozeri,’ which was the usual term for 'Christian'... On the invitation of Gamaliel II., Samuel ha-Katan composed a prayer against the minim which was inserted in the ‘Eighteen Benedictions’; it is called ‘Birkat ha-Minim’ and forms the Twelfth Benediction; but instead of the original ‘Nozerim’ ... the present text has ‘wela-malshinim’ (=‘and to the informers’). The cause of this change in the text was probably the accusation brought by the Church Fathers against the Jews of cursing all the Christians under the name of the Nazarenes."

Sociologically, these developments achieved two important ends, namely, the preservation of the Hebrew language at least for religious use (even among the Diaspora) and the final separation and distinction between the Jewish and Christian communities. (Through nearly the end of the first century, Christians of Jewish descent continued to pray in synagogues.) But see also John Chrysostom, The Homilies against the Judaizers.

Some of the books not admitted into the Hebrew canon, such as Wisdom and 2 Maccabees, gave the only textual support for the common first century Jewish belief in the after-life. The martyrs' prayers for the dead and the living praying and offering sacrifices for the dead motivated Martin Luther to reject these books as apocryphal because they supported Catholic doctrine and practice [the doctrine of Purgatory]. [Wikipedia]

Martin Luther also rejected four books of the New Testament: Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation. Other Protestant reformers fortunately replaced these four books. But Luther dumped these because there is too much in them that support Catholic teachings and the early Protestant reformers also supported most of the Catholic Church’s teachings.  Even Martin Luther himself supported most of them; for example he continued to hold to the Church’s hyperdulia of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

The canon of Scripture, Old and New Testament, was finally settled at the Council of Rome in 382, under the authority of Pope Damasus I. It was soon reaffirmed on numerous occasions. The same canon was affirmed at the Council of Hippo in 393 and at the Council of Carthage in 397. In 405 Pope Innocent I reaffirmed the canon in a letter to Bishop Exuperius of Toulouse. Another council at Carthage, this one in the year 419, reaffirmed the canon of its predecessors and asked Pope Boniface to "confirm this canon, for these are the things which we have received from our fathers to be read in church." All of these canons were identical to the modern Catholic Bible, and all of them included the Deutero-canonicals.

This exact same canon was implicitly affirmed at the seventh ecumenical council, II Nicaea (787), which approved the results of the 419 Council of Carthage, and explicitly reaffirmed at the ecumenical councils of Florence (1442), Trent (1546), Vatican I (1870), and Vatican II (1965). [www.cin.org/users/james/files/deuteros.htm]

Therefore when Protestants say that the Catholic Church added seven books to the Bible, usually citing the Council of Trent as the culprit, the fact is that the Protestant reformers subtracted seven books from the Bible.