No Schmitz!

You may have seen videos by Roman Catholic podcaster-apologists - like the popular Rev. Mike Schmitz - who assert that Luther (or “Protestants”) have “ReMoVEd boOOkS fROm tHe BiBLe!” and who have “DESTROYED LUTHER!” with a YouTube video.

First of all, on the topic of what Luther believed about the Mass, that it “doesn’t do anything” and is “only a memorial” - Father Mike is simply full of Schmitz. He has been corrected on this and other factual misrepresentations many times over. Yet he never issues a correction or clarification. The best construction is that he is a low-IQ dingdong, a plastic pretty-boy talking-head who knows not what he does, who has never actually read an attempted fair treatment of Luther or a more objective church history (of which there are examples within Roman Catholicism). He has clearly not read Lutherans and Catholics in Dialogue IV: Ministry and Eucharist, in which the distinguished international panel of Roman Catholic theologians recommended that the Vatican: “recognize the validity of the Lutheran Ministry and, correspondingly, the presence of the body and blood of Christ in the eucharistic celebrations of Lutheran Churches.” He is clearly confusing Lutherans with other people.

Moreover, the crazy assertion that Luther never quoted the Apocrypha after 1520 is easily refuted by simply pulling up the index to the American Edition of Luther’s Works that is on a shelf of just about every Lutheran pastor’s study, and is in every Roman Catholic scholarly library. This assertion is simply factually untrue.

But even if done out of pure ignorance and naivety, what he is saying and promulgating is a diabolical lie. For Satan is the ultimate father of lies. This is not a matter of opinion about these seven books, nor how the church should treat them hermeneutically, but is rather about the historical facts of their treatment by the church catholic: not only during the Reformation, but before and after.

I think a good faith argument can be made for the canonicity of the Apocrypha. Some Lutherans do consider it deuterocanonical. Lutherans have not “closed” the canon, and our main dogmatic text used in our seminaries to this day (Pieper’s Dogmatics) includes the doctrine that we Lutherans distinguish between categories of books of Scripture that have been disputed (antilegomena) vs. those that were always accepted (homologoumena) in terms of their doctrinal witness. And this is consistent with church history.

There was a 19th century case of an LCMS pastor who was brought up on charges that he did not consider Revelation to be canonical. He was acquitted, as this is a permissible confession (based on the distinction between the antilegomena and the homologoumena).

Luther did not invent the term “Apocrypha,” nor was he the first to describe the seven Greek books from the Old Testament era by this term. Luther inherited this from St. Jerome, the translator and editor of the only authoized Roman Catholic Bible of Luther’s time: the Vulgate.

All Vulgates published over the course of a thousand years, both before and after the Gutenberg Bible (that is, from 405-1455), included Jerome’s prologues - including the Prologus Galaetus - in which Jerome wrote:

This prologue to the Scriptures may be appropriate as a helmeted introduction [galeatum principium] to all the books which we turn from Hebrew into Latin, so we may be able to know whatever is outside of these is set aside among the apocrypha. Therefore, Wisdom, which is commonly ascribed to Solomon, and the book of Jesus son of Sirach, and Judith and Tobias, and The Shepherd are not in the canon. I have found the First Book of the Maccabees (is) Hebrew, the Second is Greek, which may also be proven by their styles.

Luther adopted the same policy as Jerome, copying the assertions of canonicity from the only authorized Roman Catholic Bible.  The Council of Trent reversed itself on Jerome’s conclusion regarding these seven books as Apocrypha, recategorizing them as deuterocanonical two months after Luther’s death.  But many Roman Catholic pop theologians continue to promulgate the lie that “Luther removed books.” 

Satan is the father of lies.

Both the King James Version and the English Standard Version have translations of the apocryphal books. CPH has a study version of the ESV Apocrypha. We Lutherans typically make use of the Apocrypha, not for unilaterally establishing an article of faith (without corroboration from the homolegoumena), but liturgically. For example, the antiphon for the Introit to Pentecost used in my congregation (from the old NKJV propers during the LSB field testing) comes from Wisdom 1:7 and Psalm 68:3:

The Spirit of the Lord fills the world. Alleluia. Let the righteous be glad; Let them rejoice before God; yes, let them rejoice exceeding. Alleluia.

There are other Lutheran examples of the Apocrypha being used for Introits or Graduals during the church year.

Our own Lutheran confessions cite the Apocrypha: Tobit (3:8, 4:5, 11, 19) and 2 Maccabees (11:6, 15:14, 23) - the latter of which is described as “Scripture” (Ap 21:9).

Once again, ham-fisted Roman Catholic podcasting pop-apologists - arguing with a fallacious slovenliness by means of rhetorical slop that would make Aquinas blush and run to dissociate himself from them - rely on ignorance and the sweeping generalization fallacy to try to discredit their so-called separated brethren. In the long run, their imprecision, selective memory, and lurid arguments will backfire. Rhetoric decoupled from a factual foundation is just an unhinged lie. And in this day and age, such lies are easily exposed and refuted.

While the Roman Catholic Church is receiving an influx of younger Evangelicals, they are also suffering a lot of losses as well. They are desperate to keep people from looking too much under the hood. It speaks volumes that Mike Schmitz and other pop-apologists get into discussions about canonicity while never mentioning Jerome or the Vulgate - let alone ever getting around to quoting the Prologus Galeatus.

That is because they are engaging in their all-too-common strategy of argumentation called Bubulum Stercus.