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Banned Books of The Bible
Banned Books of The Bible
Banned Books of The Bible
Though much has been forever lost, some of these books of the
Other Bible have been rescued from destruction. We owe a
great deal of gratitude to those freedom-loving and open-
minded Jews, Pacomian monks, Christians and Gnostics in
Eastern Europe, Egypt, Ethiopia, Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and
Armenia who risked much to translate and thus preserve many
of these Other Books for future generations, for all time to
come. In the case of the fifty books of the Nag Hammadi
library, there were Coptic parchments removed from a near-by
monastery library in Upper Egypt and buried in a large clay
storage jar not far from some caves near the Nile. This clay jar
ended up being a kind of time capsule that was unearthed one
thousand seven hundred years later.
Hey Jude!
Several other books that are now in Catholic Bibles were once
banned — books of “The Apocrypha”. Those were and are part
of the Greek Septuagint of Alexandria, literally the Old
Testament of the early church (including the book of Judith,
other women, also Tobit books of Maccabees, and some very
important books of Wisdom). The original King James Version
of the Bible in English published in 1611 contained those other
books, but now they have largely disappeared in the Protestant
world.
Wisdom Rejected
Even the Sentences of Sextus made the banned list. I really like
that one a lot. It’s a wonderful collection of proverbs, very
valuable. Parts of it were unearthed amongst the Nag Hammadi
library discovery in Upper Egypt a few decades back.