DEUTEROCANONICAL BOOKS

The Deuterocanonical books are the seven books Tobit, Judith, First Maccabees, Second Maccabees, Wisdom, Sirach, and Baruch plus the additional texts in Esther and Daniel that are found in the Catholic Old Testament but not in the Hebrew canon.

The Hebrew canon is the list of books that comprise the present day Jewish Bible. These are called the protocanonical books. "Proto" means first whereas "deutero" means second. Sixtus of Siena (152O-1569 AD) was a Biblical scholar and a Jewish convert to Catholicism. He was the first to call the seven additional books together with the longer editions of Esther and Daniel that the Christians had in their Old Testament the "Deuterocanonical" books, but when he did this, he did not intend that one list was more certain or more inspired than the other, but merely that there were two lists. Although there canonicity was questioned by some in the early church they are equally inspired.

SAINT JEROME

Saint Jerome was commissioned by the Pope to put all the books of the Bible into one collected work during the fourth century. His work is called the "Vulgate" which means vernacular. Latin was the common language of that time in the Roman Empire.

Initially Jerome was against including the Deuterocanonical Books as seen in in his Preface to Kings. However, he changed his mind as witnessed by the fact that he worked on translating the Deuterocanonicals and included them in his work, the Vulgate. This is further verfied by his explicit testimony in the Prefaces to Tobit and Judith.