I am the only Catholic in a group of 30 serious protestants. They sit around and discuss their King James Bibles. They insist that the Catholic Church was changing the Bible by adding and deleting books to suit their own needs so King James standerdized the Bible to stop all of the false versions.
I know nothing of the history of the KJB or why the Catholic Church refused it. Can any one enlighten me? Thanks in advance.
Other members have well shown that it was always the Protestants who were
attempting to change the Bible by deleting books they did not like. Luther used
the Jєωιѕн practice as a model because it essentially accomplished what he had
in mind - you could say that Luther's faith (he was a Catholic priest, you know)
was corrupted by his study of Judaism.
One fact that has been missed here is that Luther tried to reject the book of St.
James because it says, "Faith without works is dead" (cf. Js. ii. 17, 20, 26). He
was using the Catholic principle, actually, whereby a book that contains one
'objectionable' thing is to be discarded wholesale. There were a number of
books the Church rejected from the Canon of Scripture on that basis, which is
why we ended up with the Catholic Latin Vulgate - the books that were free from
error. It is actually those books the Catholic Church rejected that are properly
called the Apocrypha! And Protestants try to hijack the term for their own use!
I had a professor who was teaching engineering mechanics say that in a
college setting - a class that had nothing to do with religion!
In the case of Luther, even though he wanted to exclude St. James (there are
still some extant copies of his early versions that are missing the book of James)
his friends convinced him that it was best to include it so as to not leave their
progeny with an indefensible act that would only serve to the demise of their
movement. For if one book of the NT could be rejected, then why not others? It
was one thing to copy the practice of the Jєωs in rejecting 7 books of the OT,
but to now start throwing out NT books was just too much. So he relented, and
included James, with
the plan to re-define what James means by "works" - a
controversy which has endured now for 500 years, fortunately.
This practice of boldly claiming that a word means something else was later
modified to subtly use a word repeatedly in a new context so as to redefine it
by a multitude of consistently different use. This was part of the heresy of
Modernism, and was employed most prodigiously by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
I saw a Protestant preacher recently (on video) saying "Not
works works,
but
works." Their nonsense is rather laughable.
Are you consciously attempting to convert them, Ekim? If not, or you are reasonably certain that any such attempt would likely fail, you should be studying the Scriptures with Catholics, using sound commentaries. It is a fact that Catholics were always prohibited from consorting with heretics.
The modern error of "dialogue" is a corrupting influence for Catholics who are
not sufficiently strong in their Faith to deal with the heresies afoot today.
Ekim, since as you say you know nothing of the history of the King James Version
(KJV) or why the Church "refused" it, you are really not qualified to represent the
Church among such a group. The reasonable expectation you should have is that
your own faith is subject to corruption by your attendance. I have seen several
well-intentioned Catholics gradually become less fervent and stop attending Mass
after having associated with Protestant "bible studies."
You have to keep in mind, they call it "bible study" but it is really no such thing.
What they are attempting to do is to re-interpret Scripture to suit their own
predilections. Protestants deny the authority of the Catholic Church, only to
make of themselves their own personal pope, to the effect that there are as
many Protestant belief systems as there are Protestants, and they do not find
it odd that they disagree with each other. It is tantamount to a rejection of the
truth.
For, when they come together for their "study"
their purpose is in presuming
from the start that no one has the truth, so they proceed to "discover" it, and they
always fail, because what they come up with is their own unique version of it,
suited to their own particular arrangement of corruption - that is, how they 'feel'
justified in their own favorite sins! And therefore, what they say is "God's word"
is not the truth, but their own personal corruption of the truth.