Has anyone noticed that mainstream Catholic Bibles now completely agree (in terms of book names) with the Protestants? Sure, they might have a few extra books than a protestant bible. They might have less heresy and deliberate mistranslations. But they still call the last book "Revelation".
Anything to get along with our "separated brethren", eh?
...
It's Paralipomenon, not Chronicles
Apocalypse, not Revelation
1-4 Kings, not 1-2 Samuel and 1-2 Kings
Osee, not Hosea
Tobias, not Tobit
Esdras, not Ezra
and others.
The recent editions called
Catholic make several concessions toward the Protestants, besides the names of the books like you have noted.
So-called new Catholic editions have adopted the Protestant numbering of the Psalms, for example, such that a given Psalm according to the King James will generally be off by one; a typical example being "the 23rd Psalm, The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures... He restoreth my soul..."
In the Douay-Rheims, that's Psalm 22, and the words are different: "The Lord ruleth me: and I shall want nothing. He hath set me in a place of pasture... He hath converteth my soul..." I guess Prots don't like the idea of their soul being converted by God. They'd rather God just "restore" them.
Psalms 1-8 are numbered the same, but 9 is split into two (they say it was "too long"), so that 10 becomes 11, and up to around 100 they're one ahead in the new editions. Then other changes are introduced to make the numbers two off for a while, then later one off again and finally ending up with Psalm 150 being the same, such that the Protestant (and new "Catholic") end up with 150 total. This makes for difficulties in finding text when you have the wrong number.
One prominent example is Psalm 95:5, "For all the gods of the Gentiles are devils..." The Prot version is Psalm 96:5 and says, "For all the gods of the peoples are worthless idols..." More on "idols" later.
There are 3 major spots in Bibles to check for Catholicity: Genesis 3:15, Isaias 7:14, and Luke 1:28. They all are in regards to Our Lady, which the Protestants dispute, of course.
Genesis 3:15 - ...
She shall crush thy head and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel.Isaias 7:14 - Behold a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and his name shall be called Emmanuel....
Luke 1:28 -
...Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.That's the Catholic ones. The Prot versions have several different wordings, which generally shortchange the role of the Virgin Mother of God:
King James Version (KJV)
Gen 3:15 - And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed;
it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.The Scriptures (ISR 1998)
Isaiah 7:15 - Look, the maiden conceives and gives birth to a Son...
New International Version (NIV)
Luke 1:28 -
“...Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.” While the KJV is fairly accurate in the places where the OT has the Ten Commandments, in their Bible Study classes they have re-grouped the 10 to make the First Commandment into two (like with Psalm 9) and then re-combining the Ninth and Tenth Commandments into one so they end up with 10, not 11 Commandments.
The purpose of that sly move is to criticize Catholics for having statues and stained glass windows in church, giving the iconoclasts an excuse to smash them all. For they say the "second commandment" is Thou Shalt Not Make Any Graven Image..." That's where they say Catholics worship false idols, like marble and bronze sculptures, oil paintings and other fine art. Of course, Protestants have no problem going to the J. Paul Getty Museum and oggling a Van Gogh they bought for $58 million. That's ART, not "worship."
That changes Commandments 2-9 by one number (2 -> 3, 3 -> 4...), such that nobody knows anymore what you're talking about when you say "the fourth commandment" or the 5th or the 6th or the 8th or the 9th. For example, in Catholic sermons that refer to
sins against the 6th and 9th Commandments, Protestants are utterly lost because they think that means "Thou Shalt Not Kill" and "Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness Against Thy Neighbor."
Forgive me if this post is going into too much detail for the topic of book titles, but it seems to me that when you start to adopt the newfangled names of the Bible books, it is implied that you are likewise adopting the fine print contained under those changed titles.
While the KJV retains the same words in Isaias 7:14 as the Douay-Rheims, already there is the principle of CHANGE that is accepted and now we see, 400 years later, that all manner of changes have come to Bible editions, and change
per se has become the norm.