How did Catholic and Orthodox churches respond to Luther's placement of books in the Apocrypha during the Reformation?
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Executive summary
Martin Luther relocated the books later called the deuterocanonical books into an intertestamental “Apocrypha” section and described them as useful but not equal to Holy Scripture, prompting sharp pushback from Rome—culminating in the Council of Trent’s 1546 formal affirmation of those books as canonical—and a steadier, less polemical continuity from the Eastern Orthodox, which continued to treat the Septuagint tradition as authoritative [1] [2] [3].
1. Luther’s move: reordering and reclassification, not wholesale deletion
Luther included the deuterocanonical books in his German Bible but placed them between the Old and New Testaments and prefaced them with a remark that they are “not held equal to the Scriptures, but are useful and good to read,” effectively treating them as secondary scripture rather than expunging them outright [1] [4] [2]. His wider canon preferences also showed skepticism about several New Testament books—what later scholars labelled his Antilegomena—and he drew on the Hebrew canon and doctrinal concerns (e.g., passages supporting prayers for the dead) to explain why some texts should not determine doctrine [3] [5].
2. Rome’s response: Trent’s definitive counterpunch
The Roman Catholic Church reacted institutionally and doctrinally: after decades of Reformation controversy the Council of Trent (1545–63) issued an “infallible” definition in 1546 that affirmed the deuterocanonical books as part of the Old Testament canon, a direct reply to Protestant challenges and to Luther’s public reclassification [2]. Catholic apologists and historians present Trent as a restoration and clarification of long-standing church practice and as a necessary rebuttal to what they portray as Protestant arbitriness in removing or demoting books [6] [7].
3. Catholic nuance before and after Trent: internal debate mattered
The narrative that Catholics uniformly held a fixed canon until Luther is overstated in polemical accounts; medieval Latin usage varied and some scholars and editions (e.g., parts of the medieval Bible tradition and the Complutensian Polyglot) had already treated the secondary books with distinctions, which Trent nevertheless closed off by a formal pronouncement in the sixteenth century [8] [2]. Catholic responses therefore combined institutional dogma (Trent) with continued rhetorical arguments that Protestants had undermined the “universal” tradition by reclassifying texts for doctrinal reasons [6].
4. The Orthodox stance: continuity and selective engagement
The Eastern Orthodox Churches did not follow Luther’s reclassification; their canon traditions rested on a broader Septuagintal set and later synodal affirmations (for example, material consolidated in the Synod of Jerusalem in the seventeenth century), so the deuterocanonical books remained part of Orthodox Scripture rather than being demoted to “Apocrypha” [3] [2]. Orthodox reactions in the sixteenth century were less centralized than Rome’s and involved dialogues and correspondence with Protestants—Lutheran attempts to reach Eastern Christians met theological and ecclesiastical resistance but did not produce a shift in Orthodox canon practice [9].
5. Motives, accusations, and the politics of canon
Both sides framed the dispute strategically: Reformers appealed to the Hebrew canon and to perceived doctrinal errors in the deuterocanonicals (for instance, 2 Maccabees and prayers for the dead) to justify demotion, while Catholics accused Protestants of selectively excising material that conflicted with Reformation theology and used Trent to reassert ecclesial authority [10] [5] [6]. Contemporary and later polemics—apologetic blogs and pamphlets cited here—reflect that both camps have tended to read motives into the other’s actions, sometimes amplifying conflict beyond the more complex historical record [7] [11].
6. Limits of the record and lingering pluralities
Sources emphasize that the sixteenth-century reality was not monolithic: there were competing canon traditions and scholarly hesitations in earlier centuries, Lutheran confessions did not exhaustively define a strict Protestant canon, and the Orthodox churches maintained a different but internally consistent canon practice; the documents cited underline Trent’s decisive institutional role but also reveal ongoing debates in scholarship and confessional memory [1] [4] [2]. Where primary archival evidence or specific Orthodox synodal texts are not reproduced here, that gap is acknowledged rather than filled by assertion.