WHY DOES THE ROMAN CATHOLIC BIBLE HAVE DIFFERENT BOOKS IN IT ?
If you look in the Roman Catholic Church Bible you will find that there are in it some books which are not in other Bibles. In order to understand why this is the came about we have to go back several centuries BC, to the time when the ups and downs of history had caused many of the Jews to leave their homeland and settle in Egypt. Some came as prisoners of war, others had come to find work. By the third century BC there was a flourishing community in Alexandria, and these Jews spoke Greek. Gradually their ancient writings were rendered into Greek for them, and the earliest example of the translators dilemma we have comes from this time. The book of Jesus, son of Sirach, which we find in the Apocrypha as “Ecclesiasticus” opens with the plea – “Be indulgent in cases where, despite our diligent labour in translating we may seem to have rendered some phrases imperfectly. For what was originally expressed in Hebrew does not have exactly the same sense when translated into another language”
