Everette Ferguson on Catholic.com
Hello all:
I love it when I am searching for information about scripture through website sources that many in our churches wouldn’t touch with a ten foot poll, and then find little gems on those sites from scholars within Churches of Christ.
I was searching for information about the exclusion of the apocrypha from the Protestant Cannon when I found this quote, which is attributed to a book that Everette Ferguson edited, entitled “The Encyclopedia of Early Christianity.”
“The Septuagint was the Bible of the earliest church. The parting of the church from the synagogue was a bitter one. The Septuagint had been regarded as the inspired Word of God; . . . the synagogue rejected the Septuagint [c. 90-100] . . . the Church spread the Septuagint, together with its own writings contained in the New Testament, throughout the world in its missionary activities. The Greek Bible was translated into Latin, Coptic, Syriac, Ethiopic, Armenian, Georgian, Arabic and other languages. . . Until the Protestant Reformation, the canon of the Church was the larger canon of the Septuagint. The Septuagint has traditionally been used to restore the text of the Hebrew Bible where the latter is corrupt.”
The thread and post can be found here, it is post #18.
Enjoy
-Clarke

Daniel and the Dragon, circa 1372
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February 11th, 2007 at 15:00
A very interesting thread. Thanks for pointing it out. And it is interesting that Ferguson would be quoted as an authority on such a subject, given all the traditional authorities inside the Catholic church who could have been quoted.
February 21st, 2007 at 20:17
Ferguson is a widely respected historian of the early church. I have many of his works including the aformentioned Encyclopedia of Early Christianity (2 Volumes, Garland Press)
Shalom,
Bobby valentine