Some Papists remove them from the canon.
Some Papists remove them from the canon.
§ 237. [VIII] Some popes and Papists remove the Books of the Maccabees from the canon. Gregory the Great, Moral., bk. 19, c. 13: “We do not act inordinately about this matter if we proffer testimony from noncanonical books that nevertheless have been published for the edification of the Church.” Melchior Canus was moved by the clarity of this statement to admit (Locor., bk. 2, c. 10): “Gregory removed these books from the canon.” (But this Gregory was the bishop or pontiff of Rome, as they say today, whose judgment is infallible, according to the Papists.) Along with seventy bishops, Gelasius accepted only one Book of the Maccabees. William of Occam excludes these books from the canon (Dial., part 3, treatise 1, bk. 3, c. 16). Lyra, on Ezra 1: “They (the Books of the Maccabees) are not in the canon: neither among the Jews nor among the Christians.” He also admits: “The things that 2 Maccabees 2 contains cannot be reconciled with canonical Scripture.” Carolus Sigonius (Comm. in Severum Sulpitium) rejects the Books of the Maccabees from the canonical books because of their dissonance and seems to prefer the historian Justin to them. In De verbo Dei, bk. 1, c. 17, Bellarmine quotes and approves the statement of Josephus in Contra Apion. bk. 1: “The Hebrews do not have those books in the canon of Holy Scripture that were written after the time of Artaxerxes Longimanus, and he adds that Ezra indeed arranged the canon of sacred books, and his life extended beyond the time of Longimanus.” But now, the things described in the Books of the Maccabees occurred long after the time of Artaxerxes, around the 140th year of the monarchy of the Greeks, so Ezra could not have seen those books unless one imagines that he lived to be nearly three hundred years old.