The best free Bible software in the world!

Check out e-sword.net. This the best free Bible software available. The only Catholic translations available in it are the Douay-Rheims and the Vulgate (which is in Latin). But the ESV is a very good translation and is available, without the deuterocanonical books. E-sword also has the original King James Version available with the deuterocanonicals at the end.

FYI: Deuterocanonical books are the ones that Catholics, Orthodox, Episcopalians and some Lutherans have in their Bibles, but other Protestants don’t have these books. Weird, I know. The books were booted by Martin Luther because they were not preserved in Hebrew, only in Greek translation and they were rejected by the “Council of Jamnia.” The Council of Jamnia was a convention of Jewish rabbis after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD. Historians are not sure whether the event even happened, but they rejected the deuterocanonical books. They include parts of Daniel and Esther, 1 and 2 Maccabees, Baruch, Sirach (a.k.a. Ecclesiasticus), Wisdom, Tobit and Judith. All of these books are in the Septuagint (LXX) the 3rd Century BC Greek translation of the Old Testament. Whew, that’s a lot of info in a tiny space. Oh yeah, Catholics have always kept the deuterocanonical books since the Canon (the list of biblical books) was formed in the 3rd and 4th centuries. No one removed them from the Christian Bible until Luther.

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