Category: Bible

A reader writes:

A Baptist friend told me it is wrong for a Christian to actively seek a wife.  He says the Bible teaches this when Jesus says, "Seek first His Kingdom, and all these things will be added unto you as well," and in the verse where Paul says that if a man is single, he shouldn’t desire to get married…"

Jimmy, is it true that the Bible teaches this?  My friend said we should only be concerned about the Kingdom, not getting a wife, and God might give one to us.  I feel it is my vocation to marry.  Would it be wrong to join an internet dating service?  Or place myself in situations where I can easily meet a woman (like a line-dancing club?)

First let’s deal with what St. Paul said.

He indicated that he felt it would be better for people not to marry because "those  who marry will have worldly troubles, and I would spare you that" (1 Cor. 7:28b). The fact that he was living in an age when Christians would be persecuted may play a role in that judgment.

Nevertheless, it is not an absolute judgment, for he had just said, "if you marry,  you do not sin, and if a girl marries she does not sin" (1 Cor. 7:28a). He also said: "I wish that all  were as I myself am. But each has his own special gift from God,  one of one kind and one of another. To the unmarried and  the widows I say that it is well for them to remain single as I do.  But if they cannot exercise self-control, they should  marry. For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion" (1 Cor. 7:7-9).

It therefore is not wrong for a person to want to get married or to take steps toward finding a spouse.

Now regarding what Jesus said, let’s look at the "seek first the kingdom" passage with a bit more context:

[D]o not be anxious,  saying, `What shall we eat?’ or `What shall we drink?’ or `What  shall we wear?’ For the Gentiles seek all these things;  and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all  these things shall be yours as well [Matt. 6:31-33].

By telling people to seek the kingdom first (having it as your highest priority) instead of being anxious about what we will eat or drink or wear, does Jesus mean that we should not take active steps to get food and drink and clothes for ourselves?

No, of course not.

Jesus is not saying that we should refuse to work or make money or buy, grow, or raise food and drink and clothes.

So he’s not saying that we shouldn’t take active steps toward procuring such things, he’s simply saying that we shouldn’t stress over them to the point that it takes our focus off of God.

The same thing thus applies to getting a wife: There is nothing wrong with desiring one or taking steps to find one as long as one is not led away from God and into sin in the process.

Arthur of The Ancient and Illuminated Seers of Bavaria writes:

What exactly is the purpose of the Epistle to Philemon?  Or more appropriately, why is included in the New Testament canon?

Obviously the central message of "treat your slaves well" was far more important in the Roman Empire 2000 years ago than it is now, but even that doesn’t seem to be enough to include it in canon.

After all the rest of Paul’s epsitles are quite obviously teaching documents and were meant as such, whereas Philemon comes across more as a personal letter from Paul with some advice to a friend about a sticky household problem.

And the fact that it was simply written by Paul doesn’t strike me as sufficient reason to include it either.  A man as prolific and erudite as Paul must have written hundreds of similar short notes to people he had met on his journeys, yet they were not saved let alone considered part of biblical canon.

I think there are at least three ways of answering this question. I’m sure there are more, but here are three:

1) The Patristic Answer: In the age of the Church Fathers, anything written by an apostle came to be regarded as an important document of the faith–as Scripture.

While Paul may have written other notes, his reputation in the apostolic age was not everywhere appreciated. Thus, he had a bunch of critics and opponents, even within the Church in his own lifetime. It also was easier to see him as a man when he was still living so that you could still . . . uh . . . see him as a man. Thus he wrote some documents whose value was not fully appreciated in his own day, and they were lost under the providence of God.

This is analogous to those works mentioned in the Old Testament–including prophetic works, like the History of Nathan the Prophet and the Prophecy of Ahijah the Shilonite and the Visions of Iddo the Seer–that were endorsed in the Hebrew Scriptures but were nevertheless lost in the end (cf. 2 Chron. 9:29).

For some reason, in both Testaments, God allowed apparent Scripture to be written that was not destined to be included in the final canon. Presumably these works had "short term missions" and were not meant to have the long term mission of being in the canon.

Or maybe God just allowed us to misuse our free will by losing stuff that would otherwise have benefitted us. (Though I doubt that when it comes to Scripture.)

In any event, had Paul’s other missives not been lost in his own lifetime, they would have been included in Scripture by the Christians of a generation or two later. Anything that had minimal theological content–anything other than a shopping list, let’s say–would have gone in by the time the canon was finalized. Apostolic authorship (plus minimal theological content) was enough for that.

But why did this missive survive when others didn’t?

2) The Individual Answer: In Philemon Paul is basically ordering-without-ordering Philemon to send Paul a slave named Onesimus, who had apparently run away from Philemon and then encountered Paul and become a Christian. Paul writes the letter to try to reconcile Onesimus with his master, but he also orders-without-ordering Philemon to send Onesimus back to him. He may even be hoping that Philemon will give Onesimus to Paul, who oculd then free him.

According to some of early Church writings, Onesimus later went on to become the bishop of Ephesus, and according to others, Philemon was bishop of Colossae. If either one of those is true then, since the Churches of Ephesus and Colossae were involved in the passing on of Paul’s epistles to other churches such that we have both a Letter to the Ephesians and a Letter to the Colossians in the New Testament, we have a route by which Philemon would have been preserved. It would have been important to the bishop of Ephesus or the bishop of Colossae (or both) and thus been preserved and disseminated along with the letters that were sent to these churches, so we have a route of preservation for this missive on the human level.

That still leaves,

3) The Theological Anwswer: While the overt message of Philemon may seem not-that-relevant to us in the 21st century in the developed world, where slavery has been abolished, we shouldn’t read its immediate relevance to us as a test for how relevant it would have been to others.

Slavery–in one form or another, with or without the name being attached to it–has been much more the norm than the exception in world history. It still exists legally in some parts of the world today, and it still exists illegally in others (including the United States). So its message would resonate for many people historically (and even today) much more than it would for most of us.

It would have especially resonated in the early Christian centuries since slavery was still legal at the time and–in fact–Christianity spread notably among the slave class.

Part of the reason for that was that Christianity carried the message of God’s compassion for the slave, which is the central theme of the book of Philemon.

"Treat your slaves well" may seem to be the obvious message of the book from a master’s point of view, but if you think about it from the slaves’ point of view, you get something else: "God loves you and has compassion on you and has given this letter to the Church to give your master a model for how to treat you with compassion and Christian charity."

This kind of message was in marked contrast to the way the religion of slaves was dealt with outside Christian circles. In Roman households, for example, slaves were often encouraged not to worship the gods directly but to show a kind of religious veneration for their masters (presumably this was to keep the slaves from complaining to the gods about what their masters were doing).

The Christian God, by contrast, wanted slaves to have a direct relationship to him, to become his children, to become "the Lord’s freedmen," and to be equal in the Church to their masters. As Philemon shows, God also wants their masters to show them human compassion and mercy even when they have run away from and (apparently) stolen from their masters.

All of this is a very big deal for anyone who has been a slave–and even for many who aren’t, such as people who, while legally free, are economically locked in to their jobs in a way that they cannot reasonably get out of them and go elsewhere for work.

It’s true that Philemon is not a straightforward book of teaching the way many of Paul’s epistles are, which is why it is classed among the "pastoral" epistles. But it shows how to address a pastoral situation in a way that reveals important principles that are of use not just in this particular situation but in others as well.

In this respect it is like a number of books in the Old Testament that represent wisdom literature–particularly Proverbs–that convey advice that contains important principles but that do not deliver straight law or theology.

It seems to me that, despite its brevity and obliqueness, Philemon is a clearer candidate for inclusion in the canon than certain other works, such as Ecclesiastes and Song of Solomon, both of which are so unusual compared to other books of Scripture that their canonicity was doubted in the ancient world.

Still, they contain elements that are the basis of fruitful reflection, and God apparently wants us to glorify him by using our intellects to wrestle with the questions posed by the material, including the question, "Why is this book here?"

A reader writes:

Being starved for Catholic radio out here in the Bay Area, I find myself turning to an Evangelical radio station during my commute. Today, I heard a commenter saying something like this: that it was clear that the old testament writers didn’t believe in an immortal soul. The bible teaches we will be raised from the dead to everlasting life, but it doesn’t mean that our souls are immortal, that is, that our souls are alive while our body is dead.  This is an idea that is more common in Greek philosophy, he explains, but is not biblical.

Have you ever heard this theory bandied about? How would you respond to that?

There are a number of different groups that have variations on this idea. The Jehovah’s Witnesses (who are not Protestant or even Christian), for example, hold a physicalistic understanding of the spirit that basically precludes its existence between death and resurrection (meaning that there are serious questions about wheter you are still you at the resurrection). That view is not common in Protestant circles, however.

More common in Protestant circles is the idea of "soul sleep," which is that you do have a soul that continues to exist between death and resurrection but that it does not have conscious experience in the interim and is thus "asleep." Luther seems to have held this view, as do Seventh-Day Adventists and a few other groups, but it has been quite uncommon.

MORE INFO ON THESE TWO VIEWS HERE.

I can’t tell from what you said whether the gentleman you heard on the radio was saying that the Old Testament writers didn’t believe in an immortal soul or whether he was saying that it is untrue that there is an immortal soul.

These two positions are not the same. One could hold that the Old Testament authors did not believe in the immortality of the soul because this doctrine had not yet been revealed but–since it has been revealed in the New Testament–we now know what they didn’t.

If he meant this latter position then I would say he at least has part of a leg to stand on. The idea of the afterlife is not sharply defined in the Old Testament, and it is not clear what most Jews believed about the afterlife at this time. Indeed, they may not all have believed the same thing. The Old Testament spends very little time discussing the afterlife; it is focused primarily on salvation from dangers in this life rather than salvation from hell after this life, so we don’t have enough data to draw firm conclusions about the particulars of how the afterlife was conceived in this period.

We do have enough data, however, to establish that at least some Jews (and almost certainly the great majority) did at least acknowledge the existence of the afterlife.

For example, the fact that, when various patriarchs die, they are regularly said to be "gathered to their people" suggests a reunion with those who have died. That phrase is a little ambiguous, though, but here is something that is not: If belief in an afterlife was not common among the Jewish people then God wouldn’t have had to warn them against using mediums and spiritists to call up the dead.

There also is at least one passage in which the fate of a particular figure is prophecied and it describes the descent of his soul and its encounter with other souls, who recognize who it, is described. That occurs in the prophets, so one could interpret it non-literally, but one passage that is not vulnerable to this objection is the situation in which Saul has the witch of Endor summon up the spirit of the departed Samuel.

I know that there have been some (more out of a desire to say you can’t call up the dead than anything else) who have speculated that it was a demon impersonating Samuel, but this is not the way the text depicts the situation. The text presents it straightforwardly, as if the witch really did call up Samuel’s spirit (presumably by a kind of divine dispensation, since Samuel immediately prophesies Saul’s doom, which then comes to pass).

Whether or not it really was Samuel’s spirit, the passage attests to Israelite belief in the afterlife–and not just any kind of afterlife, but on in which the soul continues to exist between death and resurrection. If that’s not what you believe then there’s not point in trying to contact a dead guy.

So if the gentleman you heard on the radio was saying denying the presence in the Old Testament of belief in this kind of afterlife then he was overstating matters. It would be more defensible to say that the concept of the afterlife was not clearly defined in this age and that there may have been some Jews who did not accept it (just as some Jews did not accept the exclusive worship of God), but to say that the idea is foreign to the Old Testament is simply inaccurate.

If the gentleman was going further and saying that we do not have souls that exist between death and resurrection then he will have insuperable problems when it comes to the New Testament, because Jesus’ parable of Lazarus and the rich man clearly envisions conscious human souls in the intermediate state. The fact that this is a parable also is not an issue, for even if there was not a specific Lazarus and a specific rich man who had this experience (something that is likely), Jesus’ parables nevertheless are populated by things from the real world. They are about kings and merchants and fields and farmers and servants and sums of money and other things–like conscious, departed human souls–that really exist.

Even if he wanted to be truculent on this one, he’d also have to face the book of Revelation, which unambiguously depicts departed human souls, before the resurrection, worshipping God and talking with him in the intermediate state.

The idea that we don’t exist or are not conscious between death and resurrection simply is not tenable.

By the way, since the gentleman was Protestant he wouldn’t accept this, but it’s worth pointing out that the second book of Maccabees also has a very explicit passage on the reality and consciousness of departed souls, for Judah Maccabee receives a vision in which he learns that the departed (and unresurrected) prophet Jeremiah prays for the people of Israel. Judah also sees the soul of a departed priest in this vision.

A reader writes:

Dear Sir,

What is the Korban Rule, and why does James White make such a big deal about it when he speaks of sola scriptura?

This came up in Mark chapter 7 when some Pharisees attacked the fact that Jesus’ disciples at with unwashed hands, contrary to the tradition of the Jewish elders.

Their having made tradition an issue, Jesus turned the subject around on them by pointing to their own misuse of tradition, and he cited the korban custom just mentioned, stating that it violated the Ten Commandments, which require us to honor our parents and, by implication, support them in their old age so that they do not become financially destitude (which was the fate of almost anybody back then whose children didn’t care for them once they could no longer work).

He therefore concluded that they were "making void the word of God through your tradition" (Mark 7:13) and stated "You leave the commandment of God, and hold  fast the tradition of men" (Mark 7:8).

I haven’t read or heard specifically what James White may have been doing with this passage, but it is a staple of Protestant anti-Catholic apologetics.

The reason is that in this passage Jesus sets the korban tradition in opposition to the word of God and this is frequently taken as an indicator that all tradition is opposed to the word of God or that there is a fundamental opposition between tradition and Scripture.

It is thus common to hear Protestant ministers and apologists waxing eloquent on this passage–and even getting emotionally worked up from the pulpit or behind the microphone about how horrible a thing it is to set tradition above the word of God–and how we must therefore cling to the precious principle of sola scriptura or "by Scripture only."

The problem, of course, is that this argument commits the logical fallacy of hasty generalization.

The fact that in this passage Jesus says that particular aspects of Pharisaical tradition are contrary to God’s word does not mean that all traditions are contrary to God’s word. Nor does it say that we must use Scripture only and not Tradition. The fact that one tradition or one set of traditions must be excluded does not mean that all traditions must be excluded.

This conclusion is made even more clear when one realizes that the New Testament praises other traditions, which are in harmony with God’s word.

Thus Paul tells the Corinthians, "I commend you because you remember me in everything and maintain the traditions even as I have delivered them to you" (1 Cor. 11:2), and he commands the Thessalonians, "So then, brethren, stand firm and hold to the traditions which you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by letter" (2 Thess. 2:15). He even goes so far as to order, "Now we command you, brethren, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you keep away from any brother who is living in idleness and not in accord with the tradition that you received from us" (2 Thess. 3:6).

Paul also seeks to ensure that the apostolic traditions would be passed down after the deaths of the apostles, and he tells Timothy, "[W]hat you have heard from me before many witnesses entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also" (2 Tim. 2:2). In this passage he refers to the first four generations of apostolic succession—his own generation, Timothy’s generation, the generation Timothy will teach, and the generation they in turn will teach.

So from the perspective of the New Testament, Pharisaical tradition was unreliable and could be contrary to the word of God (not that it always was), while apostolic Tradition was normative and binding for Christians.

By the way, you may have some difficulty making some of these points to a Protestant who is using the New International Version. That translation displays a prominent bit of translator bias when it comes to rendering the term for "tradition" in the Greek text (paradosis). Whenever the term is used in conjunction with Jewish traditions, it renders the word "tradition(s)", but when it is used in connection with apostolic tradition (as in the passages above), it mistranslates the word as "teaching(s)." The net effect is to make tradition sound bad by hiding the positive references to it and using the word in passages where it is subject to critique.

No, that’s not the title of a Lovecaft story. It’s something that you yourself may suffer from. Many people have fears of things–phobias–that they don’t know the clinical names for. Any such fear is, for that person, a nameless fear.

It sometimes happens that a person has a fear of something very, very specific, and they may thing "There can’t be a special name for this phobia," but you might be surprised.

Let’s give a name to a fear that many people have but don’t know the name of.

Yesterday was June 6, 2006, or 6/6/06.

I did a blog post about it.

The post was titled 666.

Did you find yourself scrolling down past that post quickly? Avoiding looking at it? Did it make you feel nervous?

If so, then you have

HEXAKOSIOIHEXEKONTAHEXAPHOBIA.

If you need that syllabificated, it’s

Hex-a-ko-si-oi-hex-e-kon-ta-hex-a-pho-bi-a.

And now that fear ain’t nameless anymore.

Folks may have heard about Elaine Pagels, who is most famed as the author of The Gnostic Gospels (not the Gnostic gospels themselves, but a book by the same name). She is billed as an expert in Gnosticism and early Christianity and has recently been used as the go-to gal for the MSM wanting juicy pro-heresy quotes on subjects like The Da Vinci Code and the Gospel of Judas.

HERE’S AN ARTICLE BY FR. PAUL MANKOWSKI AT THE PONTIFICAL BIBLICAL INSTITUTE ARGUING THAT ELAINE PAGELS IS  NO SCHOLAR.

EXCERPTS:

Pagels has carpentered a non-existent quotation, putatively from an ancient source, by silent suppression of relevant context, silent omission of troublesome words, and a mid-sentence shift of 34 chapters backwards through the cited text, so as deliberately to pervert the meaning of the original. While her endnote calls the quote "conflated," the word doesn’t fit even as a euphemism: what we have is not conflation but creation.

Put simply, Irenaeus did not write what Prof. Pagels wished he would have written, so she made good the defect by silently changing the text. Creativity, when applied to one’s sources, is not a compliment. She is a very naughty historian.

Or she would be, were she judged by the conventional canons of scholarship. At the post-graduate institute where I teach, and at any university with which I am familiar, for a professor or a grad student intentionally to falsify a source is a career-ending offense. Among professional scholars, witness tampering is no joke: once the charge is proven, the miscreant is dismissed from the guild and not re-admitted.

I am not calling for academic sanctions but, more simply, for clarification. Pagels should be billed accurately — not as an expert on Gnosticism or Coptic Christianity but as what she is: a lady novelist.

Ouch!

It’s nice to see Catholic news sources getting the message out there that all the "Gospel of Judas" hype is, well, hype.

HERE’S A GOOD PIECE FROM ZENIT.

AND ANOTHER FROM CATHOLIC NEWS SERVICE.

One of the refreshing things about these pieces is how utterly contemptuous the experts being interviewed are about hullabaloo over the Gospel of Judas.

When asked whether the document will "shake Christistianity to its foundations," the Zenit expert replies:

Certainly not. The Gnostic gospels, of which there are many besides this one, are not Christian documents per se, since they proceed from a syncretistic sect that incorporated elements from different religions, including Christianity.

From the moment of their appearance, the Christian community rejected these documents because of their incompatibility with the Christian faith.

The CNS expert is even more blunt:

"It was junk then and it is junk now," he said.

A reader writes:

I had the TV on last night on a BBC channel (I’m in Italy right now on vacation and its one of the few English channels I have) and I saw an ad for a TV show on the Gospel of Judas Iscariot and how it could shake the foundations of Christianity and turn everything we know about Jesus upside-down (I’m paraphrasing).  Its obvious that this is shameless sensationalism in the vein of the Da Vinci Code, but I was wondering what you know about the text they are refering to?

I’ve been aware of the so-called "Gospel of Judas" for some time, and rumor is that it’ll be released by Easter.

In fact, the National Geographic Channel is going to be doing a special on it on April 9th at 8 p.m. (Eastern?), apparently.

Here’s the scoop:

In the second century there was a non-canonical work that was known as "the Gospel of Judas," and it was used by a sect of Gnostics called the Cainites who Irenaeus attacked in his work Against Heresies. According to Irenaeus,

Others [i.e., the Cainites] again declare that Cain derived his being from the Power above, and acknowledge that Esau, Korah, the Sodomites, and all such persons, are related to themselves. On this account, they add, they have been assailed by the Creator, yet no one of them has suffered injury. For Sophia was in the habit of carrying off that which belonged to her from them to herself. They declare that Judas the traitor was thoroughly acquainted with these things, and that he alone, knowing the truth as no others did, accomplished the mystery of the betrayal; by him all things, both earthly and heavenly, were thus thrown into confusion. They produce a fictitious history of this kind, which they style the Gospel of Judas [Against Heresies 1:31:1].

Despite being mentioned here, the Gospel of Judas was lost to history, but a copy of it (or, rather, of most of it) turned up on the antiquities market in the latter half of the 20th century. It was finally purchased and has been undergoing translation and preparation for publication in the last few years.

With Da Vinci madness in the air, I’m sure that the Gospel of Judas will be all over the airwaves and the Net once it’s finally published (possibly next week), so the time is ripe to do a heads-up on it.

It’ll all be much ado about not much, though, because this thing ain’t written by the historical Judas. It’s a second century forgery (assuming that it’s not a 20th century forgery of a forgery) that will tell us more about hte beliefs of certain Gnostics than it will about the events of Christ’s life.

It has historical value insofar as it is used to learn more about early Gnosticism. But the press’ll misrepresent the story, breathlessly wondering "What if it’s true?" when it just ain’t true. The press’ll try to press it into service as a window into the ministry of Jesus, and that’s precisely what it’s not.

So, forewarned is forearmed.

MORE FROM WIKIPEDIA.

MORE FROM A SITE DEVOTED TO WHAT IS CURRENTLY KNOWN ABOUT IT, INCLUDING TRANSLATIONS OF SOME PASSAGES.

I always get depressed when I read stories like the following one.

SCIENTISTS SPECULATE THAT FLOATING ICE COULD HAVE EXPLAINED JESUS WALKING ON WATER.

The theory is that conditions could have been such that ice could have formed in the saltwater springs near Tabgha in the Sea of Galilee and

With such conditions, a floating patch of ice could develop above the plumes resulting from the salty springs along the lake’s western shore in Tabgha. Tabgha is the town where many archeological findings related to Jesus have been found.

"We simply explain that unique freezing processes probably happened in that region only a handful of times during the last 12,000 years," said Doron Nof, a Florida State University Professor of Oceanography. "We leave to others the question of whether or not our research explains the biblical account."

Nof figures that in the last 120 centuries, the odds of such conditions on the low latitude Lake Kinneret are most likely 1-in-1,000. But during the time period when Jesus lived, such “spring ice” may have formed once every 30 to 60 years.

Yeah, right. Big deal.

There are all kinds of ways to rationalize biblical miracles–the burning bush only seemed to burn because there was a natural gas-emitting fissure that had ignited behind it, the miracle of the loaves and the fishes was really a "miracle of sharing," yadda, yadda, yadda.

Sheesh!

Look, I’m all for recognizing that not everything in Scripture is meant by the authors to be taken literally, but we can’t simply dismiss miraculous occurrences in this fashion, especially not in documents that were written as close to the historical events in question as the gospels (within the lifetime of the eyewitnesses and even by eyewitnesses).

The fact is that there are Aramaic and Greek words for "ice," and if Jesus had been walking on it, the Evangelists could have said so. Even if the ice was hard to see, Peter would have been aware of it, because he got out and stood on the water, at least momentarily.

The gospels also depict Jesus walking on the water, not standing and floating along on something.

This just isn’t the picture of the event that the Gospels give us.

Not that that’ll stop some avant garde priests from using the theory in homilies.

A reader writes:

I’ve always got the impression that the Catholic Old Testament is translated from the Septuagint, while the Protestant Bible’s Old Testament is translated from the Masoretic texts. The virtues of this being (A) that the apostles and Christ quoted mainly from the Septuagint, and (B) the Septuagint was translated from older and maybe more accurate versions of the books than what the Jews had in 70 AD. But — at least in a cursory glance, comparing with some Septuagint quotes online — aside from "a virgin shall give birth," all the cited passages in my Catholic Bibles seem to be what’s given as the Masoretic translation. Is this the case?

First a bit of terminology for those who may not be familiar: The Septuagint (LXX) is the major Greek translation of the Old Testament. It was produced between the third and first centuries B.C. and is extensively quoted in the New Testament. The great majority of times that the New Testament quotes from the Old, it’s the LXX version that is being used.

Originally, the term "Septuagint" just referred to the main Greek translation of the five books of Moses (Genesis-Deuteronomy), which were allegedly put into Greek by 70 scholars in Alexandria, Egypt. This is where the name "Septuagint" came from and why the Roman numeral for 70 (LXX) is used as an abbreviation for the translation. Over time (before the first century), it came to include all of the books of the Old Testament, including the deuterocanonicals.

The Masoretic Text (MT) is the main Hebrew edition of the Old Testament. It was prepared between the seventh and tenth centuries A.D. based on earlier Hebrew manuscripts. It does not include the deuterocanonical books.

It’s true that the LXX has an important role in Catholic translations of the Old Testament, but they generally are not straightforward translations from the LXX.

Until recently, most Catholic versions of the Old Testament were translated (primarily) from the Latin Vulgate rather than from the LXX or the MT. They might be based on the Vulgate using the LXX and the MT for purposes of comparison (e.g., to decide between disputed renderings), but the Vulgate was the base text used by most Western Catholics. (It’s different among Eastern Catholics.)

The Vulgate was based on the (pre-Masoretic) Hebrew text, the LXX, and the Old Latin Version.

It was in the 20th century that a significant number of translations started to be made from pre-Latin sources. This was encouraged by Pius XII in his encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu.

When this started happening, Catholic translators relied on a combination of the LXX and the MT.

The canon of the Catholic Old Testament is based on the LXX, so that’s the top level where the LXX is employed in making translations. (In the ancient world, both the LXX and the Hebrew scriptures had fuzzy boundaries about what books they included, but a few centuries after Christ the Catholic Church settled on one LXX-derived canon and in about the same timeframe the Jewish community settled on one Hebrew canon, which was later used to prepare the MT.)

Some of the books of the Catholic Old Testament seem to have been written as part of the developing LXX tradition (e.g., Wisdom, 2 Maccabees), and so there are no earlier versions. For these, Catholic translators use the LXX since there is no MT equivalent of these books.

Other books of the Catholic Old Testament were based on earlier versions in Hebrew or Aramaic but have survived primarily in the LXX (e.g., Sirach). For these Catholic translators tend to use primarily the LXX, but they may also consult the original language versions to the extent that these have been recovered by archaeology (e.g., the Hebrew version of Tobit).

Still other books are found in both the LXX and the MT. Here recent Catholic translators have tended to use the MT as their base text, using also the LXX and the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) for purposes of comparison.

The base text is just a starting point for the translators of major editions of the Old Testament, though. The goal is not to translate what is in the base text but to produce a translation that best reflects what the originals most likely said. This means going with what is in alternative sources (like the LXX and DSS) whenever it appears that the reading in the alternative source is more likely the original reading.

In some passages, it appears that what the MT has is the most original; in others it seems like the LXX or the DSS may better preserve the original.

How this gets sorted out is a complex process, but it’s part of the burden that scholars have to shoulder in an effort to get past the manuscript variation we are confronted with and try to arrive at the original readings. Scholars also disagree, coming to different conclusions or making different choices about what readings should be used. Generally they try to note major alternate readings in the footnotes.

This is not unique to Catholic scholars. Though many Protestant translations lack the deuterocanonicals, Protestant translators are confronted with the same set of questions regarding which readings best reflect the original, and so major Protestant translations of the Old Testament also use a hodge-podge approach to which text to follow in a particular passage (MT, LXX, DSS, or something else). They also generally note major alternate readings in the footnotes.

The major difference is that they let the MT control what they consider canonical.

Hope this clarifies things by muddying them!