“The new Bible translated into Turkish, including the deuterocanonical books, was published on 20 November”. News of the new Turkish Bible was broken to SIR by Father Domenico Bertogli, parish priest of the church of Saints Peter and Paul at Antakya (Turkey). “It’s an important event he said because hitherto there was only the Bible translated by the Protestants, from which these apocryphal books were excluded”. The books in question are seven books of the Old Testament, Tobit, Judith, Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch and Maccabees Books I and II, and seven books of the New Testament, the Letters to the Hebrews, the Second and Third Letter of John, the Second Letter of Peter, James, Jude, and Revelation. “In August 2001 the Protestants themselves published a new version of the Bible in modern Turkish and agreed to include in it the apocryphal books already translated in a separate book by Father Luigi Iannitto, conventual Franciscan, in 1987”. Apart from the dueterocanonical books, the new edition of the Bible (1827 pages) also contains the apocryphal books of the Armenian Church, such as the third and fourth books of Maccabees. “Ecumenical dialogue concludes Bertogli is now enriched with a fundamental tool for continuing our path towards unity”.
