My first question has something to do with the Bible books. Protestants removed the deuterocanonicals, they like to call it apocryphal, meaning secret or hidden. But it's not actually.
When Christianity began, the early Christians only had the Jewish Scriptures; what we call the Old Testament. The Jewish world was divided into two kinds of Jews: those that lived in the Holy Land, and those that lived outside, known as the "diaspora." Most of the Jews outside the Holy Land spoke Greek, not Hebrew, and so they used a Greek translation of their Scriptures called the Septuagint. In the Holy Land their Scriptures were in Hebrew. The Septuagint had 7 more books than the Hebrew scriptures, mainly books telling stories of their people's history so that they would not forget. Jews outside the Holy Land also observed feasts and holidays for an extra day longer than Jews in the Holy Land; being a Jew in a foreign land required you to do extra to maintain your cultural identity.
When Christianity began spreading outside of the Holy Land, Greek became the common language; this is why the writings of the New Testament were almost all written in Greek. The early Christians therefore used the longer Greek Septuagint for their Scriptures because Jew and Gentile alike could read it, and this became the primary translation of the Old Testament the Church used from the earliest days. If you look up the oldest Bibles still in existence, from just a couple hundred years after Christ, you will see that they contain the deuterocanonical books just like Catholic Bibles do today. All Bibles had these books until Martin Luther translated the Bible into German, and decided to use the Hebrew version of the Old Testament to translate into German, and so he removed those seven books; this is why they are not in Protestant Bibles. It is useful, too, because 2 Maccabees gives good Scriptural support for purgatory and praying for the dead. He wanted to remove the Gospel of John, the Letter of James, and the Book of Revelation but his fellow Reformers argued against it. Why? He claimed they weren't Scripture, but if you think about it John gives the strongest Scripture evidence for Catholic belief in the Eucharist, and James says "faith without works is dead."
My next questions is that if God forbids statues, why do Roman Catholic church have statues.
Why do we have statues? Leah, do you have photographs of loved ones in your room? Churches have had statues for centuries to remind us of the saints and of Jesus, to help us remember that they were real people. In ancient times there were no photographs, so you had a painting or a statue made of an important person. Many cultures still make statues of famous or important people; why wouldn't we do that for the most important people of all: Jesus, Mary, and the saints? The commandment against graven images is only against images that are made to be worshipped; Catholics do not worship statues. If making statues of holy things at all was against God's commandment, why did the Temple have statues of trees, animals, and even angels and cherubim? Even the Ark of the Covenant had two statues of cherubim on it.
The Protestant study Bible is different from the Roman Catholic. Because of the interpretation. My Protestant churchmates said Jesus has siblings. So what is really the truth?
Regarding Jesus' brothers and sisters: There are two main ways to explain what this means. In the Hebrew language there is no word for cousin, step-sibling, or half-sibling. Remember how Jacob had 12 sons? They all referred to one another as "brother" and never as "half-brother," even though Joseph, for example, was born of a different mother. Even Abraham refers to his nephew Lot as his brother! This is because in that culture your close relatives were seen as your siblings; you likely even grew up with them, possibly in the same house or at least the same neighborhood. It is most likely that the "brothers and sisters" of Jesus were either half or step-siblings from a previous marriage Joseph was in before becoming Mary's husband (hence why Joseph is sometimes depicted in art as being much older looking than Mary) or they were His cousins, whom He would have seen as being His brothers and sisters though they had different parents.
So that's it. I hope that you also have found the answers to your questions. If you have questions never be afraid to ask.
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