Two new works join the library together: The Defense of the New Testament and The Defense of the Old Testament — Books VII and VIII of Sixtus of Siena’s Bibliotheca Sancta (1566), in English for the first time.
These are the closing books of the Bibliotheca, and its most combative: Sixtus’s answer to those who have assailed the volumes of Scripture themselves. Book VII defends the New Testament through ten heresies — from the attacks on the New Testament in general, through each Gospel, the Acts, the epistles of Paul, Hebrews, and the Catholic epistles, to the Apocalypse. Book VIII defends the Old through thirteen — the books of the Law against the Manichaeans, the Prophets, the Psalms, Daniel, the Maccabees, and the rest — closing with the great defense of the Church’s translations and the Vulgate after Trent. For every heresy: its statement, its assertors named, the refutation, the heretics’ objections, and their dissolution.
Each book may be read online heresy by heresy or downloaded as a PDF with a clickable table of heresies, and as an EPUB for e-readers. With these, four of the Bibliotheca Sancta’s eight books are on the shelves, alongside the annotations of Books V and VI.