History of the Apocrypha in the Biblical Canon — Stephen Russell — Ep. 067

Hello everybody, welcome back to another episode of Anabaptist Perspectives. I'm here with Steven Russell. You've spent a lot of time studying church history. You teach that here at Faith Builders. That's where we are right now in one of your classrooms. And we're going to dive into a topic that's maybe, I don't know if you could say a lightning rod, but very misunderstood, and there's a lot of controversy around. We did another episode with David Berso on this, but that is the Apocrypha. And we've, especially since you've studied a lot of history, can you go into more of what is the Apocrypha and when was it written and just some of the content? Give us a backdrop for this.

Okay. The Old Testament ends about 420 BC, and that's with the prophet Malachi. And then, well, there is a way John the Baptist is also seen as an Old Testament prophet. So in a way, you could say he's a continuation. But anyway, between him and Malachi, there's 400 silent years. And the Jewish people were extremely aware of this. And they knew that they didn't have a prophet, but they knew they should. And so they were expecting the prophet that Deuteronomy talks about, that I think Jesus was. They were expecting the Messiah. But they were very aware. They didn't know all that they ought to. And during that 400 years of silence, they call it the 400 silent years, where there's not a real God, a prophet of God.

And during that time, there are Jewish writings that were done. And it's actually because of these writings that we know that they yearned so deeply to hear God's voice again. These apocryphal books don't claim to be God's word. But for instance, in Maccabees, we know that it talks about how when they recaptured the temple and rededicated it, they weren't sure exactly what to do. They were yearning for God's word. And so, for instance, the altar in front of the temple had been desecrated by the pagans. They had killed a pig on it or sacrificed a pig. But it had also been used to sacrifice to Yahweh. So they didn't know what to do. So they decided to take those stones, store them in a side room, and wait until the prophet comes who will tell us, until God starts talking to us again.

So the Apocrypha is written by Jews during that 400 years, yearning for the voice of God again, but not claiming. This did not claim to be the voice of God. And so it's very historically important. It tells us about those years. And it also helps us understand what the change from Old Testament Judaism and then New, the Second Temple Judaism, the Judaism after they came back from the exile. We have a little picture of that in the Old Testament. But that develops a bit differently than the original Temple Judaism. And that Second Temple Judaism is yearning for this prophet and for the Messiah. And these apocryphal writings help us see how that was developing and setting the stage for the coming of Jesus.

And so these are recognized as historically accurate pieces of legitimate history? Some of them are. Some of them feel more like what we Christians would call, you know, Christian novels and things like that. So some of it is very clearly historical and telling us very important things about how the people were thinking. Well, even the novel part was. So there's a story about somebody named Tobit.

At least an awful lot of us think that this is simply a story. Maybe a parable or something like that. Yeah, something more along that line.

A lot of people anyway don't think it's what happened historically. There's also a story called Judith. And it doesn't seem to fit the historical facts we know. So I would say parts of it are Jews expressing their yearnings in a story, but not necessarily recording history. But other parts are definitely recording history. That's interesting. Okay. I think that's important to know. So when did these pieces of literature enter the canon, the canon of scripture, and whose particular interpretation of the canon did they enter? Okay. Well, this is interesting. The early church wrestled for years about what is the canon of the New Testament. And because the books were being written, I mean, the first book is probably Galatians and/or James.

And they probably date to about AD 48. The church has already been going for 30, I mean, not 30, for about 20, yeah, about 20 years, a little bit more. And so the church knows the gospel and is preaching the gospel, but it's only starting to write things down around in the 40s. And the gospels are probably started around the same time.

And so in different parts, we actually have different churches listing the books they have in the New Testament. They all are solid about the gospels and Paul's letters. It's the few books after that where there's a little bit of disagreement, a little bit of question. So it takes the first time we actually have the exact list that we use in the New Testament is 367, when Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria in Egypt, sends a letter out to his pastors in their churches to tell them when Easter. Easter is a changing date or a changing festival. So one of the jobs of the bishop was to tell them, "Easter will be this Sunday this year." But he would also tell them other things.

And so in that letter, it's the first time we have exactly the books we use in the New Testament. Plus, he also names the books we use in the Old Testament. So 367 is the first time we have that. It's also repeated in the West in Carthage in a council, church council at 393. Wait, so we're talking like, I mean, several hundred years, and we don't have, as far as we know at least, we don't have a record of the list of books that was used. But don't misunderstand me.

The core and the vast majority, everyone agrees on. And I think there's a reason. I don't know who gathered together the gospels, but apparently they were gathered together very early. And there's a legend that says Onesimus gathered together Paul's letters. And it makes perfect sense. Because why else is Philemon in Paul's letters? This is what gave Philemon, this is Philemon is the letter that gave Onesimus freedom. He becomes a bishop. And so the legend says he brought these books together. So the early church, there's no argument about Paul's letters and about the gospels and the book of Acts. So it's the ones that come after that there's a little bit of question. And you can imagine there are going to be areas that are far away from where Hebrews was written.

And so they're less likely to have it. And let's say, and then that was probably, we think it was written in Italy, near Rome. And then we think Revelation was written in Asia, what we call Turkey today. And so it's kind of natural that it may be that those letters don't get to the far other end of Europe in time for them to show up in some other lists. But the core is extremely clear, and the vast majority is extremely clear. It's the letters that come after Paul's letters where you get a little bit of question.

And a good bit of question, but we finally get it definitively stated in 367 or in 393 in the Western part of the church. And like I said, when Athanasius says what should be read in the church from the New Testament, he also names the same Old Testament that we use. Now, as in the same? The Hebrew one. The one. Okay. Okay. Gotcha. Sure. Now, in Egypt, of all places, they also had, that is where most of these apocryphal books seem to have been collected and used.

And so you actually do have a continuing use of those books among many, many Christian churches. And so even though Athanasius says, he names the books that are in the Hebrew Bible, somehow that was never as definitive. And so the churches that used the Apocrypha are, let's say, after 500, basically all Christians were using them. And it wasn't until the Reformation that they got questioned. Now, okay. So let me just make sure I'm understanding this correctly. So the Apocrypha was being used up until like for quite a long period of time, a thousand years or so. But they did recognize that there's a difference. So for instance, there was an old Latin Bible. We don't know who translated it.

In fact, it was probably translated by many people. And it wasn't very, the translation quality wasn't so good. So a bishop of Rome named Damasus, I think in the 380s, commissioned Jerome, who was very good at Latin, to translate the Bible into good Latin. And he went to Bethlehem and he did it there. And he asked the rabbis for the books, and they didn't have the Apocryphal books. So he wrote back to Damasus and said, "He doesn't want to do the Apocryphal books." But Damasus wrote back and said, "Do them anyway."

So he did. But there was a kind of a recognition that these are perhaps not quite as important. And in fact, even today, the Catholics call them Deuterocanonical. We call them Apocrypha, which means hidden. They call them Deuterocanonical, which means the second and therefore lesser canon. And they're less likely to use them, especially if they're writing something they want even non-Catholics to read. They're less likely to use them for that. So there's a recognition, at least among Catholics, that they have a lesser status. And that was always kind of suspected, I think, at least by many Christians through the ages. The Anabaptists, when the Reformation came, the Protestants put the Apocrypha in between the Old Testament and the New.

So they said there's something worth reading here, but they didn't think it was scripture. But over time, we tended to start using the Luther Bible. And so we're going to start to shift away. Historically, this is what happened. We shift away from what the early Anabaptists did. And we saw the difference that was in the Luther Bible. And so as we stopped using the Froschauer Bible, started using the Luther Bible, I imagine that, I don't know for sure, I haven't looked this up, but I think that's when we would have started questioning how much we should use the Apocrypha. An interesting little tidbit, the Apocrypha was always published with the Old and New Testament, usually in between, by Protestants until the American Bible Society got the idea in the very early 1800s that if we cut that out, we can print more Bibles if all we have is the Old Testament and the New.

And that's where, I think that's where it all started, that the Apocrypha was taken out. And so you can even all the way through, you can find some Protestant Bibles that have it. And nowadays, there's more interest. And so you do find a few more that actually have the Apocrypha in it. And like the Orthodox, for example, will still have that as well. Catholics and Orthodox early on used it, and they continue to use it.

And then you're going to find some variety, perhaps, with Anglicans. But I think by and large, it's the Catholics and the Orthodox that still use it. That's really interesting. I like that historical backdrop. I think it's going to be very helpful. So then if these Apocrypha books aren't in the Jewish Old Testament, the Jewish Bible, did the Jews ever treat them as canonical or no? It doesn't look like it.

You know, a lot of things we have to read what's available. And there's just a lot missing that was undoubtedly. There was a lot more written. Well, it seems to be that the Jewish Bible was canonized in three parts. And so it's probably the Torah, first of all, so the first five books. And then the Prophets.

And there's a part called the Prophets. And then there's a part that the Jews call the Writings. And it looks like that was the last part done. Definitively accepted as canon just around the time of the Lord. Maybe before, maybe after. This is somewhat speculative. Okay.

We know now that some of these Apocrypha books were originally written in Hebrew. There are some pieces in the Qumran scrolls. There are pieces of this, of some of the Apocrypha books in Hebrew. There are the one that I mentioned that was called Sirach or Ecclesiasticus. It has a prologue where the grandson, I think it's the grandson, says, "My grandfather wrote this in Hebrew, and I'm translating it into Greek so that the Jews who live in Egypt who use Greek can understand it." And that's why we think that this was kind of put together. Well, it's pretty clearly put together in Egypt because the Egyptian Jews were using Greek, which was the language of the upper-class people in Egypt at the time.

And so some of them were originally written in Hebrew, but it looks like they were more or less put together along with the other Hebrew biblical texts. They were put together as a Greek Bible that the Egyptian Jews could use.

That's really interesting. Yeah, that makes sense. And then, and so I'm not even saying that the Egyptians, I think the Egyptians were a little bit unsure. They had all this literature, which is biblical, which is not. That's a different thing. You know, one thing that we have to remember is that the Jews never put their Bible together between two covers.

So if you go to a synagogue, you're going to have the Torah, and you're going to have other scrolls. Now, I'm not saying they don't have books that actually do have the Bible, but this isn't the original way they did it, not way back then. So what you ended up having was a collection of scrolls, and that's a little bit ambiguous. If you have all these books and you're reading them until they've actually made it hard and fast which ones are scripture and which ones aren't.

And so I think that the Jews in Egypt were not always sure how they looked at the books that we would now call the Apocrypha. And for us Christians, it's the same thing. They were never collected between two covers until about the middle 300s or the earlier middle 300s. And before that, each church's deacon would have a collection of books. So he would have Paul's letters in a collection. He'd have the Gospels in a collection. And then he might have the others just kind of as individual books. But there was no one Bible up until, I don't know if the date is 330 or somewhere around there, you get the first Bible. It's huge. And it's not something an individual owns.

It's for a church. It's to have in the church. But because they did it by hand, and so it's much bigger than what a printed Bible is going to be. But that not having them between two covers is one of the reasons there's all this question. So which of these books really fit? Which ones don't? Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. So yeah, what was Luther's treatment of these books then? You mentioned that earlier, but can you go into that a bit? He didn't believe that they were scripture. And in the Catholic and the Orthodox Bible, they're scattered through the books. So he collected them and put them aside, but mostly as good reading, you know, as reading that could encourage us.

And that's valid. I think that's worthwhile. But this was his judgment. But then he also judged that the book of James should not be in the New Testament. And I think he also wished not to have the book of Revelation. So just add that to say, you know, his judgment isn't always what mine would be. But I do think that the Apocrypha, I like what Athanasius said, that these are the books, and he included exactly the list we have. And the rest of them are informative, historically informative. They help us understand what was happening in those silent years. And that's good. But I don't, well, and they even have at least one or two aspects of them.

In one of the books of Maccabees, I can't remember which one, the Jewish army suffers a defeat, and they find out that the men who died all were wearing an amulet around their necks with a little idol on it.

And so they pray for, they say prayers for the dead, hopefully to take away the sin. And that would fit with prayers for the dead, which some churches do, but I don't think that really fits either the Old Testament or the New Testament. It's kind of like in a limbo. It's one little, yeah, it's one little piece. There may be a few other little pieces, but historically, they help us understand what was going on. That's the important thing. Yeah. How did the Council of Trent fit into all of this as far as the public view of these? Well, most of the Protestants agreed with Luther that the Hebrew Old Testament is the Old Testament. The Greek New Testament is the New Testament.

And all that other stuff is the Apocrypha, not scripture. This had never been, the Old Testament part had never been decided by a council. And so the Council of Trent was held during the Reformation. And what they did was they organized the Catholic thinking about how they will, what they believe and how they live. They really didn't change their belief. So they said, "These are canonical." I don't know for sure if they gave them that secondary level, if they called them Deutero. I don't know if that's when that started or not, but they did say, "These are part of God's word to us." So by and large, at the Council of Trent, they continued to do what they were doing, though they tried to get abuses out.

So for instance, they still did indulgences, but they didn't sell them anymore. And things like that. So the Catholics had been using the Deutero-canonical books or the Apocrypha. They continued to. So what advice would you give to our audience then when it comes to the Apocrypha? Should we read this? Shouldn't we? How should we view them?

I would say that we ought to see them as historically important and helping us to understand what happened in those 400 silent years and how God moved his people, continued to move his people to be at the place where they could accept the Messiah. Because Second Temple Judaism is very different than First Temple Judaism. That's the Old Testament Judaism. And it's getting them ready. It's getting them expectant that the Messiah is coming. And we get to see that happening in the Apocrypha. So I think it's good to help us there. But I think all indications would point to the standard Old Testament and New Testament as the ones that are God's word. It's a judgment call.

And so you have differences of opinion. But I don't see anything in the Apocrypha that spiritually helps us that's not also available in the other. And there are a few stories like Tobit that really seem to miss the point spiritually for us.

So I would say read it to understand our history, how things developed, but not to see. And there even, you know, I do want to say this that Ecclesiasticus and the Wisdom of Solomon do have some very interesting and good advice, just like Christian literature does. So I look at it as the Jewish literature that wasn't sacred. And just like we have Christian literature that's not sacred, it can help us. And so I'm not saying there's nothing there that can help us spiritually. There is. But I don't see it having, it doesn't feel like it's what God was using to develop his people, to bring the salvation through Abraham's family that he promises us at the beginning of, soon after the beginning of Genesis.

And so that would be my call on it. And once again, I have to admit, it's a personal call. But I think that what most of us have decided about the Apocrypha is correct. That makes good sense. Wow. Well, thank you so much for sharing. And I enjoyed it. Yeah. Yeah. I think this will cause some interesting conversations. Okay. I hope I don't get skewered.

Yeah. No, it's, yeah, this has been really good. Thank you for sharing. Thank you. Yeah.