"Sacred Writings: The Deuterocanonicals: Your Friend or Foe?" by David Bercot

The one may be overpowered by another, two can withstand him, and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us this Saturday afternoon. It's a blessing to see you all on here. Thank you for making the sacrifice and taking up precious time on Saturday afternoon to hear about the Deuterocanonical. See, I shouldn't even have attempted it.

We have Brother David Bursot on with us this afternoon to share about the Apocrypha. Is it your friend? Yes or no? And I'm excited to hear what he has to say about it. It can be a controversial subject. David Bursot is from Chambersburg and has written many books. I think he's well known from his books and some of his messages online. And one of his books, The Kingdom That Turned the World Upside Down, has had a huge, huge impact in my own and my wife and I in our journey to the kingdom. And so I am grateful for David's writing and the simple way that he explains truth. It makes it easy to engage with, easy to understand, and also makes it wonderful to pass these books around.

They're not a heady theological explanations or anything like that. So I'm grateful for David's work and his authorship. And I've talked to so many different people from many different places and backgrounds. And you ask them, you know, what has impacted your journey into the kingdom of heaven? And many times, if not every time, at some point, Brother David's name comes up because of his books and because of his preaching. So we're grateful to have you on, Brother David, here this morning or this afternoon. And may God be with you as you share. Before we get started, we'll just bow our heads and say a word of prayer.

Heavenly Father, it's with gratitude and love that we pause in your presence. We're so grateful for the mercy that you have shown us in providing brothers like David, who can handle the word with wisdom and with care and who can teach us about your word and about you and about the kingdom through the work that he has done. Just pray that you would bless him this afternoon as he shares the inspiration that's on his heart. I pray that you would give him clarity of thought and words to speak and be with each one of the audience. I thank you for their sacrifice and joining us here this afternoon. May it be a time of blessing and encouragement.

And may we go away from here better fit to serve in your kingdom. We want to honor you and glorify you with everything that we do and say. We pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen.

All right, you can go ahead, Brother David. Okay, well, Brother Sam has announced the title. And in case you're not familiar with the term Deuterocanonical books, they're the books that most Catholics know as the Apocrypha. And I would like to convince you this afternoon that these books are your friends, not your foe.

But to be realistic, nearly all of us have grown up with enormous prejudice against these books. I mean, I know I did. Or some of you out there have grown up as Roman Catholics or maybe as older order Amish. And so you at one time used these books, but then you converted to an evangelical church or maybe a Mennonite church. And from that experience, you've been instilled with an extreme prejudice against these books.

So, I mean, one way or the other, probably all of us here today have been taught that these books are false, evil, that they were inserted in the Bible by the Roman Catholics. And I seriously doubt that in 45 minutes, I can overcome all of that prejudice. I mean, it took me a lot more than 45 minutes to change my mind about these books.

And it's not my big mission in life to convince everyone to change their mind about these books. I mean, whether you view them as your friend or your foe, it's not likely to affect your walk with Christ. However, I can promise you this.

If you're able to get past your prejudices, you will find that these books will enrich your spiritual life. You'll definitely view them as a friend, not as your foe. And the only way I know to help you to overcome your prejudice is to explain to you the truth about these books. So here's the plan for this afternoon.

We're first going to look at what these books are and where they came from. All right, second, we're going to briefly learn how they went from being part of the Old Testament canon of the early church to being viewed today as books that are evil and mythical, books that no true Christian would ever read or quote.

All right, third, we're going to look at some of the objections that Protestants typically put forth as to why these books should not be included in the canon. And then finally, I'm going to briefly point out why these books can be a real blessing to you, or at least I'll show you some of the things. Our time will be limited, of course.

All right, so what are these books? Let's start off by explaining what people mean when they say the Apocrypha or the Deuterocanonical books. A few months ago, Chuck Pike gave a couple of messages here on Strength to Strength about the Septuagint.

It is the Greek translation of the Old Testament that was made by the Jews in the second century before Christ. It was the Bible of the Greek-speaking Jews, and it was also the Bible of the apostles and the New Testament Christians. I say that because 90% of the Old Testament quotations in the New Testament are taken out of the Septuagint.

And certainly, the Septuagint was the Old Testament of the early Christians who followed after the apostles. Now, why is this significant about the Septuagint? The reason it's significant for our discussion is that the Septuagint has a canon of 46 books.

Our Protestant Old Testaments, which were translated from the Masoretic text, have a canon of only 39 books. That's a difference of seven books. So when people talk about the Apocrypha or the Deuterocanonical books, they're talking about these seven books that are part of the canon of the Septuagint, but they're not a part of the canon of the Masoretic text, at least once that canon was finalized in the early second century AD.

All right, well, let's just list these seven books in case you're not familiar with them. I'll name them off. They're the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, Tobit, Judith, First and Second Maccabees, and First Ezra. Now, if you look at the Apocrypha in the King James, it calls First Ezra, Second Ezra. Now, Ezra is just the Greek form of the name Ezra.

And the King James also calls Sirach by the name of Ecclesiasticus. So just in case you've seen that before, you'll understand what we're talking about. Now, it's important to understand that these seven books were an intrinsic part of the Septuagint. They weren't a collection of books that were grouped together by themselves and called the Deuterocanonical books or the Apocrypha.

Two of these seven books, the Wisdom of Solomon and Sirach, are what are called wisdom books, like Proverbs. And in the Septuagint, they were placed along with the other wisdom books, like Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. The other five books of the so-called Apocrypha are all historical books. And in the Septuagint, they're included with the other historical books.

So the early Christians never thought of these books as the Apocrypha or the Deuterocanonical books. If you ask them, "What do you think about the Apocrypha?" they'd have no idea what you're talking about. To them, these books were simply part of the Old Testament.

Now, I should explain that in the Septuagint, the books of Jeremiah and Daniel contain material that's not included in the Masoretic text. So when the King James translators grouped together the books of the Apocrypha, they included this material from Jeremiah and Daniel. They included it as separate books. So when you look at the King James Apocrypha, you'll see Baruch, which was actually part of the book of Jeremiah. You'll see Susanna, Bell and the Dragon, and the Song of the Three Hebrew Children. And all of those were just part of the book of Daniel in the Septuagint.

They were never, like I say, separate books. But again, to the Greek-speaking Jews and to the early Christians, these seven books and those sections of Jeremiah and Daniel were simply part of the Old Testament. They didn't know them as the Apocrypha.

Now, how do I know all this, what I'm telling you? Well, I didn't get this out of some Roman Catholic book, in case you're wondering. I didn't go to a Roman Catholic website. I learned all of this firsthand from reading the early Christian writings for myself. And take note of this. When I started reading the early Christian writings, the Apocrypha was not even on my radar.

I naturally assumed that the early Christians didn't use those books. I mean, I had been taught that those books were later, somewhere in the centuries, they were later added by the Roman Catholic Church.

Well, then the big shock came. I start reading the early Christian writings, and I began with the very earliest ones that were written just after the close of the New Testament. In fact, one of the earliest of these, First Clement, was written just a couple of years after the Apostle John wrote his letters.

And most of the other of the very early Christian works were written by esteemed church leaders who had been ordained by the apostles. So, you know, I'm reading them, expecting them to sound pretty much like the Christianity I knew.

And to my utter amazement, I find out that they're all quoting from the so-called Apocrypha. And this is just a few years after the Apostle John by his own disciples. And these men never make any distinction between these seven books and the rest of Scripture.

In fact, as I kept reading the early Christian writings, and, you know, I don't know if it's in the, you probably can't see it on the screen. They're behind me in my library there. It's a whole volume, 10 volumes.

I found that virtually every early Christian writer quoted from these books. I mean, there are hundreds and hundreds of citations in the early Christian writings from the Deuterocanonical books. In fact, there may be thousands. I've never sat down and counted them all.

Even more interesting, what I discovered from reading the early Christian writings is that from the beginning of the second century, this is from the year 100 AD on, there was a fierce struggle between the Christians on the one hand and the unbelieving Jews on the other regarding the Scriptures.

After using the Septuagint for three centuries, the scribes and Pharisees suddenly banned the Septuagint around the beginning of the second century. They even sponsored a new translation to be done in Greek because they didn't want the Jews to use the Septuagint any longer.

Well, why would they do that? Well, it's because the Christians were using the Septuagint as their Bible, and they were using it very effectively in their disputes with the Jews. Some of the Messianic prophecies appear only in the Septuagint, not in the Masoretic texts.

And some, one key one, appears only in one of these seven books that are known today as the Apocrypha. So if you can eliminate those seven books, you eliminate a key Messianic prophecy. So as a result of all this, from the second century on, the Masoretic text became the Old Testament of the unbelieving Jews. The Septuagint was already the Old Testament of the Christians, and it continued to be so.

Now, the battle was not over the seven books of the so-called Apocrypha. It was over the Septuagint versus the Masoretic text. It was a contest between the unbelieving scribes and Pharisees and their successors and the believing Christians. Now, the unbelieving Jews ridiculed the Christians, saying the Christians were using corrupted Scriptures. They claimed that they alone had the true Bible, which was written in Hebrew.

Well, the Christians responded that no, it was the Jews who had corrupted the Scriptures, taking away from the sacred books of the Bible and altering the text of other books. And most Christians were not persuaded by the attacks of the Jews.

I mean, this was particularly the case since the apostles, as I mentioned, nearly always quoted from the Septuagint when they quoted Scripture. So they were going to follow the practice of the apostles, not the practice of the scribes and Pharisees.

Okay, so we're having this battle over the, like I say, the two text types, the Masoretic and the Septuagint. And these seven books get caught up in it because they are part of the canon of the Septuagint, but they're not part of the canon of the Masoretic text. At least they're not in the second century. They might have been earlier. We don't know for certain.

But there were a few Christians who were intimidated by the propaganda of the unbelieving Jews. For example, around the year 240, a Christian named Julius Africanus, he wrote a letter to Origen about the canon of Scripture. Now, Origen was like the chief scholar, Christian scholar of that day.

And Julius was concerned over the fact that the Jews were scoffing at the Scriptures of the Christians. He was worried that maybe the Scriptures used by the church were corrupt, containing extra books and materials that the Jews didn't recognize.

And so, like I say, he wrote Origen because Origen was the primary scholar of that day, not only in the Christian world, but in the pagan world as well. And he had spent years studying the differences between the Christian texts and the Jewish texts. He grew up in Alexandria, where there was a huge Jewish community. He got to know a lot of the rabbis. He studied some Hebrew with them, became very familiar with their canon, etc.

And this is the answer, just a part of it, that he wrote back to this brother who had written him with concern. He said, "In many of the other sacred books," this brother had talked about some parts of Daniel. Origen says, "I sometimes found more in our copies," meaning in the Septuagint, which was the Scriptures of the Christians, "than in the Hebrew," meaning the Masoretic text. "Sometimes I found less."

When we notice such things, are we to abruptly reject espurious, the copies in use in our churches? Should we command the brotherhood to put away the sacred books that are currently being used among them? Should we coax the Jews and persuade them to give us copies that will be free from tampering and forgery?

Are we to suppose that the providence that has ministered to the edification of all the churches of Christ in the sacred Scriptures had no concern for those who were bought with a price, the ones for whom Christ died?" So that was a quote from Origen.

And I know of no better answer than the one that Origen gave. I mean, are we to believe that around the year 100, that God providentially guided the scribes and Pharisees to be able to determine the precise books to be included in the Old Testament canon and the precise texts to use, while at the same time he left the church, the body of Christ, without any guidance in this matter?

And then as a result, Christians were following both the wrong texts and the wrong books. Does that make any sense? I mean, in short, whose decision do you think we should go with? That of the men whom Jesus called blind guides or that of the faithful church?

What's more, we don't just have the witness in the writings of the early Christians. In the fourth century, this is in the 300s, the church decided it was time to make an official pronouncement on the canon of Scripture. And almost all Protestant reference works, I'm talking about Bible dictionaries, Bible encyclopedias, books about the canon of Scripture, in fact, Catholic reference books point to the same thing. They all point to this council. It's the Council of Carthage in AD 397. It was the definitive council that set forth the 27 books of our New Testament canon. And like I say, Protestant reference works all point to it and say, "We have a definite, clear canon here, the 27 books that forever settles the issue."

Now, generally speaking, the council was simply affirming what had already been accepted by the vast majority of churches from the second century on. The council just made things uniform throughout the churches. It didn't create this canon. It was already being used.

Now, what our Protestant reference works very honestly do not tell us is that the Council of Carthage also officially pronounced the Old Testament canon. And in its list of the Old Testament books, it included these books that later came to be called the Apocrypha.

And once again, it was simply affirming what Christians had embraced as the canon from the very beginning. So the very council that Protestants point to, to say, "See, we know these 27 books are inspired of God because we have the Council of Carthage." Well, guess what? It also pointed to the 47 books of the Septuagint and pronounced them as the official canon of the Old Testament.

Okay, not only that, we have ancient Christian manuscripts. Now, most of the ancient Christian manuscripts we have contain only the New Testament text. But there are a number of them, and they're very ancient, that contain the Old Testament as well as the New, all bound together in one book. And every one of them includes these books of the so-called Apocrypha.

In fact, to my knowledge, there are no Bibles anywhere prior to the Reformation that contain an Old Testament of just the Protestant 39 books. So having an Old Testament of 39 books is a very recent change in the history of Christianity.

So if you ask anyone in the first 400 years of the church whether these books were the friends or foes of Christians, they would have clearly said friends, not just friends, but inspired Scripture. I mean, that's how it started.

So the question naturally becomes, well, how did we reach the situation we have today? If they started off as pretty much undisputed Scripture by all the churches and that they are included in the official canon pronounced by the Council of Carthage, why do we have this situation today where people view them as evil books and fictitious books?

Well, we reached this place in three steps. And for each step, we know when it happened and we know who was responsible. It's not any mystery. In the early fifth century, the Pope authorized his secretary, a man named Jerome, to produce a new Latin translation of the Bible that would have the official seal of the Pope. They were aware that there were some errors in the Latin translations that were being used. They wanted an official one with the sponsorship of the Pope. That way, all the Western churches would have a uniform Latin translation. Now, Jerome was supposed to translate the Old Testament from the Septuagint, which is what everyone had always done up to that time.

The Latin Bibles had all been translated from the Septuagint as to the Old Testament. But Jerome had been strongly influenced by the unbelieving Jews. So without any authorization from the church or anyone else, he surreptitiously translated the Old Testament from the Masoretic text, copies of which were furnished to him by the unbelieving Jews.

Now, this not only altered many, many verses of Scripture, which is why when you look up an Old Testament quote in the New Testament in most Bibles, so often it doesn't fit. You know, Paul is quoting it one way, and you look it up in the Psalms or Isaiah, and it reads differently. That's because Paul's quoting from the Septuagint. So not only did he create that mess, but then he had this problem. There are seven books of the Septuagint that aren't in the Masoretic text.

He couldn't just leave them out of the Bible. That would have raised enough roar. So he included them. He translated them from the Septuagint. But in his own notes that he included with the Bible, he attacked them as being not on the same level as the other 39 books.

And he is the one who gave them the name Apocrypha, which simply means hidden. Of course, these were hardly hidden books, not in the Christian world. People had been using them for 400 years. But like I say, these books still stayed in the Bible as part of the inspired canon.

Furthermore, there was enormous opposition to what Jerome did, translating the Bible from the Masoretic text instead of from the Septuagint, which had always been the practice of Christians. But shortly after his translation came out, the barbarians began invading the Western Roman Empire. And within a generation, Western civilization sank into what is often called the Dark Ages.

As a result, by default, Jerome's Latin Vulgate slowly gained acceptance and eventually became the official Bible of the Roman Catholic Church. I mean, when barbarians are burning your cities down and overrunning your farmlands, you don't really care if your Old Testament came from the Masoretic text or the Septuagint. In fact, by the year 600, probably most people in the West couldn't have even told you what either one of those were. Okay, so that was step one, that Jerome puts a slur on them and he gives them the name Apocrypha, but they stay part of the inspired Scriptures. Okay, step two, this came about 1,000 years later. In the early 1500s, Martin Luther, as we all know, touched off the Reformation.

Now, what most people don't know is that Luther tried to recreate both the Old and the New Testament canons in order to eliminate any books that went against his doctrines, particularly his doctrine of salvation by faith alone. Now, he failed when it came to the New Testament. He tried, but there was too much opposition. When it came to the Old Testament, he succeeded in having the books of the Apocrypha stripped of their canonical status, at least among Protestants. Now, to be sure, Luther included them in his Bible. Again, there would have been an uproar if he had tried to take them out. But he grouped them together as one set of books, placing them between the Old Testament and the New Testament, and including to call them the Apocrypha.

But he put, and then he put this statement in front of them.

He said that these are books that Christians should read for spiritual edification, but not for doctrine. Okay, so like I say, the first step was calling them the Apocrypha and kind of slamming them in the side notes. That's what Jerome did. The second step was saying these books are not canonical, but they are books Christians should read for spiritual edification. They're good books, just don't use them for doctrine. That's what Luther did.

Now, interestingly, the Anabaptists seem to have totally ignored Luther. I mean, any of you who have read the Martyrs' Mirror or the writings of Menno Simons or the other early Anabaptists like Michael Sattler, I mean, you know that all of them quote freely from these books and they use them to support doctrine. They don't make any distinction between them and the other books of the Old Testament. They quote from all seven of these books in their writings, as well as the parts of Daniel from the Septuagint.

Now, interestingly, I've got a concordance here of the Swiss brethren that taking all of their writings and what books they quoted from, and it's very interesting, I discovered that they quote twice as much, the early Anabaptists, our forefathers, they quote twice as much from the book of Sirach as they do from the book of Romans. That's how much appreciation they had for these books, and particularly for Sirach.

Also, the King James included these books between the Old and New Testaments like Luther, but the King James translators did not put any notation that we read these only for edification and not for doctrine. That does not appear in the 1611 King James.

The Geneva Bible of the Calvinists also included these books, but they put a similar notation that Luther did. So that was step two. For most Protestants, these books went from being canonical Scripture to being spiritual books that we should read for edification, but not doctrine.

Nevertheless, by most Christians, they were still viewed as friends, not foes. So how did they suddenly become foes? Well, that was step three. In 1826, in order to save printing costs, the British and Foreign Bible Society began printing copies of the King James without the Apocrypha in it. Until that time, every copy of the King James included the so-called Apocrypha.

But now these Bibles were to be used for evangelism and missionary work. Protestants didn't quote much from the Apocrypha by the 1800s. And they thought, well, this will save a bit of money if we can leave those books out. Well, this practice soon caught on, and within just a few decades, not only missionary copies of the King James Bible, but also copies used in churches in England and the United States and around the world were printed without the Apocrypha.

There's no saying out of sight, out of mind. Well, before long, a generation of Protestants grew up who had never seen these seven books from the Septuagint. If these Protestants happened to notice a Catholic Bible, they realized that, huh, they have books in their Bible that we don't have in ours. And they were told that the Catholics had added spurious books to the Bible. And now Protestants began viewing these books as evil, fictitious books containing false doctrine. This is something the Roman Catholics did because they didn't know the truth of their own history.

So over the course of 1500 years, these books had gone from being Scripture to being worthy of reading for spiritual edification to becoming a foe of true Christians. And very, very few Christians knew anything about the real facts because hardly anyone read the early Christian writings to know what had really happened.

Okay, now I want to briefly address some of the objections that are commonly thrown out as to why these books should not be viewed as Scripture, why they should not be included in our canon. And since I have only a limited amount of time left, I'm going to have to go through these pretty quickly. I won't be able to address them all. Now, if you've heard some objections that I don't address or that you want addressed in more detail, I'm really hoping that in the question and answer session, you'll ask me about it because I will be happy to talk a lot more about it.

Now, one of the objections I hear most often is that these books are never quoted by Jesus and the New Testament writers. Therefore, they're not Scripture. They shouldn't be in our Old Testament. And let me just say this, not only about this objection, but about any objection that someone throws out to you about the so-called Apocrypha.

If their objection fits only the books of the Apocrypha and not any of the books, the 39 books of the Protestant Old Testament, well, it may be a legitimate objection. It may not be true, but at least I'd say there's some legitimacy to it. But if you apply that same standard that they're objecting to, to the 39 books of the Protestant Old Testament, and many of those books failed the test, then it's a fake objection. You're not using that as a litmus test of what is Scripture and what's not. So this one that's thrown out so often, well, these books are never quoted by Jesus and the New Testament writers.

Well, you know there's nothing unusual about this at all. Did you know that over a fourth of the books of the Protestant Old Testament, the 39 books, are never quoted in the New Testament either? The book of Joshua, Judges, Ruth, Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Lamentations, Nahum, Zephaniah, and Obadiah, they're not quoted in the New Testament either.

So the fact that something isn't quoted in the New Testament isn't the test we use to determine whether or not it's canonical Scripture. That's a fake objection. Moreover, none of the historical books of the Old Testament that take place during the exile or after the exile are ever quoted in the New Testament.

Don't ask me why. I don't know why. But none of those books like Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, they're not quoted in the New Testament. And yet five of the books of the Apocrypha are historical books that take place during or after the exile. So of course, they're not quoted in the New Testament. None of the other Old Testament historical books of that period are quoted. So we can throw out that objection as totally fake.

All right, another one that I heard recently. Well, none of these books claim to be inspired or claim to be Scripture. Well, again, I mean, that sounds rather serious. But let me invite you to just, if you've got your Bible handy, open it up, maybe not right now while I'm talking, but when we get through and just leaf through it and see how many of the 39 Protestant books of the Old Testament claim to be inspired. Now, the books of the prophets often will say, "The word of the Lord came to me," etc. So you can say, "Well, yeah, they're claiming some kind of inspiration." But the historical books don't claim to be inspired like Chronicles, nor do most, if any, of the wisdom books like Proverbs or Ecclesiastes.

To my knowledge, Genesis doesn't claim to be inspired. So claiming to be inspired is not a legitimate litmus test. Again, it's just a red herring being thrown out. It's a dishonest objection. Okay, another one I hear a lot is, "Well, there are strange and unscriptural things that happen in these books of the Apocrypha."

I always hope I can get to a podcast without having to take a drink, but I never quite make it. And the event that's brought up most often is an incident that took place in the book of 2 Maccabees.

And what this is, the faithful Jews were battling against the Greeks. That's what the whole Maccabees are about. And the Jews prevailed in this battle. And after the battle was over, they went to collect their dead. And when they were collecting the bodies of their dead comrades, they noticed that every one of the ones who were killed were wearing a pagan amulet underneath their tunic.

And they came to the conclusion that that's why these men, God allowed these men to die in battle, because they had sinned by wearing these pagan amulets. So when they went up to Jerusalem, these soldiers then made an offering on behalf of their fallen brethren, asking God to forgive them for the sin they committed.

Now, the account doesn't say God accepted their intercession or that it helped the fallen comrades in any way. The writer merely commends them for the fact that these soldiers believed in the resurrection of the dead. Otherwise, there was no point making intercession for them.

They were interceding for their comrades because they believed in the resurrection of the dead.

So that's it. That's the incident. But centuries later, the Roman Catholic Church took this episode and began teaching that if a person for a dead person in purgatory, then this could shorten their time in purgatory. Well, now there's very little connection between that false doctrine and what happened in 2 Maccabees. I mean, just because the Roman Catholic Church misuses something in the Bible is a poor excuse for throwing out an entire book of the Bible. I mean, the Catholic Church says that the woman in Revelation 12 represents Mary, the Queen of Heaven.

So should we take Revelation and remove it from our Bibles because the Roman Catholics are misusing it? Of course not. I mean, that's no way to come up with a list of what to include in the canon, whether the Roman Catholic Church comes up with a wrong doctrine from it.

The irony is that there are much stranger things in the Protestant 39 books than that incident in Maccabees. I mean, think about Jephthah offering up his daughter as a sacrifice. Now, if that was in Maccabees, oh, we would hear, "No end of it. What a horrible teaching. This can't possibly be Scripture. Look at that, a man offering up his daughter as a sacrifice."

Oh, but it's in one of the 39 books of the Protestant Old Testament. Oh, well, yeah, I mean, we find some way to explain it or we just sort of ignore it and say, "Well, you know those things happen. Doesn't say God approved it."

Or what about 1 Kings 22, verse 22? "Here God sent his angel to be a lying spirit in the prophets who were speaking to Ahab." Are we to believe that God tells his angels to go out and lie to people? But I mean, that's what it says.

Again, if that was in one of the books of the Apocrypha, every Protestant would point to that and say, "See, this can't be Scripture. It contains false teaching." Ah, but it's in our Old Testament. So yeah, we come up with an explanation.

What about Samuel? The witch of Endor, she brings Samuel up from the dead and he gives King Saul a prophecy. Again, if that was in the Apocrypha, we'd say, "Look, it teaches spiritism. These books are obviously unscriptural." Do you see what a double standard we have? If there's something the least bit strange in the seven books from the Septuagint, we immediately say, "Aha, this can't be Scripture." But there are far stranger incidents, and I've mentioned only a few in our Bibles, and we'd say we always come up with a way to explain them away. So we practice a real double standard there. Then the last objection I want to mention is, and I hear this a lot, Josephus gives us a list of the Old Testament canon and it contains the 39 books of the Protestant Old Testament.

How many of you have ever heard that? Raise your hand if, I mean, I've heard that so many times. I heard it as a JW when I was growing up. And yet it's a false objection for several reasons.

The first one, the canon of Josephus only appears in a work that he wrote in AD 105. In other words, at the beginning of the second century. Now, we already know that around the year 100, the rabbis had rejected the Septuagint and its canon.

So this passage from Josephus adds nothing new to the discussion. It simply reaffirms what we already know, that when you get to that year, the Jews have rejected the Septuagint, including the seven books that are in it, but not in the Masoretic text.

Well, what's interesting is that in his earlier work, Josephus speaks of the Septuagint in glowing terms. And he relies exclusively on 1 Ezra and 1 and 2 Maccabees for much of his information in his book, The Antiquity of the Jews.

So Josephus seems to have changed his canon based on the later ruling of the scribes and Pharisees. And after all, he himself was a Pharisee. The other thing that is dishonest when Protestants make this claim is that Josephus does not say that the Jewish canon consists of 39 books. He says it consists of 22 books.

So Protestants go through all kinds of gyrations to turn his 22 books into the Protestant 39 books, which is not very honest. I think it's pretty clear that Josephus did not accept some of the books that are in the Protestant Old Testament of 39 books.

Okay. Up to this point, I've explained the origin and history of the seven books known today as the Apocrypha. I've demonstrated that they were part of the original Christian Old Testament canon from the apostolic period up to when the canon was officially decided at the Council of Carthage in 397.

I've defended these books against some of the charges that are often leveled against them. Now, in the few minutes I have left, I do want to talk just a little bit about why these books are your friends. I mean, now for the sake of argument, let's just assume that right now it's too big of a leap for you to accept these books as part of the canon. I mean, if this is the first time you're hearing this subject, I would say that would be quite a leap. In 45 minutes, you've totally changed your mind. Like I say, it took me a lot longer than that.

But let me encourage you to at least do this. At least accept the judgment of Martin Luther and so many other Protestants that these books are books you should read for your own spiritual edification. And why are they edifying? Why did those men say that?

It's because they serve as a spiritual bridge between the time of Ezra and Nehemiah and the New Testament. God was not silent during those 400 years. For one thing, he was raising up heroes and deliverers for the Jews.

And yet without the books of the Maccabees, we wouldn't know anything about what happened to the Jews during those centuries. I know I never did. I mean, my history ended with Ezra and Nehemiah, and then it picked up with John the Baptist. I never knew what happened until I read Maccabees.

And yet even secular historians acknowledge that 1 Maccabees is a reliable historical book. They have a lot of praise for it, more than they do for a lot of the books of the Protestant Old Testament. Another thing, in 2 Maccabees, we have one of the first and certainly the most graphic narratives of faithful men and women dying as martyrs for their faith.

In other words, they're given the choice of giving up their faith as Jews and they'll be spared, or if they won't give up their Jewish faith, they'll be put to death. Now, you don't have those kinds of tests, or at least not any I can think of, until you get to the period of the Maccabees.

And here you start reading about martyrs like we do when we get to the Christian period. And most Bible scholars acknowledge that this is the event, the martyrdom of seven brothers in 2 Maccabees, that is being referred to in Hebrews 11 when it says, "Others were tortured, not accepting deliverance, that they might obtain a better resurrection."

I mean, where else in the Old Testament is anyone tortured refusing to accept deliverance so they could obtain a better resurrection? I think this is the only logical place. But there's more than history in these books. One of the most amazing messianic prophecies anywhere in the Old Testament is found in the wisdom of Solomon, which describes, I mean, almost to a T, what happened at the crucifixion, including the ridicule that the scribes and Pharisees heaped upon him. Yet it was written long before Jesus was even born. I mean, it's an extremely faith-strengthening prophecy.

Furthermore, the very first place we read about demons in Scripture is in the book of Tobit. Without Tobit, we have no reference to demons in the Old Testament at all that I know of. It's not until we get to the New Testament. And yet when we read about the ministry of Jesus, immediately we start reading about demons everywhere.

Without the book of Tobit, we would have to conclude that demons never possessed anyone or interfered with mankind until the time of Jesus. And that makes no sense. When Jesus told his disciples to cast out demons, they didn't reply, "What are demons?" In fact, the teachings in Sirach are so close to New Testament teachings, it almost reads more like a New Testament book than it does an Old Testament one.

The parallels between it and, say, the Epistle of James are extremely obvious to anyone who reads the two books together or, like, read one of them one night, read the other the next night, immediately realize James is drawing heavily from Sirach.

What's more, Sirach contains the expression, "The gates of hell," or "The gates of Hades," which is found nowhere else in Scripture until Jesus uses it. Now, if that expression were found in the book of Daniel, our New Testaments would put it in italics and attribute it as a quote from Daniel.

But they don't because it's a quote from Sirach. So it's not necessarily correct to say that there are no quotations in the New Testament from the Apocrypha. Because, like I say, there definitely are extremely close ones that are so close, we would call them quotes if they were from the Protestant Old Testament. And then again, for those of us Anabaptists, for non-Calvinists, the book of Sirach contains the longest and probably best discourse on free will than any other book in Scripture. And I think that's one reason why Luther and Calvin did not want it as part of the canon because it disproves their teaching of predestination.

Even if you reject the inspiration of these seven books, God was obviously giving some kind of general revelation and spiritual progression to the Jews during the 400 years before Christ. There was quite a progress from the time of Ezra. And these books let us know this. And it's something in which we can find great encouragement and edification.

So I'm going to stop there. And hopefully you've got some questions on what I've discussed. And it's fine to challenge me on things as well.

Thank you for that. That was extremely helpful and enlightening. Some of the things I've heard before, some of them were new. I actually had purchased an—someone gave me an Orthodox study Bible here a number of months ago. So it's been fun, quite enjoyable actually, to snoop around in that.

Patrick Matthews. Pardon? It wasn't actually—it wasn't him. No. He's the chief defender in that area. Yeah. One of the brothers here did a study on it for school. And so he had purchased some Orthodox study Bibles. So we will open it up for questions and comments here. If you have any questions, comments, challenges, something you need clarified a little more, now is the time.

So Brother David, the term 400 silent years, you would say is not a very accurate term. Exactly. God was moving in marvelous ways. Like I say, the book of Sirach would be the last book of the so-called Apocrypha.

And the progress in the understanding of God and the way things are, I mean, it's so pronounced in Sirach, like I say, it is closer to New Testament thinking than most of the Old Testament. So God is obviously not silent. He was guiding the Jews, bringing them to an understanding so that when Jesus comes with his teachings, there isn't quite the gap that it might seem like between the new and the old.

I had a question come in on the chat about what time was the book of 1 and 2 Ezra written. Do you know?

Okay.

537. Around 500 BC, give or take 50 years, something like that. If somebody wants to correct me on that, I don't pretend to be a scholar on that. I think—are you talking about just the general book of Ezra? Yeah. He said 1 and 2 book. Yeah. So there's a 1 and 2, and one of them is included in the Protestant canon, and one of them is only in the canon of the Septuagint. And I mean, as far as I know, they're written at the same time. Yeah.

I think one of the most convincing things for me is the fact that it's part of the Septuagint. And it's obvious from the quotations of the New Testament that the Septuagint was the Bible of the early church. And it's like Chuck Pike shared when he was on, "If that's the Bible Jesus used and taught out of, how come we would use anything else?" I mean, if we know that that's the scriptures that he was referring to, how could a Bible that was put together in the last 250 years be the wiser choice?

Yeah. I absolutely agree. I mean, again, this went as much against my thinking as probably for most of you, what you would have grown up with. And I mean, I fought against it mentally for quite a while, but it was just such an overwhelming case. I mean, but I've never been taught most of those things. In fact, I didn't know that Paul and them were quoting out of the Septuagint. I knew their quotations didn't fit my Old Testament so much of the time. But when I would ask the minister, I was never told, "Oh, well, that's because they're quoting out of the Septuagint." So I mean, it's ridiculous, the darkness that so many of us, most of us, have been hidden in.