Hi, my name is David Bercot, and tonight our subject is The Apocrypha: Separating Myth from Fact. Tonight we're going to be learning what these books are, where they came from, and why they're included in Catholic Bibles, and not in Protestant Bibles. And then tomorrow night, we'll be looking at some of the objections that Protestants put forth against these books. Now, if you've listened to very many of my messages, you know that my two cardinal rules for doing research on any subject are: 1.
Start with a blank slate and two, go to the primary sources. And what is a primary source? It is a document or other item that was written or produced near the time that's being studied. Well, I have a confession to make. When it comes to tonight's topic, I did not start with a blank slate. I already had a very preconceived view of the subject. That's because from childhood on, I'd always been told that the books of the Apocrypha were something that the Roman Catholic Church added to the Bible.
I had heard that they were fictitious books, and they weren't inspired of God. And so in no sense did I have an open mind towards the subject of the apocrypha? I was dead set against these books long before I ever even read them. So, as I said, I violated my first rule on how to do research properly. But in my defense, I should note that none of this was by choice. It was what I was indoctrinated with.
And number two, I should also let you know that when I first researched the subject of the apocrypha, I didn't know that that's what I was researching. You see, actually, I was examining what the historical Christian faith was. The issue of the apocrypha wasn't even on my radar. In fact, I assumed it had no connection whatsoever with the historical Christian faith. Now, thankfully, I was following step two of how to do research properly. I was using primary sources for my research of the historical faith.
Thankfully, because of that, I did discover the true story behind the Apocrypha. Now, when I say that I was researching the historical Christian faith, I wasn't trying to discover what do the Scriptures say. I already knew that I had read them over many, many, many times. What I was trying to find out is how do we properly understand the Scriptures? And so I wanted to find out how those Christians who lived right after the apostles, how did they understand the Scriptures?
To do this, I ordered a set of the Ante-Nicene Fathers, which is a 10-volume set that contains most of the writings of the Christians who lived prior to the time of Constantine. I still remember how excited I was when the set finally arrived in the mail. I immediately began flipping through the various volumes to give myself an idea of what kind of reading to expect. Of course, the logical place to start would have been with the very first writing in the set, which is the letter of Clement of Rome.
However, I decided to start with the apology of Tertullian. I had heard of Tertullian ever since I had been a young Jehovah's Witness teenager because Jehovah's Witnesses would sometimes quote from him. And after I had left the witnesses, I came across Tertullian's name a lot in Bible encyclopedias, church history books, theological works, things like that. So I read his apology, which I found very interesting. Then after that, I went to another one of his apologetic works entitled An Answer to the Jews.
Well, early into this work, Tertullian was discussing the Sabbath. He mentioned that not all work was forbidden on the Sabbath, and he used the example of Joshua and the Israelites who marched around the walls of Jericho on the Sabbath. Well, he next said, " Also, in the time of the Maccabees, they bravely fought on the Sabbaths, and they routed their foreign enemies. " End quote. Well, I nearly fell out of my chair. In the time of the Maccabees? I couldn't believe what I had just read.
I'd always thought the Maccabees were some kind of mythical people that the Roman Catholics had made up. Despite all the Bible commentaries I had read through the years, I had not even once come across any mention of the Maccabees. I had had no idea who they were. And yet here was Tertullian talking about them in a work written to the Jews. As I said, I was just flabbergasted. I certainly did not want to believe that the early Christians accepted the Apocrypha as Scripture.
So I told myself that perhaps this was something limited to Tertullian. As it turned out, after a few weeks of reading, I had run into so many things that I hadn't expected to find that I was simply overwhelmed. So I quit reading. Believe me, the matter of the apocrypha was only one of so many new things I was discovering. Things I didn't want to discover. So I put the early Christian writings back on the shelf and I decided that maybe I just didn't need to know what Christians believed in the beginning.
Well, that worked at most for perhaps four or five days. And soon I realized that I had to see what Christianity was like in the beginning. I told myself that I didn't have to embrace their beliefs, but I did owe it to myself at least to know what they did believe. Well, when I did pick up the Ante-Nicene fathers again, I decided that this time I would start from the very first work in them, The Letter of Clement to Rome. I would then work forward chronologically from there.
I was hoping to find that no one who lived immediately after the apostles would quote from the Apocrypha. Now the letter of Clement of Rome, where I was starting, was probably written around the year 105. Now incidentally, Clement of Rome was no minor figure in the Church of his day. He was one of the leaders in the church in Rome, and he was well-known and respected by the other churches in the Mediterranean world, if not beyond. And he wasn't writing a personal letter.
Rather, his letter was written on behalf of all of the leaders of the church in Rome to the entire church in Corinth. So I started reading. However, I didn't get very far into the letter of Clement before I ran into the Apocrypha again. I couldn't believe it. I found Clement quoting from the wisdom of Solomon. And this was particularly mind-boggling because I wasn't even researching the Apocrypha. This wasn't supposed to happen. Why do these books keep popping up, I ask myself.
Well, to top things off, toward the end of Clement's letter, I came across the following quotation. He wrote, " Many women, also being strengthened by the grace of God, have performed numerous manly exploits. The blessed Judith, when her city was besieged, asked the elders for permission to go forth into the camp of the strangers, and the Lord delivered Holofernes into the hands of a woman.
" Esther also being perfect in faith exposed herself to no less danger in order to deliver the tribes of Israel from impending destruction. So here Clement mentioned Judith, the heroine from the Book of Judith, which is part of the Apocrypha. And he mentions her in the same breath as Esther, the heroine of the Book of Esther. Now, the significance of Clement's use of the Apocrypha didn't escape me. As I said, he was a respected leader in the church in Rome.
The church in Rome was the largest church in the world at that time. And we know from Paul's epistle that the church in Rome was a faithful church, at least in the days of the apostles. Not only that, Clement was writing to the church in Corinth, a well-established church where Paul had taught. Obviously, Clement knew or at least assumed that the church in Corinth recognized these books from the Apocrypha as Scripture, or else he wouldn't have quoted from them.
This was particularly the case because he was writing a letter of admonition to the church in Corinth. When you're admonishing someone, you don't quote from books that are going to be a red flag and that would undermine the very counsel that you're giving. So the handwriting was on the wall. I realized that it was totally false that the apocrypha was comprised of books that the Catholic Church had added to the scriptures.
Rather, these books were obviously works that Christians recognized as scriptures from the very start. And in saying that, I'm not basing it merely on the fact that Clement of Rome and Tertullian quoted from these books. No, they were just two of the writers. As I continued to read from the early Christians, I saw for myself that it was writer after writer that quoted from these works.
As I was eventually to discover, in the writings of the early Christians prior to the Council of Nicaea, which was in the year 325 AD, there are over 300 quotations from the Apocrypha. And that's just in the works that are included in the set of the Ante-Nicene Fathers. When you add to that other works that are not included in that set, the total is closer to 350 to maybe 400 quotations.
In fact, the early Christians quote from several of these books, like The Wisdom of Solomon and from Sirach, far more than they quote from many of the books that are part of the Protestant Old Testament. More importantly, when the early Christians quoted from these books, they made no distinction between them and the rest of Scripture. They used these works to support doctrine, to teach moral living, and to discuss biblical history.
Needless to say, none of this was something I had wanted to find, nor was it something I had expected to find. But I could hardly deny it. I spent an entire year reading the early Christian writings, and at the end of that year, I felt very betrayed by conventional Christianity. I should not have been discovering the truth about the apocrypha in the manner that I did.
I was in my mid-30s, and I had been reading standard Bible dictionaries, Bible commentaries, and all sorts of Protestant theological books and history books for many years. Yet no one ever said a word about the books of the Apocrypha being embraced by the early Christians. All I ever heard was that these were false, uninspired books that the Catholics had added to the Bible. Now you have to understand that at that point in time, as to the Apocrypha, I had no idea of what was going on.
I saw that the early Christians used those books, but I didn't understand why then we didn't use them today. I didn't have the answers. To be sure, I eventually did discover the answers, and that's what I'm going to be explaining to you during the rest of this hour. But if you're going to understand the history we're about to discuss, you have to understand a little bit about the Septuagint. The Septuagint was the first translation ever made of Scripture.
It was made by Jews about 200 years or more before Christ, and it was a translation of the Old Testament from Hebrew and Aramaic into Greek. Now the reason it was made was because after the Jews returned from the exile in Babylon, fewer and fewer of them could speak Hebrew. What's more, after Alexander the Great conquered that part of the world, Greek eventually became the language of most Jews. As a result, the Septuagint became THE Bible of the majority of Jews throughout the world.
And except perhaps for a limited number of scribes and Pharisees who felt the Scripture should never be translated out of Hebrew. To my knowledge, there was no major controversy surrounding the Septuagint. In his historical work entitled The Antiquities of the Jews, which was written around the year 90 AD, Josephus praises the Septuagint in glowing terms. Now this is significant because Josephus was a Hebrew-speaking Palestinian Jew. Not only that, he was a Pharisees.
Well, not only did the majority of the Jews use the Septuagint, but it was also the Bible of the Christians. That's because most of the Jewish converts to Christianity couldn't speak Hebrew, and certainly none of the Gentile converts could speak Hebrew. So naturally, the Septuagint was the Old Testament that these Christian converts used. But what does the Septuagint have to do with the Apocrypha? You may be wondering.
Well, the books we know as the Apocrypha were simply some of the Old Testament books that comprised the canon of the Septuagint. When the Christians adopted the Septuagint as their Bible, they embraced all of the books that were included in the Septuagint. And so naturally, they accepted the books of the Apocrypha as Scripture. That's why they knew of no distinction between them and the rest of the Old Testament. So exactly what books are we talking about when we say the Apocrypha?
Well, actually, the canon of the Septuagint only included eight books beyond the 39 books that we're familiar with in the Protestant Old Testament. These eight books are Sirach, The Wisdom of Solomon, Tobit, Judith, First and Second Maccabees, and First and Second Esdras. In case you're wondering, Esdras is simply the Greek form of the name Ezra.
The original King James version contained the books of the Apocrypha, and it called these books First and Second Esdras simply to distinguish them from the Book of Ezra that is part of the Protestant canon. But all three of these books deal with the same person, Ezra, and they all revolve around the same events pertaining to the rebuilding of the temple.
I realize that you might be puzzled here, because if you've looked at the Apocrypha in the 1611 King James version, you no doubt notice that there are 14 books listed there, not 8. Why is that? It's because in the Septuagint, the books of Jeremiah, Daniel, and Esther contain material that was omitted in the Masoretic text, the Hebrew text from which both Roman Catholic and Protestant Old Testaments have been translated.
Well, rather than deleting this additional material, when the Protestants translated their Bibles from the Masoretic text, they set out the additional material from Jeremiah, Daniel, and Esther as separate books. For example, in the original King James, you'll see the Book of Baruch, which was part of the book of Jeremiah in the Septuagint. And you'll see the story of Susanna, which was part of the book of Daniel in the Septuagint. And that's the reason why the Apocrypha in the King James Version has 14 books.
Now I should mention that for the sake of simplicity, I'm going to be referring to these books as the Apocrypha, even though I don't like that name, because that's how most people in the West refer to these books. However, that name was not given to them until the fifth century by Jerome. The name Apocrypha comes from the Greek word apocrypha, which simply means hidden or non-public.
Jerome had picked up that name from the unbelieving Jews who, in his day, called these books by that name because they were hidden from the ordinary Jews by their rabbis. Now, today in English we have an adjective, the word apocryphal, which means mythical or fictitious. And so for much of my life, I thought that the books of the Apocrypha were books that were fictitious or mythical. But that is not the case. OK, back to our narrative.
As students of Scripture, the Christians were making tremendous use of the Septuagint in converting both Jews and Gentiles to Christianity. As I mentioned a minute ago, at one time, the Jews had seen the Septuagint as a wonderful God-inspired translation. But after it had been adopted by the Christians, and the Christians were making such effective use of it in witnessing to the Jews, the scribes and Pharisees no longer looked upon the Septuagint with favor.
In fact, they realized that they needed to launch a major spiritual counterattack if Judaism was going to survive. So somewhere around the close of the first century, the scribes and Pharisees came up with a brilliant but evil plan that would both insulate the Jewish people from the Christians and would also spiritually discredit Christianity. Their plan was threefold. First, they realized the Septuagint had to go. Sure, it had served the Jewish people well for many centuries, but now it had become a liability.
That is, it was a liability from the perspective of unbelieving Jews. To take the place of the Septuagint, the rabbis commissioned a new Greek translation to be made of the Old Testament. But this new translation would not be made from the same Hebrew text that the Septuagint had been translated from. Rather, it would be made from the text now favored by the rabbis, which is known today as the Masoretic Text.
This meant, from that point on, the Christians and the Jews would be using Old Testaments that were based on different texts. Now in saying this, I don't want to over-exaggerate the differences between the Septuagint and the Masoretic text. For most Old Testament verses, they read exactly the same. When they do differ, usually the differences have no doctrinal significance.
However, a lot of the Messianic prophecies, and a lot of the prophecies about the disbelieving Jews and about the Gentiles turning to God, do turn on the wording of the Septuagint. If you can make the time, I want to encourage you to listen to the CD set I recorded several years ago about the Septuagint. The reason I say that is because the Septuagint is so important to your understanding of the New Testament and of the historical Christian faith.
And of course, it's important in order for you to understand the history of the Apocrypha. Now, I'm not going to be talking about it anymore right now, but we're going to be revisiting the subject of the Septuagint a little later on this evening. In fact, six or seven of the 14 books that are contained in the King James Apocrypha are simply the direct result of this single decision by the rabbis to abandon the Septuagint.
That's because, as I've said, these books were simply integral parts of the Septuagintal texts of Jeremiah, Daniel, and Esther. Okay, so that was the first decision made by the scribes and Pharisees. The second one was that they declared there had been no further prophets and no further inspiration of Scripture since the time of Ezra. That was at least 400 years before Christ. So of course this was basically an official declaration that neither Jesus nor John the Baptist had been prophets, nor any of the apostles.
It also meant that the Christian New Testament was not Scripture. Third, the scribes and Pharisees limited the canon of Scripture to around 38 or 39 books. This new official canon was the familiar Protestant canon of 39 books, but probably without the Book of Esther. The general thought among scholars today is that this represented the more conservative canon that the scribes and Pharisees were already using by then, in contrast to the larger canon of the Septuagint.
Well, as a result of these three monumental decisions, after about the year 100 AD, Christians and Jews were using different Old Testament texts. Christians were using the Septuagint, and the Jews were using the Masoretic text. And Christians and Jews had different Old Testament canons. The Christian canon included the books of the Apocrypha, and the Jewish canon didn't. So who was right? The Christians or the Jews? Since I'm addressing Christians, the answer to that question should be a no-brainer.
I mean, seriously, as Christians, can we possibly take the position that the scribes and Pharisees got the canon of Scripture right, and the Christians got it wrong? These are the very religious leaders whom Jesus called blind guides, hypocrites, brood of vipers, and sons of hell. Now, how could any Christian believe that these blind guides came to an accurate decision on what books should be included in the Old Testament, while the faithful Christians got it wrong?
At the same time, are we to believe that the apostles gave no instructions to the men to whom they were turning over the church? Paul had told Timothy to train up men in the faith who would be able to train up other men after them. Are we to believe that part of that training did not include knowing what books constituted Scripture? Or are we to believe that this whole system had already broken down by the time the Apostle John had died? Let me ask you another question.
Are we to believe that the Holy Spirit had guided the Church in other matters, but he completely abandoned the Church when it came to defining the Old Testament canon? What's more, if the early Christians couldn't recognize the books of the Old Testament, how could they possibly recognize the books of the New Testament? Interestingly, we turn to the early Christians when we argue the canonicity of the books of the New Testament.
We point to the fact that the early Christians accepted these particular books and rejected others. We acknowledge that the Holy Spirit was with them in formulating the New Testament canon. Does it make sense that the Holy Spirit was not with them in formulating the Old Testament canon? There's another point we need to reflect on. When the scribes and Pharisees made their definitive decision about the canon of Scripture, it was at the close of the first century. The New Testament had been written by then.
When the rabbis declared that God had inspired no further scriptures after the time of Ezra, they didn't mean that he had not inspired any further Old Testament writings. They meant that he had not inspired any further scriptures, period. They weren't saying that the Old Testament consisted of only 38 or 39 books. They were saying that the Bible only consisted of 38 or 39 books. They weren't simply rejecting the books of the Apocrypha. They were rejecting the 27 books of the New Testament.
That was one of the key elements of their decision. So when we side with the scribes and Pharisees, which is what nearly all Protestants have done, we're having to say that these rabbis were utterly wrong in their decision that special revelation had ended in the time of Ezra. Yet somehow they were utterly correct in discerning which books should be included in the Old Testament canon.
We're having to say that these blind guides were enlightened when it came to the Old Testament canon and that the Church was in complete darkness on the matter. Does that make sense? Is that believable? Did the blind guides, the hypocrites, the brood of vipers get the canon of Scripture right? While those who faithfully believed in Christ got it wrong? Back years and years ago, right after I had finished reading the early Christian writings, I had to ask myself those questions.
And to me, the answer was rather obvious. Certainly the Christians got it right, not the scribes and Pharisees. Now you may be asking yourself, but isn't it possible the early Christians departed from the faith on this one issue? Or to frame the suggestion in its proper perspective, we're saying that neither the apostles use these books nor the Jews. But for some inexplicable reason, the disciples of the apostles started using them. Well, the first question I'd have to ask is, but why?
If neither the apostles nor the Jews use these books, why would the men after the apostles suddenly start using them? That defies all logic. It would be bizarre. Sure, if it had happened over a long period of time, perhaps there would be a remote possibility that Christians would change their canon of Scripture. Although even then, it's not likely they would do so without some big underlying reason. But as I've mentioned, the earliest of the Christian writers quote from these books as inspired scripture.
Clement of Rome, Polycarp, Barnabas, and the writer of the Didache, among others. These were faithful, godly men who had the utmost respect for the apostles. Polycarp had been appointed as a church leader by the apostles, and he died as a martyr for Christ. So why on earth would he or any of these men, without any reason, suddenly change the canon of Scripture that had been delivered to them by the apostles? Second, it wasn't that just a few Christians accepted these books as Scripture.
They virtually all accepted them as part of the Bible. Now, is it believable that within a year or two after the apostle John died, the whole church would suddenly change its Old Testament canon? And why would they do that? After all, can you picture that happening in the denomination that you belong to, or to the church that you belong to? Let's suppose that the present group of leaders in your church, whom everyone loves and respects, passed away.
And then suppose that when these men died, suddenly your whole church changed its canon of Scripture. Is that believable? It wouldn't make any sense, would it? But for the sake of argument, let's suppose that it did happen in your church. Let's suppose that the new leaders in your church suddenly started basing their sermons on supposedly inspired scriptures that you've never even heard of before. Do you think your congregation would just quietly sit by and accept it? Of course not. There would be a huge uproar.
A church leader can't just quietly change the canon of Scripture without causing a big controversy. Yet, there was no controversy in the early Church about the use of the Apocrypha. In contrast, when an early heretic named Marcion tried to change the New Testament canon this was around the year 150, there was a big uproar. He was put out of the church, and he was condemned everywhere. Quite a few early Christians wrote works attacking him. We still have those works.
So no, it just isn't believable that the generation after the apostles suddenly changed the Old Testament canon, and yet no one said anything about it. I stated earlier that the strategy of the scribes and Pharisees was both brilliant and evil, and indeed it was both. It not only affected the Jewish canon of Scripture, it eventually affected the Christian canon of Scripture as well. In fact, their plan no doubt worked far better than any of them ever imagined it would.
In fact, it's only because their plan was so brilliant and worked so effectively that I'm even giving this message tonight. To be sure, at first, the only effect was that, in a major way, it insulated the unbelieving Jews from the Christians. At first, it had no impact on the Christian Church. The early Christians saw through what the Jewish religious leaders were doing, and they were very vocal in denouncing the rabbis for doing this.
They denounced them for tampering with the Scriptures in order to remove numerous Messianic prophecies and to remove passages that put them, the religious leaders, in a bad light. But over time, the strategy of the scribes slowly began to impact the Christian church. And the key to understanding why it had an impact turns on our recognizing three factors. One, the Hebrew language. Two, the fact the printing press had not yet been invented, and three, the fact that most Bible manuscripts were written on papyrus.
Let's start with that first factor, the Hebrew language. With the exception of perhaps one or two books of the Apocrypha, all of the books of the Old Testament were written in Hebrew or perhaps in Hebrew and partly in Aramaic. So what's the significance of this? It's the fact that Hebrew was only spoken by the Jews. And as I stated before, centuries before Christ, even most Jews couldn't speak Hebrew. That's why they had the Greek Septuagint translation made.
But by the time the Septuagint was translated, there were two main Hebrew families of the Old Testament text. One was the Hebrew text that the Septuagint was translated from, and the other was the text that we know today as the Masoretic text. The scribes and Pharisees in Palestine, or at least most of them, favored the Masoretic text. In fact, many, if not most of them, opposed having the Scriptures translated into other languages at all. They wanted to keep it in the Hebrew language.
So, of course, they sponsored the continual copying of the Masoretic text to keep the copies fresh. Well, how does the printing press come into play? Well, the fact that it had not yet been invented meant that everything, including Old Testament manuscripts, had to be copied by hand. That was an expensive and time-consuming process.
Now, if you're a Jew who can't read Hebrew, and the Septuagint is your Bible, why would you pay someone to make hand copies of the underlying Hebrew text on which the Septuagint had been based? Well, the answer is you wouldn't. You would pay someone to make copies of the Greek Septuagint itself. Not copies of the old underlying text. Finally, the third factor that plays into all of this is papyrus. Most of the ancient Old Testament manuscripts were written on papyrus, which is made from reeds.
It is fragile and is not particularly durable. So over the centuries, the Hebrew manuscripts, upon which the Septuagint was based, they disintegrated and disappeared. Now, no one particularly cared because they were using the Greek copies, which were constantly being recopied and renewed. But it meant that by the year 100 AD, all Hebrew copies of the underlying Septuagint text had pretty much disappeared.
The only Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament, still in existence, were those of the Masoretic Text, and they were in the exclusive control of the unbelieving Jewish religious leaders. Not only that, the only people who could read these Hebrew texts were the rabbis and a small handful of Palestinian Jews. I stated earlier that the Christians in the 2nd century went on the offensive against the Jewish religious leaders for tampering with the scriptures. However, the rabbis launched their own counter-offensive.
They told the Christians, " We aren't the ones who've corrupted the Scriptures. It's you Christians. We have the original Hebrew manuscripts of the Scriptures. You don't. We know what is genuinely scripture and what isn't. Wow. That was a very plausible sounding claim. Now most 2nd century Christians had no doubts that God had guided the church into the correct scriptures. But by the 3rd century, you do find a few Christians who put stock in what the Jews were saying.
Such Christians began to doubt both the text and the canon of the Old Testament used by the Christian Church. One such Christian was Julius Africanus. In fact, he wrote a letter about the matter to one of the most respected and learned early Christians of the 3rd century, a man named Origen. Julius tried to argue to Origen that the unbelieving Jews must be correct. Well, Origen gave him this reply.
He wrote, " In many of the other sacred books, I sometimes found more in our copies, that is, in the Septuagint, than in the Hebrew, " that would mean the Masoretic text. Continuing, he said, " Sometimes I found less. " Now, when we notice such things, are we to abruptly reject as spurious the copies in use in our churches? Should we command the Brotherhood to put away the sacred books that are currently used among them?
Should we coax the Jews and persuade them to give us copies that are 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? End quote. I still remember reading that exchange between Origen and Julius Africanus when I first came across it over 30 years ago.
I found it hard to argue with Origen's logic then, and I find it equally hard to do so now. Are we to believe that the Holy Spirit had no regard for the Church and gave it no guidance with regard to the Scriptures? While he infallibly guided the unbelieving scribes and Pharisees? Of course not. Nevertheless, the scribes and Pharisees had indeed successfully planted seeds of doubt in the minds of some Christians.
Through the years, the rabbis kept throwing in the face of the Christians that you Christians have corrupted copies of the Scriptures. And this did have its effect over time, like water dripping on a rock. When we get to the 4th century, to the period of Constantine, we begin to see a few of the prominent church leaders like Athanasius, voicing doubts about the Old Testament canon of the Church.
Yes, the Rabbis had been attacking the books of the Apocrypha for centuries, and now a few key church leaders were beginning to believe them. One such church leader was Jerome. Now in his day, nobody any longer realized that the Septuagint was based on a different text family than was the Masoretic text that the Jews were using in his day.
So unless you had faith that the Holy Spirit had guided the apostles and the Church into using the correct scriptures, it did appear that the Septuagint was an inaccurate translation of the original Hebrew Scriptures. But unlike Origen and the rest of the early Christians, Jerome did not have faith that the Holy Spirit had guided the Church into the correct scriptures. The ridicule of the Jews really bothered him, and he was convinced that the Church was using a defective Old Testament.
Eventually, he got his chance to do something about it. In his day, around the beginning of the 5th century, very few people in the Western Roman Empire could any longer read Greek. Latin was now the language of both the educated and of the ordinary Roman, that is in the West. Now, ever since the first century, individual Christians had been making translations of the Scriptures into Latin. Now, the people who did this translating were not necessarily scholars, and there were imperfections in their translations.
More importantly, there were several Latin translations of scriptures floating around. Now, by the beginning of the 5th century, you had a state church, and you had a pope who had the power to authorize a single Latin translation of the Bible. Well, guess who that Pope's secretary was? None other than Jerome. So the pope commissioned Jerome to make a new Latin translation of both the Old and New Testaments.
To be fair, the Pope assumed that Jerome would translate the Old Testament from the Septuagint, since that had always been the practice of the Church. However, without any authority from the Church, Jerome decided to translate the Old Testament from the Hebrew Masoretic text. He saw himself as the great Savior of the Church, who would single-handedly enable it to start using the right version of the Old Testament, the one approved by the Jewish rabbis.
Well, to do this, Jerome first moved to Bethlehem, and he studied Hebrew under the Jewish scribes. He then used their texts to translate the Old Testament from Hebrew into Latin. Naturally, this created all kinds of problems. Latin-speaking Christians knew many of the Old Testament passages by memory. And the version of the Old Testament they had memorized was the Latin translation of the Septuagint.
Also, several of the Old Testament books that are included in both the Jewish canon and in the Christian canon contain either more verses or less verses in the Septuagint than in the Masoretic text. That was one of the things Origen was talking about in his letter. And then of course there was the issue of the books from the Septuagint that were part of the Christian canon, but which were not contained in the Masoretic text. Now, Jerome couldn't simply omit these books. The Church would never stand for it.
They had been using them for centuries. So what Jerome did was to create a bizarre hybrid Old Testament. His Old Testament was primarily a Latin translation of the Hebrew Masoretic text. But he used the Septuagint to translate certain familiar verses that people would have otherwise objected to. He also used the Septuagint to translate the Psalms, since Christians were used to singing the Psalms based on their wording in the Septuagint.
Finally, Jerome grudgingly included all of the books of the Christian Old Testament canon in his translation, which of course he had to translate from the Septuagint. However, Jerome gave these books the name Apocrypha. I spoke about that earlier. And ironically, the name stuck, and that is the term by which these books are still known today. In his Bible, Jerome wrote critical prefaces to most of the books of the Apocrypha.
He also wrote a defense of his new translation because he was getting a lot of criticism in which he disparaged the Septuagint as being a sloppy, inaccurate translation of the Hebrew text. In his ignorance, Jerome didn't realize that the translators of the Septuagint had been working from a different Hebrew text. Now Jerome's new Latin translation, known as the Latin Vulgate, would have probably been dead on arrival if it were not for the events of secular history that were happening at the time.
Shortly after Jerome completed his Latin Vulgate, the barbarians overran the Western Roman Empire. So the issue of whether or not his translation was based on the Septuagint or on the Masoretic text was hardly the main thing on most people's minds. The main thing on their mind was just surviving. Before long, learning almost totally collapsed in the West.
The later Popes, who didn't know anything about the textual controversies of Jerome's time, made the Latin Vulgate the official Bible of the Roman Catholic Church. Eventually, the earlier Latin Bibles that had been translated from the Septuagint disappeared. So here is one of the great ironies of Christian history. Protestants blame the Catholic Church for adding the books of the Apocrypha to the Bible. But the truth is the exact opposite.
If it weren't for the Catholic Church, we would all be using translations of the Septuagint as our Old Testaments, and we would all be using the books of the Apocrypha, just like the early Christians did. Yes, the Catholic Church is responsible for corrupting Scripture, but in the opposite way that most people think. Interestingly, in the end, Jerome not only corrupted Catholic scriptures, but Protestant scriptures as well. Why do I say that?
It's because the Protestant Reformers followed his example of translating the Old Testament from the Hebrew Masoretic text rather than from the Septuagint. Furthermore, during the Middle Ages, various Roman Catholic theologians read Jerome's disparaging comments about the Apocrypha, and many of them accepted his comments as factual. And this made it easier for the Reformers when they decided to declare these books not to be inspired Scripture.
Finally, before moving to the Reformation part of our story, I should explain that what Jerome did only affected Western Christians. The Eastern Christians paid no attention to him. In fact, up to this day, they continued to use the Septuagint as their Old Testament, and they continued to embrace the original Christian Old Testament canon, which includes the Apocrypha. Now we come to the Reformation. As we all know, Luther's banner slogan of the Reformation was salvation by faith alone.
Most people also know that Luther preached the slogan " Sola Scriptura, " that is, " Scripture alone. " However, what most people don't know is that Luther tried to remake the canon of Scripture, both the Old Testament and the New Testament. Luther realized that his doctrine of salvation by faith alone was contradicted by numerous passages in Scripture. Those scriptures show that after we are saved, we maintain our salvation through an obedient love faith relationship with Jesus Christ.
Now, the main New Testament book that got in Luther's way was James. But Revelation was another problem because it states that on Judgment Day, we're going to be judged based on our works. And then there's the Book of Hebrews, which says that if we go on sinning willfully after we're saved, we will be rejected by Christ. So Luther wanted to take those books out of the New Testament canon, along with a few others.
Now he would have liked to have taken out Matthew, Mark, and Luke as well, because they contradict his gospel, but he realized he could hardly get away with taking out those three gospels. So he came up with the idea of a canon within a canon. According to Luther, within the New Testament canon, not all books are of equal value for the purposes of doctrine. He said the chief book of the New Testament, the book which contains the entirety of the gospel. Everything we need to know for salvation is the book of Romans.
He said, " It's the touchstone by which you measure every other New Testament book. " And then along with it, he wanted to include in his inner canon Paul's letters to Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, and Colossians. Finally, he wanted to add to these letters of Paul, the Gospel of John. In other words, he basically wanted to remake the canon based on whether a certain book of the Bible fit his new doctrine of salvation by faith alone. Now, the Old Testament actually wasn't as big of an issue to Luther.
That's because it's not very doctrinal in nature. Plus, even if a passage in the Old Testament seemed to contradict Luther's gospel, he could just dismiss it by saying, well, that was the law, which has been replaced by the gospel. Still, in his debates with the Roman Catholics, they used Second Maccabees to support their doctrine of saying masses for the dead to get him out of purgatory. And we're going to be talking more about that passage in 2 Maccabees tomorrow night.
And the Roman Catholics also used the Book of Sirach to support the doctrine of free will against the doctrine of predestination that he was teaching. On the other hand, Luther liked much of what some of the other books of the Apocrypha teach. So his idea at first was to exclude some of the books of the Apocrypha from his new canon and keep other ones. And of course, again, it would be based on whether a particular book fit his doctrines or didn't fit his doctrines.
By way of example, he wanted to delete the Book of Second Maccabees, but keep 1 Maccabees. He wrote this, " Just as it is proper for the first Book of Maccabees to be included among the sacred scriptures, so it is proper that this second book of Maccabees should be thrown out. " However, in the end, Luther lost his bid to remake the New Testament canon. He also lost his efforts to exclude some of the books of the Apocrypha, but include other ones.
So he had to content himself with excluding all of the books of the Apocrypha from the canon. Nevertheless, he included these books in his new German translation of the Bible, but with the notation, " Although these books are not esteemed like the Holy Scriptures, they are still both useful and good to read. " He then took all of these books and placed the whole group of them between the Book of Malachi and the Book of Matthew.
In case you didn't realize it, in the Septuagint and in the Latin Vulgate, these books appear in their natural order along with the other Old Testament books. For example, if they are historical books, they're included with the other historical books. If they are wisdom literature like Sirach, then they're included with the wisdom books, like Proverbs. But not everyone bought into Luther's grand scheme to remake the canon of Scripture. And the group that opposed him on this were the Anabaptists.
They wanted a real Reformation, one that would focus primarily on the teachings of Jesus, not on the book of Romans. And they refused to read Romans and the rest of the New Testament, for that matter, through Luther's eyes. They also rejected Luther's scheme to remake the Old Testament canon by excluding the books of the Apocrypha. In fact, if you read the writings of the early Anabaptists, you quickly discover that they quote extensively from the books of the Apocrypha.
And like the early Christians, they make no distinction between them and the rest of the Old Testament books. They quote them both for moral instruction and for doctrine. And I'm talking about the main Anabaptist leaders like Menno Simons, Michael Sattler, Peter Riedemann, and Pilgrim Marpeck. And as most modern-day Anabaptists have discovered, the books of the Apocrypha are quoted frequently in the highly respected Anabaptist work entitled The Martyr's Mirror.
Like the early Christians, the Anabaptists appreciated the books of the Apocrypha. Their faith was strengthened by the messianic prophecies contained in the wisdom of Solomon. At a time when they were suffering horrible persecution, they drew strength from the example of the Jewish martyrs in 2 Maccabees who endured torture for their faith. They appreciated the godly instruction contained in the Apocrypha, particularly in Sirach and the wisdom of Solomon.
And as believers in free will, the Anabaptists frequently quoted the teachings in Sirach on this subject. In fact, the 15th chapter of Sirach contains the strongest teaching on free will in the entire Old Testament. It says this, " Do not say it was God's doing that I fell away. For what God hates, He does not do. " In the beginning, God created human beings and made them subject to their own free will. If you choose, you can keep the commandments. In front of everyone are life and death.
Whichever they choose will be given them. In closing, let's briefly sum up what we've learned tonight. We've learned that the term apocrypha refers to the Old Testament books that were part of the canon of the Septuagint, but are not part of the Masoretic text. We've seen that the Septuagint was the Old Testament of the New Testament Christians and the early Christians.
And so not surprisingly, we saw that the Christians who lived immediately after the deaths of the apostles frequently quoted from the books of the Apocrypha. These books were virtually universally accepted as inspired scripture by the early Christians. Next, we learn that somewhere around the close of the first century, the scribes and Pharisees abruptly rejected the Septuagint, which had been the Bible of the vast majority of Jews for hundreds of years. The scribes also limited their canon to 38 or 39 books.
As a result, after that time, the Christians had a different Old Testament canon than did the unbelieving Jews. The Christian canon included the books of the Apocrypha, the Jewish canon did not. We saw that at the beginning of the 5th century, Jerome, who was the Pope's Secretary, was commissioned to do a new Latin translation of the Bible. And he unilaterally decided to translate the Old Testament from the Masoretic text instead of from the Septuagint.
And he's the one who gave these Old Testament books that are missing from the Masoretic text the name Apocrypha, which means hidden. We next learn that Martin Luther tried to create a new canon of Scripture for both the Old and New Testaments, based on whether various books agreed with his doctrines or not. And although he failed in his attempt to create a new Protestant New Testament canon, he was successful in having the books of the Apocrypha removed from the Protestant Old Testament canon.
Finally, we saw that the Anabaptists not only rejected Luther's doctrines, but also his new canon of Scripture. They continued to embrace the books of the Apocrypha as Scripture. Tomorrow night, we're going to look at some of the objections that are made about the Apocrypha and see if they really hold up to careful scrutiny.