What About the Apocrypha? (Part 1)

If you open up a Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox Bible, or for that matter many older Protestant bibles, you will notice other books with names like 1 and 2 Maccabees, Judith, and Tobit. What are these books? Why are they in these other Bibles? And, most importantly, why are they not included in our canon of Scripture?

The books of the Apocrypha, which are sometimes referred to as Deutero-Canonical (which means ‘second canon’), were writings that developed after the close of the Old Testament canon. They were included in many copies of the Septuagint. Often abbreviated as LXX (the Roman numeral for 70, the supposed number of translators who worked on the Septuagint), the Septuagint is the Greek translation of the Old Testament writings. They also included other writings, most importantly this group known as the Apocrypha. The Septuagint was developed because in the centuries before Christ Greek was the dominant language of the Mediterranean world, and the language even many Jews read. Thus, the Septuagint became widely circulated and read, and it was thus very influential.

The obvious question is “If these books were in the Septuagint, why would they not be considered to be part of the canon of the Old Testament?”  There are two major reasons why we do not accept them as part of the canon.

First, they were never accepted as Jews as being part of the Old Testament canon. They were thought of as being very useful and important, but not as part of Scripture. We can see this in the writings of Josephus, when he writes “It is true, our history hath been written since Artaxerxes very particularly, but hath not been esteemed of the like authority with the former by our forefathers, because there hath not been an exact succession of prophets since that time…” (Josephus, Against Apion, 1:8.) The same idea is found in the Babylonian Talmud: “After the latter prophets Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi had died, the Holy Spirit departed from Israel, but they still availed themselves of the bath qol” (Babylonian Talmud, Yomah 9b, quoted in Grudem, 56). The phrase bat qol means ‘the daughter of the voice – the echo. Thus after the time of Malachi there were no more inspired books that were the voice of the Spirit, but only the echoes. For this reason, the Apocryphal books were never accepted by the Jews as part of their canon.

The second reason is that while all the books of the Old Testament canon were originally written in Hebrew (with a few small sections written in Aramaic), it appears that many of the books of the Apocrypha were originally written in Greek, not Hebrew. This shows their later date, adding to the reason they were not considered as part of the canon.

Next time we will continue to look at the Apocrypha and see how they were used in the early church.

In Christ,

Bret