What is the Apocrypha?

Excerpt from Bruce L. Shelley, Church History in Plain Language (Nashville: HarperCollins Christian Publishing, Inc., 2013), 66-67.

When Christians retained the Old Testament for their own use, they did not settle completely just which books this included. To this day Christians differ over the inclusion or rejection of the so-called Apocrypha in the Old Testament list of books. The term stands for twelve or fifteen books, depending upon how you group them, that Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox accept as canonical and most Protestants reject.

                Some Jews embrace a canon that includes the typical Protestant canon for the Old Testament of thirty-nine books. Scholars often picture this being more typical for the Jews in Palestine. They numbered these books in clusters and organized them by a three-fold division of Law, Prophets, and Writings. The three-fold structure of this emerging canon may explain Jesus referring to the Law of Moses, the prophets, and the Psalms (the first book in the Writings, Luke 24:44). Most scholars believe Jesus quoted only from this smaller canon, which is frequently but perhaps deceptively called the “Palestinian Canon.”

                The Greek translation of the Old Testament included the books of the Hebrew canon, with additional books as well. Protestants routinely call these additional books the Apocrypha, or more generically the Deuterocanonical books. The Greek translations, the chief of these being the Septuagint, were influential in making the books of the Apocrypha more popularly circulated. Greek translations of the Old Testament were made in the City of Alexandria. This larger canon, consisting of the Hebrew canon and the Apocrypha, is called the “Alexandrian Canon.”

                Early Christians differed over the question of the Apocrypha. In the West the influential Augustine, the well-known bishop of Hippo, embraced the Apocrypha as part of the canon of Scripture. During the sixteenth-century Reformation most Protestants rejected the Apocrypha as canonical. The Roman Catholic Church, following Augustine, accepted the books. And that is how the churches differ to this day. From the beginning, however, Christians had more than the Old Covenant as their rule for faith. During Jesus’ life on earth they had the Word made flesh, and after Jesus’ departure they had the living leadership of the apostles. The reverence for the apostles’ message, whether oral or written, as the authentic channel to the will of the Lord Jesus, is reflected throughout early Christian literature.

                During the days of the apostles, congregations often read letters from the companions of the Lord. Some of these letters were obviously intended to be read in public worship, probably alongside some portion of the Old Testament or with some sermon.

                Churches also relied on accounts about the life of the Lord Jesus. The first gospels were not written before AD 60 or 70, but their contents were partly available in written form before this. Luke tells us that many had undertaken some account of the events of the life of Jesus.

                The question is, out of this growing body of Christian literature, how did the twenty-seven books we know as the New Testament come to be set apart as Scripture? How and when did they cross the line between books regarded as important and even authoritative, and books regarded as holy and the Word of God? To put it in one word, how did they become canonical?

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