Well, it's really a story of Bibles. You have strong support in the early church for the 22 book Old Testament Canon. There were other books that were read, but were not considered authoritative on matters of doctrine.
Some of those books ended up eventually in the Septuagint, the Greek Bible and eventually the Vulgate, the Latin.
We can see even though they were in the Bible though that the learned did not consider them of the same authority. So we see Athanasius, the Bishop of Constantinople, clearly lay out that there was a 22 book canon of the Old Testament that was scripture (he made one mistake in his list, having one Apocryphal book instead of Esther). We also see Jerome, who translated the Vulgate, in the prefaces of the Vulgate lay out again that there were the books of fully authoritative scripture and the apocryphal books. Apocrypha was even a word he used for them.
Well over time, people look to their bible and they just accept it. Not everyone is a scholar. So we see the Orthodox church and people think the Septuagint was always the way they have it now and they think in that exact form Jesus and the Apostles quoted from it and so they accept it in it's entirety. They don't really make the distinction between the books of scripture and those that are useful but not scripture.
And we see the same thing in the Roman church. In addition to the prefaces of the Vulgate, we see people through the ages who understand that the extra books are useful for reading and study but not to be a source of doctrinal authority, people like Pope Gregory the Great, is just one. And we see the very books the Roman Catholic Church used make the same distinction.
For instance the Glossa ordianaria, the ordinary or common gloss which was the standard commentary used by the Roman Catholic Church. It both laid out in the prefaces that the Apocryphal books were not scripture but in order to make sure one did not miss that, each Apocryphal book or portion of a book was started with a note saying they were not a part of the canon.
In any case we don't see a lot. Because a lot was lost, there weren't that many that wrote and it's a little like those other things that people just know, they write about areas of dispute, not areas of agreement.
Anyway we see some individuals who wrote but we don't see a lot not in what you could necessarily call officially approved publications but then comes the printing press and things change.
The Biblia Complutensia, produced by Cardinal Ximenes, the Archbishop of Toledo, dedicated to Pope Leo X, and published with his full authority and consent in 1517, spells out that the Apocryphal books are not canonical scripture and so not to be used for confirmation of doctrine.
A couple Latin Bibles were also in agreement.
The earliest Latin version of the Bible in modern times, made from the original languages by the scholarly Dominican, Sanctes Pagnini, and published at Lyons in 1528, with commendatory letters from Pope Adrian VI and Pope Clement VII, sharply separates the text of the canonical books from the text of the Apocryphal books. Still another Latin Bible, this one an addition of Jeromes Vulgate published at Nuermberg by Johannes Petreius in 1527, presents the order of the books as in the Vulgate but specifies at the beginning of each Apocryphal book that it is not canonical. Furthermore, in his address to the Christian reader the editor lists the disputed books as Libri Apocryphi, sive non Canonici, qui nusquam apud Hebraeos extant (Bruce Metzger, An Introduction to the Apocrypha (New York: Oxford, 1957), p. 180).
Even Cardinal Cajetan, who was a great opponent of Luther published his commentary on the Old Testament in 1532 and voiced complete agreement with Luther on the canon. Luther's full translation was published in 1534.
So the position of the Western church was really quite clear, but really only known by scholars, it probably wasnt' a topic of many sermons because there was no fight over it.
So you have the Old Testament canon, the New Testament canon and the Apocryphal book deemed useful for study but not authoritative in doctrine.
You often hear it stated that Luther somehow was the first to make the distinction but he's really in complete agreement with his contemporaries. As shown by those references I mentioned. And it should be noted that at least two of the works he used in making his translation, the Vulgate and the Glossa ordianria make the clear distinction. Luther probably would have liked to actually remove some books, he complained about them, but in the end, every book is right there in his translations. (the only exception was 3 and 4 Esdras which were in an appendix in the Vulgate, and ignored by Trent, later they returned to the Protestant Apocrypha as 1 and 2 Esdras)
Then came the Reformation and Trent. Trent is called an eucumenical council by the Roman Catholic church but it's really more a regional council. Just ask the Orthodox. In any case it is there that they declared the Catholic canon. And what they did was declare every book in the Vulgate (except the three in an appendix which they didn't mention) as fully authoritative scripture. Now even the vote gives insight 24 aye, 15 nay, 16 abstaining. You often hear that they were just affirming the long standing canon accepted universally by the church, but the vote certainly doesn't support that theory. And the politics of the day need to be understood. Trent was not the learned of the church. It was more a gathering of the political opponents of the Reformation. And it should be noted that the way you got appointments to land and such was to please the Pope. So I can but see the vote as little more than some political hacks who wanted to say what they thought the Pope wanted them to say. Or possibly people who without understanding simply took the Vulgate, the only authority they appealed to as scripture.
It's really much like a child growing up and seeing the pastor wave a KJV repeatedly saying behold the Word of God and the child grows up to become a KJO proponent. He literally take the KJV as perfect because that's how he understood it as a child. He simply took a statement he heard on faith and didn't necessarily understand everything behind the statement.
There are of course through the years people and such that can be used to support Trent, but the most learned and even indeed the publications used by the church show that there was that distinction between scripture and apocrypha, the difference between being written by a prophet and a historian.
There really isn't as much difference as it seems sometimes. Catholics still often make a distinction between the protocanoncial (Jewish canon) and the deuterocanonical (Apocryphal) books. And they really don't use them for doctrine. Oh you hear people use them to try and support purgatory, but the story doesn't support purgatory unless idolatry is a venial sin and the Catholics sure don't teach that. And I would criticize many Protestants today for being so negative on the Apocrypha, it seems to me to be an overeaction to Rome. There are things to be learned there and the Apocryphal books do give insight into the New Testament.
Hope that's helpful. Many of course would not agree with my rendition of history. But I believe it's basically accurate.
Marv
