I'm buying an NRSV apocrypha bible and was wondering what you guys think about the apocrypha. I've always wanted to read it, and I know it may not be truly biblical but to me there is no hurt in reading it. Does anyone here read the apocrypha and if so, what do you think about it?
bibles with apocrypha
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I read it, but can't pronounce it. Although it is easier to say than Pseudepigrapha. 
I don't give it much weight, but it has many interesting insights and some great stories. It also gives you some idea about what was being written between the Old and New Testaments.
I don't give it much weight, but it has many interesting insights and some great stories. It also gives you some idea about what was being written between the Old and New Testaments.
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Tobit and II Maccabees are particularly helpful for seeing distinctions between Protestantism (which does not affirm their inspiration) and Catholicism (which does). Of the apocryphal books, my favorites are Wisdom and Sirach, both of which provide an interesting historical context for what was going on theologically before and during the time of Christ. It's a bit of a over-simplification, but if you read Sirach, you're basically getting a glimpse at what the Sadducees believed.
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Many of the books are worth a read. 1st Macabees gives a good bit of interbiblical history.
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AngelAmidala
Legend
It has been awhile but I have read the apocrypha. I don't think there's any harm in reading it and in fact I may go back and read those books again since this discussion brought it up. I had a couple NRSV Bibles I bought for classes at the college where I work and basically read what was assigned out of them. I always meant to go back and read it again...just never did.
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SeventhValley
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Apocrypha
The collective name given to the collection of fifteen books written generally during the period between the writing of the last books of the Old Testament and those of the New Testament. The word apocrypha literally means "things that are hidden." When the canon or official list of books was established for the Jews (the Old Testament) these books were not included. A Greek translation of the Old Testament books, however, known as the Septuagian, which circulated widely in the early Christian church, did include the books. The Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Churches recognize these books as authoritative. Protestants have not recognized the books of the Apocrypha as Scripture or authoritative; therefore, they are not included in most Bibles used by Protestants. If the Apocrypha is printed at all, it is as a separate section and is included in recognition of the use made by other groups and for the information it contains concerning the period between those of the Old and New Testaments. Reading from the Apocrypha is now an option in the commonly used lectionaries.
Source: A Dictionary for United Methodists, Alan K. Waltz, Copyright 1991, Abingdon Press. Used by permission.
The collective name given to the collection of fifteen books written generally during the period between the writing of the last books of the Old Testament and those of the New Testament. The word apocrypha literally means "things that are hidden." When the canon or official list of books was established for the Jews (the Old Testament) these books were not included. A Greek translation of the Old Testament books, however, known as the Septuagian, which circulated widely in the early Christian church, did include the books. The Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Churches recognize these books as authoritative. Protestants have not recognized the books of the Apocrypha as Scripture or authoritative; therefore, they are not included in most Bibles used by Protestants. If the Apocrypha is printed at all, it is as a separate section and is included in recognition of the use made by other groups and for the information it contains concerning the period between those of the Old and New Testaments. Reading from the Apocrypha is now an option in the commonly used lectionaries.
Source: A Dictionary for United Methodists, Alan K. Waltz, Copyright 1991, Abingdon Press. Used by permission.
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GraceSeeker
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It might be worth a bit more understanding of how it is that the books of the Apocrypha are not considered part of the Bible by Protestants. It has as much to do with accidents of history as it does with theology.
As SeventhValley writes above, these books were included in the Septuagint (LXX). The LXX was a Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, and was in essence the Bible for the first generation of the Christian Church. When Paul wrote to Timothy that all scripture was God-breathed, he was referring to this collection of scriptures, because he was writing to a Greek-speaking community. That Paul himself used the LXX is something we can see because there are a few differences in the LXX and the Hebrew forms of the Old Testament, and Paul's quotations of OT often reflect these variations.
So, the NT church, even the NT writers made use of the LXX as their Bible. And for the next 1500 years whenever the church considered what was scripture, these books we today know as the Apocrypha were considered a part of it. So, how did they get excluded?
Well, that has to do with the whole idea of how we formed canon.
The NT Church never really worried about the idea of what was and was not canon. They didn't, because the Jews never really had. What they had was the Law and the Prophets and Writings. They were very careful with preserving these books, but they were not so careful and identifying different levels of acceptability among them. If you were a Sadducee you accepted only the first five books identified with Moses, the Pentateuch, or Torah. But the scribes and Pharisees would accept all of the Prophets and other writings (such a the Psalms and Proverbs) as well. So, when the Maccabees, or Tobit was written these were accepted too. But other groups, such as the Essenes had their own preferred collections, often with books they had written themselves and weren't in circulations outside of their circle. This is because the Jews had no set canon. The idea of having an established canon was something that developed within the Church in the 2nd and 3rd centuries.
Actually, like the Jews before them, the early church had different collections of scriptures depending on various factors: geography, influence of particular church Fathers, and most importantly what they had access to. You see, we think of the Bible as a bound book. But that is not what the Bible actually is. The Bible is NOT a book. The Bible is a library, a collection of books. )Even the word for Bible in other languages is related to this concept of library, for instance in Spanish they are Biblia & biblioteca). And for the first couple hundred years of the church these individuals books were each on their own scroll, just like they had been kept that way by the Jews. (Trivia: some books like Samuel were so long as to require 2 scrolls, hence we have a 1st & 2nd Samuel; others like what we call the Minor Prophets of Hosea thru Malachi were so short as to be written on one scroll. But on the whole each book had its own scroll.) And, being precious writings, they were all safely kept in one place. As other writings were received, be they letters or novels, they too were kept with the other scrolls. And then the codex, the earliest from of a book, was invented. It was a piece of high tech engineering that enabled people to keep all that was written on their unwieldy scrolls in one easy and convenient to carry place.
But when downloading from the scrolls into these codices, what should and what should not be kept together? The was such an important question in the 2nd and 3rd centuries of the Church that they actually convened church councils to make the decision. These council were to establish canon. Now, in fact, the councils did not vote on what the canon would and would not be, that was a process that had been going on in the church over the centuries. What the councils did was recognize what in time had become the accepted canon of the church in actual practice. But, it did take time to get there. In the end they recognized the 27 books of the NT that we presently have and the Hebrew scriptures. The only problem with that is that the Jews themselves had not yet actually established any canonical list of accepted books of Hebrew scriptures in the same way that the Christian church had done with the New Testament. Greek-speaking Jews used the LXX (including books like Tobit and the books of the Maccabees) now written on codices, while Hebrew-speaking Jews were still using their collection of scrolls. Since by now most Christians were Greek-speakers, the LXX was simply adopted as the OT for the church. And when the Bible was translated into Latin, copies of the Greek LXX codices (not the Hebrew scrolls) were what was used as the text to translate the OT into Latin.
For the next 1000 years the Church just copied these Latin translations. Then comes Luther.
Now, Luther was not the first to translate the Bible into common language, after all that was the whole purpose of the Latin Vulgate -- to get a copy of the Bible in the common language of the people of its day -- and there had been a few isolated instances in the century before Luther. But he would do it about the time that the printing press was invented and when the laity were finally becoming educated enough that at least the rich were themselves learning to read. In addition, Luther did it for a group of people that were rejecting all things Catholic, and that would include the last 1500 years in the history of our sacred writings. His translation would become a standard for Protestant Christians for centuries to come, but not so much for the translation itself as much as for the methodology.
What Luther did was decide not to translate the inherited Latin text into German, but from the original languages. This was no easy task in Luther's day. First, most ancient texts where held by the Catholic church, a group he couldn't go to for help. Second, even the Catholic church hadn't kept the original Hebrew, because they had never used it. The early church being Greek-speaking and having a copy of the OT in Greek already in the form of the LXX, they simply continued to maintain what they already had as I've already described above. So, where will Luther turn for a Hebrew text of the OT? The answer was as close as the Jewish communities in Germany.
However, Judaism had changed in the last thousand years. The nascent Christian community that had adopted the LXX as its own did not stay the small non-threatening offshoot it had once been. It grew, and it began to be a threat to Judaism. You can see that as early as the conflict recorded in Acts 15. But it would become more so when these Christians began to use the very scriptures the Jews themselves used to declare that this man Jesus that the Christians worshiped was in fact not just the Jewish Messiah (there had been hundreds before of mostly little significance) but actually God incarnate. And some of the places that they got these ideas from where in particular Judith and Tobit. So, the rabbis decided that they needed a more defined canon as well, and the process by which that canon was determined coincidentally would exclude those books that Christians had found so helpful to their cause.
Thus by the time Luther is asking the rabbis of Germany for a Hebrew copy of the Bible, it does not include some of the books found in the Latin editions of the Bible (or even the Greek editions of the OT if he had had access to them). In the end Luther settles on the same 39 books of the OT that we have today, and the 27 books of the NT that the church had settled on early in its own history, this list gets passed into the understanding of what it means to be protesting the corruption of the Catholic church at the heart of the Reformation, and the rest is history.
As SeventhValley writes above, these books were included in the Septuagint (LXX). The LXX was a Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, and was in essence the Bible for the first generation of the Christian Church. When Paul wrote to Timothy that all scripture was God-breathed, he was referring to this collection of scriptures, because he was writing to a Greek-speaking community. That Paul himself used the LXX is something we can see because there are a few differences in the LXX and the Hebrew forms of the Old Testament, and Paul's quotations of OT often reflect these variations.
So, the NT church, even the NT writers made use of the LXX as their Bible. And for the next 1500 years whenever the church considered what was scripture, these books we today know as the Apocrypha were considered a part of it. So, how did they get excluded?
Well, that has to do with the whole idea of how we formed canon.
The NT Church never really worried about the idea of what was and was not canon. They didn't, because the Jews never really had. What they had was the Law and the Prophets and Writings. They were very careful with preserving these books, but they were not so careful and identifying different levels of acceptability among them. If you were a Sadducee you accepted only the first five books identified with Moses, the Pentateuch, or Torah. But the scribes and Pharisees would accept all of the Prophets and other writings (such a the Psalms and Proverbs) as well. So, when the Maccabees, or Tobit was written these were accepted too. But other groups, such as the Essenes had their own preferred collections, often with books they had written themselves and weren't in circulations outside of their circle. This is because the Jews had no set canon. The idea of having an established canon was something that developed within the Church in the 2nd and 3rd centuries.
Actually, like the Jews before them, the early church had different collections of scriptures depending on various factors: geography, influence of particular church Fathers, and most importantly what they had access to. You see, we think of the Bible as a bound book. But that is not what the Bible actually is. The Bible is NOT a book. The Bible is a library, a collection of books. )Even the word for Bible in other languages is related to this concept of library, for instance in Spanish they are Biblia & biblioteca). And for the first couple hundred years of the church these individuals books were each on their own scroll, just like they had been kept that way by the Jews. (Trivia: some books like Samuel were so long as to require 2 scrolls, hence we have a 1st & 2nd Samuel; others like what we call the Minor Prophets of Hosea thru Malachi were so short as to be written on one scroll. But on the whole each book had its own scroll.) And, being precious writings, they were all safely kept in one place. As other writings were received, be they letters or novels, they too were kept with the other scrolls. And then the codex, the earliest from of a book, was invented. It was a piece of high tech engineering that enabled people to keep all that was written on their unwieldy scrolls in one easy and convenient to carry place.
But when downloading from the scrolls into these codices, what should and what should not be kept together? The was such an important question in the 2nd and 3rd centuries of the Church that they actually convened church councils to make the decision. These council were to establish canon. Now, in fact, the councils did not vote on what the canon would and would not be, that was a process that had been going on in the church over the centuries. What the councils did was recognize what in time had become the accepted canon of the church in actual practice. But, it did take time to get there. In the end they recognized the 27 books of the NT that we presently have and the Hebrew scriptures. The only problem with that is that the Jews themselves had not yet actually established any canonical list of accepted books of Hebrew scriptures in the same way that the Christian church had done with the New Testament. Greek-speaking Jews used the LXX (including books like Tobit and the books of the Maccabees) now written on codices, while Hebrew-speaking Jews were still using their collection of scrolls. Since by now most Christians were Greek-speakers, the LXX was simply adopted as the OT for the church. And when the Bible was translated into Latin, copies of the Greek LXX codices (not the Hebrew scrolls) were what was used as the text to translate the OT into Latin.
For the next 1000 years the Church just copied these Latin translations. Then comes Luther.
Now, Luther was not the first to translate the Bible into common language, after all that was the whole purpose of the Latin Vulgate -- to get a copy of the Bible in the common language of the people of its day -- and there had been a few isolated instances in the century before Luther. But he would do it about the time that the printing press was invented and when the laity were finally becoming educated enough that at least the rich were themselves learning to read. In addition, Luther did it for a group of people that were rejecting all things Catholic, and that would include the last 1500 years in the history of our sacred writings. His translation would become a standard for Protestant Christians for centuries to come, but not so much for the translation itself as much as for the methodology.
What Luther did was decide not to translate the inherited Latin text into German, but from the original languages. This was no easy task in Luther's day. First, most ancient texts where held by the Catholic church, a group he couldn't go to for help. Second, even the Catholic church hadn't kept the original Hebrew, because they had never used it. The early church being Greek-speaking and having a copy of the OT in Greek already in the form of the LXX, they simply continued to maintain what they already had as I've already described above. So, where will Luther turn for a Hebrew text of the OT? The answer was as close as the Jewish communities in Germany.
However, Judaism had changed in the last thousand years. The nascent Christian community that had adopted the LXX as its own did not stay the small non-threatening offshoot it had once been. It grew, and it began to be a threat to Judaism. You can see that as early as the conflict recorded in Acts 15. But it would become more so when these Christians began to use the very scriptures the Jews themselves used to declare that this man Jesus that the Christians worshiped was in fact not just the Jewish Messiah (there had been hundreds before of mostly little significance) but actually God incarnate. And some of the places that they got these ideas from where in particular Judith and Tobit. So, the rabbis decided that they needed a more defined canon as well, and the process by which that canon was determined coincidentally would exclude those books that Christians had found so helpful to their cause.
Thus by the time Luther is asking the rabbis of Germany for a Hebrew copy of the Bible, it does not include some of the books found in the Latin editions of the Bible (or even the Greek editions of the OT if he had had access to them). In the end Luther settles on the same 39 books of the OT that we have today, and the 27 books of the NT that the church had settled on early in its own history, this list gets passed into the understanding of what it means to be protesting the corruption of the Catholic church at the heart of the Reformation, and the rest is history.
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It is worth adding that nowhere in any of the Lutheran Confessions is the canon of scripture defined the way it is in just about every other branch of Protestantism, such as the Articles of Religion.
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GratiaCorpusChristi
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Basically, our canon is a function of the liturgy: What is read in the lectionary is Scripture.
Our theology of the Word of God also means that Scripture is part of a continuum. So that on the one hand there's a sort of "canon within the canon" where we find Scripture teaching the gospel most clearly (so Romans, Galatians, Isaiah, Psalms, John, etc.), and that's perhaps more especially the "Word of God" than anything else in Scripture; on the other hand, the Word of God extends to all sincere and true preaching of the gospel, including the words of absolution and the homily during the service. As such, while we do generally have a defined canon- in the United States the lectionary readings are confined to the 66 books of the Protestant canon- our theology of the Word of God makes the whole question of canonicity not nearly as important. Thus if the Books of First Maccabees, Tobit, or Wisdom are used to preach the gospel, they're the Word of God in those instances, even if they're not strictly canonical.
Dustan can probably give you a different take on it, but that's generally where I tend to go when canonicity comes up.
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GraceSeeker
Senior Member
Interesting. While I have been a Methodist all my life, and I am an ordained UMC pastor, I also served on synodical staff in the ELCA for 4 years, and never had a hint that the apocrypha would be seen as canonical in the Lutheran Church. It's not that I didn't know people who would have preached from a text found in the apocrypha, because I did and even heard a few. But I didn't realize that in doing so they were to be received as (in your words) "the Word of God in those instances," for those same people would probably have preached from the Bhagavad Gita, the Qur'an, or the collected works of Monty Python if it had suited them.
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GratiaCorpusChristi
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Pshaha, well I certainly believe you. Dear me, who knows what nonsense the ELCA can get itself in to.
Typically, in Germany, Die Luther Bibel is printed with the Apocrypha included (between the testaments, not as a fully incorporated Deuterocanon); in the English-speaking world, we typically don't print our own denominational/synodical Bibles, and so our "canon" (= the Bibles we use in church- currently ESV) have the Protestant canon.
As for the lectionary, I actually couldn't say whether or nor the apocrypha was ever used in Germany historically or is used today, but we definitely don't have any apocryphal reading in the LCMS.
Of course, canonicity is also a question about the source of doctrine. But even there, we tend to think of the preached Word of the gospel as being prior- both logically and historically- to the Scriptures, and thus they are the rule that organizes our interpretation of them. I think a typical Lutheran answer would be that the 66 books of the Protestant canon do not in any way contradict the preaching of the gospel, and thus are fully canonical, while the books of the Deuterocanon(s) may contradict the gospel at points, and thus are secondary. However, whether that secondary reality makes them canonical (= Deuterocanonical) or not (= Apocrypha) is still a sort of open question. I think I'd take the same approach to the Deuterocanon as I take toward the Holy Tradition of the Church Fathers: We except everything in the Deuterocanon that does not contradict the gospel, and we except everything in the church fathers and their holy tradition that does not contradict the Scriptures.
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SummaScriptura
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Hi,
I am a Southern Baptist who accepts the disputed books of the Old Testament as Scripture. I am the only Protestant I know who does. I look at how they were treated by the ECFs and that settles it for me. Were the ECFs unanimous on the subject? No. As things are now, so they were then... the status of the disputed books of the O.T. are not universally accepted.
However, I take it a bit further, for me, if a book is/was accepted as O.T. by any of the communions of Orthodoxy, I too accept it, provided it was not written after Apostolic times.
I did an exhaustive study comparing the versions of these books in English translation weighing the relative merits/demerits of each. I'll post that study later. (The NRSV scored very high if I recall)
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I have been a fan of Enoch since I found out about it. You can almost read that book, and get all the prophecy, promises and for telling of Messiah per sacrifice, and Messiah setting up Heaven on earth. It also thoroughly explains Genesis 6, and why for example, God would command "genocide" on "people."
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GratiaCorpusChristi
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Quite the other way around. 1 Enoch is a pseudepigraphal intertestamental text primarily concerned with the events and concerns of its day.
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The NRSV has a very inclusive group of Apocryphal (or other denominations would say Deuterocanonical) books including books accepted by branches of the Orthodox Church. The Oxford Annotated Bible in the NRSV is one of my favorite Biblical resources.
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That is why it is still in orthodox books.
Keep in mind, Revelation was considered UNINSPIRED at the same time Enoch was considered inspired, and part of the canon. Now, "quite the other way around."
Humans choosing for me what is the word of God, inspiration, or good for instruction is counter-productive to my personal salvation. After Christ, I am the only human that chooses my salvation. That means I have to make a choice to accept a canon made by others, venture outside said canon for clarification/truth, or deny both inside and outside sources. That way, even if I am wrong at judgment day, I can tell our Father that it was not because of complacency and lack of seeking. He will judge me accordingly.
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