Introduction to Verity Podcast
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Speaker
Welcome to Verity. I'm your host, Felicia Masonheimer, an author, speaker, and Bible teacher. This podcast will help you embrace the history and depth of the Christian faith, ask questions, seek answers, and devote yourself to becoming a disciple of Jesus Christ. You don't have to settle for watered-down Christian teaching. And if you're ready to go deeper, God is just as ready to take you there. This is Verity, where every woman is a theologian.
The Apocrypha: Origins and Definitions
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Have you ever opened up a Catholic Bible, if you're a Protestant, a non-Catholic, and seen, whoa, there's some extra books in here. What are these? Or maybe as you've been reading and studying more about the canon through this series, you have discovered that certain traditions, including the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church, as well as many Anglican churches,
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have the Apocrypha, these additional books included in their Bibles. If that was shocking or alarming to you, you're not alone. Many believers are not familiar with where the Apocrypha books come from and their history in English translations. And so in this episode, we're going to get into all the nitty-gritty details about the Apocrypha.
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So without further ado, let's chat first about what this term means, because this is important. This word, apocrypha, is a Greek term, and it is a word that literally means hidden or concealed.
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So in the early church period, this word was associated with secret knowledge, which had some pretty strong Gnostic vibes, if we're really being honest, and ran contrary to the clarity and the accessibility of the Gospel. If you read Paul's writings, he is very clear that everything is
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revealed in Christ. What was hidden has now been revealed through Jesus Christ, through the Gospel. It is clear. It is available for all. And one of the fundamentals of Gnosticism is this idea of a hidden knowledge. It's esoteric. It's for certain elites who can gain access to this wisdom. And that is what Apocrypha as a word originally
The Apocrypha: Historical Context and Church Views
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meant. It had negative connotations, often indicating that contents of
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Apocrypha were false or that they were for these elite few people. And so when this term started being used to refer to books written in the inter-testamental period, so this would be between the closing of the Old Testament or the final book written for the Old Testament
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around 400 years before Christ and then the New Testament works written about you know anywhere from 60 to 100 years AD then you have these books that were written in that inter-testamental period and they were being referred to as Apocrypha. Later on they added the the it became a noun but for a long time it was just these are Apocrypha.
00:03:26
Speaker
So Apocrypha came to refer to this set of books, these books written in that period, as inferior. And it's used by Origen, Arrhenius, Tertullian, making a distinction and a contrast between canonized books and the Apocryphal books. So a lot of this came from the Western church. So the Western church would have been the Latin speaking church.
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the Eastern Church would have been primarily Greek speaking operating from the Septuagint. So remember the Septuagint is our Old Testament in Greek and it did include the Apocryphal books and we'll get to what that means and how to understand that in a few minutes here.
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But I want to start with the definition of apocrypha because we pull this term from the usage by Origen and Tertullian and understanding that this is not a positive term originally. And even today, when these books are referred to by Catholic scholars, they are referred to as Deuterocanonical. Deuterocanonical.
00:04:46
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Now what that means is, deutero is a Greek word for second. Proto-canonical is a word, proto means original. So the whole of scripture as we know it, what we've talked about thus far, is considered proto-canonical by the Roman Catholic Church, so the original canon.
Protestant and Catholic Perspectives on the Apocrypha
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And the apocryphal books are considered deuterocanonical or secondary canon, but they do believe all of them to be inspired.
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So as Protestants are looking at this, it can be really easy to demonize the Apocrypha and say they're adding on to the gospel, they're sticking these books into the Bible, and there's a lot of demonization of Catholicism that happens
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in the Protestant Church, especially in more fundamental factions of it, almost to the point where there isn't an honest look at Church history, not only with the Apocrypha, but with the Catholic and Protestant relationship over time. We're not going to get into that today, but it does play a big part in our understanding of why Protestant Bibles today
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don't have the Apocrypha, why Catholic Bibles do, but also understanding that up until about 120 years ago, many Protestant Bibles actually did have the Apocrypha included in them, including the King James Version.
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So a lot of this isn't known by Protestants because we tend to not do a great job at teaching church history and teaching the canon, but that's why I'm here because I love talking about this. Okay, so we know what the Apocrypha means. We know what that word means. It's origins.
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Now our question is, how did these books come to be associated with the Bible at all? So remember that the books we're talking about, and we'll go down a list here in just a minute, but the books we're talking about are associated with the Jews, with Hebrew culture, they are attributed to Hebrew authors, and the Jews knew about them, they recognized them. Remember that the Septuagint
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was a greek translation in the old testament so it's this bible hebrew bible if you will in greek was translated because of the diaspora so the dispersion of the jews across the roman empire
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Many Jews were not living in Palestine and they were living in Greek speaking areas. And so as they were living in these areas, it became necessary to translate the Old Testament into the language they could understand. And that is what the Septuagint did. So within the Septuagint, they had these apocryphal books and
00:07:48
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That is why there has been, over the course of history, confusion and discussion and debate over whether or not to include those books as inspired scriptures. We'll talk about why after we talk about what. So what books are these exactly? We're going to look at a little list.
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So there's a couple different names and terms for these. I'm going to read the Protestant names. Traditional Roman Catholicism has a little bit different name for some of these. So Tobit is one, Judas, Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiasticus, 1 Maccabees, 2 Maccabees, Baruch, Epistle of Jeremiah, Auditions to Esther, Prayer of Azariah in Song of the Three Young Men,
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Susanna, Belle and the Dragon, First Estras, Two Estras, and Prayer of Manasseh. In Roman Catholic tradition, Prayer of Azariah, Susanna, and Belle and the Dragon are considered additions to Daniel.
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So that's a distinction and a difference between those as well as additions to Esther is written down as Esther 10 through 16. So different names, same concept here. And what's possible and what some scholars, conservative scholars especially believe is that these apocryphal books were stored as scrolls alongside the canonized Old Testament.
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and the distinctions were eventually forgotten. As a reminder, Protestants, many, all through history,
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including the Anglicans today, do see these as historically helpful books to read them, to understand them, because they have been used by the Church over the years.
Scriptural Authority: Catholic vs Protestant Views
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Catholics, however, since the Council of Trent, see them as canon.
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and inspired scripture. So again, I want to specifically say though, when you are speaking with a Catholic friend, they will often refer to these books as Deuterocanonical as opposed to calling them the Apocrypha. The Apocrypha is very much a Protestant term and it became a negative term, started as a negative term and ended as a negative term for these books. And so there will be a difference in how they are treated in the different traditions.
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So why would there be a difference in how these churches are looking at this? Now remember that the Protestant non-Catholic church really was established after the mid-1500s.
00:10:46
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When we have Luther doing his work and then Calvin and we start to see this rapid escalating development of the Protestant Church after the separation from Catholicism. So we have to look even further back than the Reformation. There is some misconstrued history and false accusations from our
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Catholic brothers and sisters that the Apocrypha was completely accepted up until Luther and he's the one that threw it out, but that's not actually true. There's some fishy stuff going on if we go further back into history, specifically looking at early Church Father Jerome.
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Now Derome is one of my homeboys. I actually asked my artist sister if she could make me some paintings of the early church fathers and she's actually working on it right now. My first homeboy is Athanasius. My second one is Derome and part of this is because Derome is responsible for translating
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the Latin Vulgate. The Vulgate, as we've talked about in prior episodes, is the Latin Bible translated directly from the Hebrew and the Greek. So instead of being a Latin that was two degrees removed from the correct language, so Hebrew to Greek to Latin, he went back to the Hebrew Old Testament and translated it. And then the Greek text, he translated to the New Testament to Latin. And that is the Vulgate, which
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I translated in high school when I was taking my Latin classes and I think that's why it's always been had a special place in my heart. So when Jerome translated the Vulgate, he did not translate the entire Apocrypha. He did not translate all 15 books. He translated Tobit and Judith and when he did he noted clearly that the Apocryphal works were not inspired
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He made this very clear, he made notes and prefaces saying this is not inspired, this is not accepted, this is not canon. Later on though, the church added back in an Old Latin version, so pre-Jerome. Old Latin apocryphal works and they put them into Jerome's Vulgate translation, removing the notes and prefaces that
The Council of Trent and Protestant Reformation
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contained Jerome's distinctions.
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This is interesting. I could not find any reasons as to why this happened, except maybe tradition or just wanting to have them there for reference. Whatever the case, they got put back into the Vulgate after Jerome removed them. And Jerome removed them because they are not in the original Hebrew Bible. So this was confirmed later on at the Council of Trent. And so the Council of Trent
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was essentially responding to Luther's actions and his pressure. It was the Catholic Church defining their stance on certain issues that Luther and others had confronted. And one of the things they did was decide as the church that these Deuterocanonical books were inspired and they were canon.
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they actually went up against Jerome himself in doing this. So they're using the Vulgate, still his translation, but they're rejecting what he believed about the apocryphal books in saying that these are canon and these are inspired as a response to Luther saying that they're not. So why would Luther care so much about the apocrypha? Like, what's the big deal, Luther? Calm down. Well, one of the reasons is because it's in the apocrypha.
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that the teachings on purgatory and prayers for the dead are found. These doctrines, these teachings, are not found anywhere else in scripture. They are found primarily in second Maccabees, and because of that,
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He believed, since Luther's big deal issue at the beginning with the church was the doctrine of purgatory and the issue with indulgences, or basically paying money to free a soul from purgatory and using that money to fund the building of churches, this was Luther's big issue.
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And so he searched scripture to find support for this doctrine, and he could not find it anywhere but in the Apocrypha, which the early church fathers themselves had rejected as authoritative, with the exception of Augustine. So a lot of history here, right? A lot of drama, probably more than you thought was involved in determining what scriptures would be contained in the Bible.
00:15:41
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It's so important to know all of this though because I think when we're having conversations with our Catholic friends or even with our Anglican friends who don't see these books as inspired but see them as historically helpful, when you come to it without that historical understanding and you just assume that they pulled these books out of nowhere and jammed them into the Bible and
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added on to Scripture, you're ignoring this incredible, helpful history that tells us more of the journey of how our Bibles came to be.
00:16:18
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So what about Protestant English Bibles? We know that the Latin Bible by the Catholic Church contained the Apocrypha. Did English Bibles contain it? Yes, they did. In fact, most of them did include the Apocrypha. Thomas Coverdale's version, which was developed from the work of Jerome,
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Tyndale, Zwingli, Luther, and others.
Organizing the Apocrypha in Bibles
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He put the apocryphal books at the end of the Old Testament as kind of an appendix, and this set the standard for English Bibles. We also see the apocryphal books in the Matthews Bible, which closely followed Coverdale's Bible by about two years, the Taverners Bible, the Geneva Bible, the Bishops Bible, and the Authorized Version.
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I want to make a quick note, and we'll talk about this in the episode on the King James Version. All of these Bibles, these six Bibles preceded the King James Version. Yes, there were English Bibles being put together and distributed before the King James Version. I think there is another misunderstanding among Protestant Christians that the King James Bible was the first English version, or it was the most accurate English version.
00:17:35
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But reality is there's a lot more history surrounding that issue as well. But we're going to do a whole episode on that. Okay. So.
00:17:45
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A couple things that were said about the Apocrypha considering that it was in these original Protestant English Bibles. Luther himself said this, the Apocrypha, books that are not held equal to the Holy Scriptures but are good and useful to read. Coverdale said, these are not to be used to confirm ecclesiastical doctrine, but they are useful to read. In the Taveners Bible it read, they're profitable to read but not considered inspired scripture.
00:18:15
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The Great Bible was commissioned by King Henry VIII. It was supposed to be the authorized Bible for the Church of England. He upheld Jerome's view of these books, which was, once again, not inspired, helpful to read.
00:18:32
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And then the Geneva Bible. These books were considered according to the Geneva Bible, which had a preface written by John Calvin. They're not to be read publicly, publicly expounded on in church, but only could prove doctrine in as much as they agree with the proto-canon.
00:18:51
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Remember what the protocannon is? Proto means original, the original canon. So all of those books that we've talked about thus far in the series, that's the protocannon. So the apocryphal books could only prove a doctrine if they agreed with the protocannon. And basically what he's saying here is, in the example of 2nd Maccabees,
00:19:12
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If the doctrine of purgatory and praying for the dead doesn't agree with the rest of scripture, then it doesn't get to dictate our doctrine. This apocryphal book does not get to introduce a new doctrine. Now there was another version that was specifically Catholic. The ones I've read to you so far are all Protestant Bibles. The Dewey Rhymes Bible, which you can actually still read, it is in your YouVersion app. It'll say Dewey Rhymes.
00:19:42
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This is a Catholic version, and in this version, the apocryphal books are scattered throughout the Old Testament according to genre. So remember that the difference is now, if you were to go find a Geneva Bible right now, which you can also still read, there would be a section after the Old Testament, and it would be like an appendix, and it would say the apocrypha, and that's where those 15 books would be. In the Catholic Bible, these books are dispersed throughout according to genre.
00:20:11
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I want to reiterate here that the difference between standard Catholic doctrine and Protestant doctrine on these books is that Catholics do see these as inspired works, and they also believe something very pivotal that's different from Protestants. They believe that the Bible gets its authority from the Church.
00:20:31
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And this is a direct contrast from the Protestant view, which is that the church gets its authority from the Bible. And this is why you'll often see Protestants in Catholics butting heads because our view of authority and tradition is different.
00:20:47
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I work to bring clarity to these topics as much as possible and help denominations understand each other. Now, obviously I have my own personal stances. I am not Catholic. I don't plan to become Catholic anytime soon, but in understanding one another's viewpoints, it really helps us with these conversations. And so understanding, oh, this is why Catholics believe the church has this authority and the Bible has this authority.
00:21:17
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helps us in having those conversations. This is a quote from Catholic news agency on the Apocrypha, which says, The Bible needs a visible external authority guided by the Holy Spirit to define both the Old Testament and the New Testament canons. This authority is the magisterium of the Catholic Church. As St. Augustine writes, I would not have believed the gospel had not the authority of the church moved me.
00:21:45
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Now I'll be perfectly honest with you, Augustine isn't one of my favorite church fathers. He did some amazing, amazing work, but he also had some pretty wild doctrines and some pretty crazy stances and a pretty crazy personal life if we're being real.
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And this is one of those things that he wrote that I think makes him a confusing church father to follow. But as we read this, we do get some more context into how the Catholic Church was arriving at their conclusions versus how the Protestant Church was arriving at theirs.
00:22:21
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00:22:40
Speaker
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Arguments for Inclusion of the Apocrypha
00:22:47
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00:22:57
Speaker
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00:23:23
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So now we're going to move into some arguments for the canonosity of the apocrypha. So this would be the pro-apocryphal stance. So the first is that some New Testament books allude to apocryphal texts. One of the most clear
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Allusions is in Jude, which talks about the book of Enoch. This is in Jude 14 and 15. The difficulty, according to Paul Wigner, lies in the fact that it suggests Enoch, the seventh from Adam, spoke the words recorded in the book of 1 Enoch. So this would be extremely early.
00:24:08
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There's a couple resolution scholars put forth that Jude may simply be referring to the book as a piece of literature which his readers would have been familiar with. So he might have been attributing the language to Enoch as a quote, sort of, to the book. Then he may also have been accommodating himself to the audience's high view of 1st Enoch while not endorsing the view, or
00:24:32
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Jude maybe does endorse the authority of those sayings, but not all of 1 Enoch. Basically, that is the one book of the Bible, the one letter that we see, a quote from an apocryphal book, in an authoritative manner.
00:24:48
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The second argument is New Testament authors quote Septuoden, which included the apocryphal books. Though they might not quote the books themselves, they do quote from the Septuoden. And early Greek manuscripts contain these books in the text. There are three, and this is an argument you'll hear often from our Catholic friends, Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Alexandrinus, and Codex Vaticanus.
00:25:13
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Now, interestingly, I will add just a little, you know, devil's advocate here on the other side of the fence. All three of these texts are from the fourth century. And that at that point, Augustine's support for the Apocrypha was already influencing the topic. So these are kind of late texts that we're working with as far as
00:25:35
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you know, the Greek manuscripts of the Septuagint that include the Apocrypha, there could have been some changes in developments along the way there, and Augustine was already influencing the conversation. Just some things to think about.
00:25:48
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Another argument is that some of these books were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. So if they're among the Dead Sea Scrolls, doesn't that mean that they're authoritative? Well, it just means that they were being read. And, you know, it's kind of like if in a thousand years somebody dug up a time capsule and there was a Bible and there was, you know, Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code in there, too. Well, does that mean that both were considered authoritative? No, it just means that people were reading both at that period in time.
00:26:16
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So it's not necessarily an argument. Now, some early church fathers, this is another argument you'll hear, some early church fathers, especially in the West, the Latin West, accepted these books as authoritative. And some Eastern fathers who did were Clement,
00:26:32
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Origen accepted a few and Irenaeus. Now, these are the same guys who also had problems with certain books. So, you know, there's a few that they saw as authoritative and a few as they didn't. So it really is kind of sketchy, hard to hard to know what I think there. And then finally, the Council of Trent proclaimed these books canon. And as we talked about earlier, this was really in reaction to Protestant pressure and what was going on politically at the time.
00:27:02
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with also this had to do with the doctrines of purgatory and indulgences okay so these are some of the arguments we're hearing for the canonosity of the apocrypha now i want to talk before we get to arguments against the apocrypha i want to talk a little bit about a little of the history of how
00:27:23
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these books went from being you know involved in the catholic bible and put into the catholic bible to being in the protestant bible because we know loser is over here saying no i don't i don't like these like these don't agree with scripture like
00:27:38
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No, but he did say that they were helpful to read. Okay, so how is it that they're ending up in all these English translations? So something interesting to know, when the King James Bible was being translated after those first six translations is commissioned this King James Bible, one of the six committees was assigned to translating the Apocrypha.
00:28:03
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Also, interestingly, King James himself said in 1599, I omit the apocryphal books because I am no papist. Okay, thanks King James. He's saying, I omit these books because I am not a Catholic. And we have to be honest here, there is a very political and social aspect to this going on.
00:28:26
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that it wasn't just that the books were not viewed as authoritative in what King James is saying at least, but that he is not a Catholic and he is not going to be associated with anything that sounds Catholic. I wanted to bring this up because this is not a healthy way to form your theology.
Historical Acceptance and Rejection of the Apocrypha
00:28:49
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Remember what we say. Reactive theology is not sound theology.
00:28:53
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and reacting against Catholic doctrine or, you know, fearing anything that sounds Catholic is to ignore history, to ignore the fact that there are Christian Catholics. And if you're Catholic and you're like, duh, hello, I feel like why are you even mentioning this? Most of my audience is Protestant.
00:29:15
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I am a Protestant Christian and so I speak and teach mostly to Protestants and in doing so I often have to help them understand that church history includes a Catholic heritage. We can't ignore that. It's a part of how we became who we are as our denominations today and that there's a lot of truth in what the Catholic Church is teaching because we came from them. We
00:29:44
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believe many of the same things. We diverge on many things, too. And obviously, if I agreed with everything, I would be Catholic, I suppose, and I'm not. So obviously, I have major differences with the Church. But I just want to encourage you to, before you get all squiggly inside, anytime we talk about Catholicism,
00:30:06
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We need to look at history and understand what was going on, be honest with ourselves about the facts, and honest with ourselves about what happened during the Reformation and how the Catholic Church influenced the Protestant tradition. Okay, that's all I'm going to say history-wise on that. King James did amend his statement about the Apocrypha later on, saying that he read the books as the Church Fathers did for history but not for doctrinal direction.
00:30:36
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So the first two centuries of the King James Bible's existence had actually included the Apocrypha. And I think today if you were to talk to many King James only believers, that may be a shocking statement to hear and to understand because after pressure from English Puritans and Scottish Presbyterians
00:31:00
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In many, many years in edits and revisions, the Apocrypha was removed from the KJV.
00:31:08
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Now, why was it removed? Mainly because it's not found in the Hebrew Bible. We're going back again to Jerome's statement. These books are not found in the Hebrew Bible. I'm not going to include them as canon. But there also was some influence from anti-Catholic sentiments, anti-royalists who didn't like the king, and issues of doctrine in the books, including what's called their
00:31:32
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quote, sensational nature, being very poetic or dramatic and not containing a lot of sound doctrine.
00:31:42
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And this was finally completed pretty early on when the Westminster Confession was established. There was an established understanding, even as the King James was still being translated and updated, including the Apocrypha, that among at least the Puritans and the Reformers, these books were definitely not canon. The Westminster Confession in Chapter 1, Article 3 says, the books commonly called Apocrypha, not being of divine inspiration, are no part of the canon of Scripture.
00:32:09
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and therefore are of no authority in the church of God, nor to be any otherwise approved or made use of than other human writings." So basically they're saying these books are human, they are not divinely inspired, they are not to be for directing doctrine or reading in the church for expositional preaching and things like that. So we're going to conclude with
00:32:30
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some arguments against the Apocrypha. We've already given some of the arguments for the Apocrypha being included in Scripture. So as a Protestant, non-Catholic theology teacher, I do favor the Apocrypha being read for historical value and for understanding these ancient texts, but they are not inspired. They're not included in the original Hebrew Bible, so I don't believe that they should be included in the canon.
00:32:59
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here are some arguments as to why. Number one, the New Testament never cites these books as inspired and Jesus and the apostles usage of scripture suggests only the books of the Hebrew Bible. If you need more on that and what the Hebrew Bible was at the time of Jesus, make sure you go back and you listen to the three parts on the Old Testament and then the two parts on the New Testament as well.
00:33:23
Speaker
Secondly, none of the Apocryphal books claim to be the Word of the Lord, like the ones in the Hebrew canon do. So you know how in Isaiah it will say, and the Word of the Lord came to me, or this is the Word of the Lord? That is a direct appeal to the authority of God and divine inspiration, and we see this happen quite often throughout the Old Testament, but not in the Apocryphal books.
00:33:49
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As far as the lists of Old Testament books that we have today, the ones from Josephus, Melito, Jerusalem List, and Origen all list the same Old Testament books we have today and do not include the Apocrypha. So while Origen may have quoted from some of these books, he did not include them in his list that he deemed canon.
00:34:11
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Fourth, the theory of an Alexandrian canon is sketchy. So one of the theories that scholars will put forth is that there was a Palestinian Hebrew canon and there was an Alexandrian canon. And the Alexandrian Judaic canon included the Apocrypha, while the Palestinian one did not. So for those who don't know, Alexandria is in Egypt
00:34:36
Speaker
And this theory is a little bit sketchy because Philo, a Jew of Alexandria, never quotes from an apocryphal book. And we don't hear anything from Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, who is now around 300 AD. We don't hear anything from him either to prove this.
00:35:01
Speaker
Fifth argument is historical inaccuracies, and this is one of the bigger deal issues here. There's historical inaccuracies in most of the apocryphal books, 11 out of 15, and the four that are remaining are extremely short, poetic-type books.
00:35:19
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That's concerning, and it's a really good reason to not canonize these books. So one such example is in Tobit where he is said to live in Nineveh in 722 BC, yet he also saw the division of the United Kingdom in 931 BC.
00:35:37
Speaker
So he either lived a really long time, or there's something going on here. They also have misattributed names of certain kings who wouldn't have been alive at the time, such as Artaxerxes. And so these historical inaccuracies are things that we don't see in the other books in the Hebrew canon.
00:35:59
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A sixth argument is that no major church father accepted the Apocryphal books, like as a whole, endorsed them until Augustine. It was Augustine who really pushed for it and who really kind of founded that understanding of Apocryphal use that carried over into Catholic church tradition. And then finally, we have Jerome, my homeboy, who translated the Vulgate from Hebrew and Greek and argued against the Apocrypha.
00:36:30
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Last couple things that are a little concerning about these. Some scholars have suggested that the inaccuracies in these books are intentionally there so that readers would know that they were fiction. It seems strange, but I mean, hey, if I was an ancient
00:36:47
Speaker
Hebrew man writing this book? And that made sense? I don't know. Maybe I do it. So that's one theory is that this is intentional. These books are fictional. Another issue with them is that many of them falsely claim Old Testament authorship. They claim to be attributed to Old Testament authors and take on their authority in writing.
00:37:13
Speaker
and many church scholars over the ages have been concerned by this, it is not uncommon for authors to write under pseudonyms, but to take on the authority of Old Testament people is pretty sketchy.
Political Influences on Biblical Canon
00:37:31
Speaker
So these are some of the arguments against the Apocrypha being included
00:37:35
Speaker
And hopefully that gives you kind of a perspective on both sides. I always try to be honest when I'm sharing this kind of stuff clearly as a Protestant, I lean towards the latter, but there's a lot of history here. And we have to be honest that there has been a political influence in some of the decisions that were made. Even the Council of Trent reacting against Luther's pressure and saying these books are canonical because of the threat against the doctrines of indulgence and purgatory.
00:38:04
Speaker
But then we have to look again at these reactions, for instance, with the King James Version, where we have people saying, I don't want anything to do with the Catholics whatsoever. Yank those books out of that Bible. We don't want to be going to wild extremes. And isn't that just human nature up until this day? So what's our goal? Our goal?
00:38:27
Speaker
as modern theologians, students of the nature of God, is to dig into history, to look at scripture, to make sure that the books that we know are authoritative, that have been canonized, match those standards that we've seen throughout confessional Christianity.
Exclusion of Gnostic Gospels
00:38:45
Speaker
that link to the apostolic witness, making sure they're consistent in doctrine, that they reflect that divine inspiration. These standards are our way of knowing canon. Just like we talked about that Greek word that means canon, K-A-N-O-N, the read, the standard of measure. There is a standard of measure for what is included in the canon, what can speak into our lives and direct our lives.
00:39:14
Speaker
want to conclude this episode just quickly going back and revisiting the Gnostic Gospels. So we talked about these in the episode on the Gospels themselves and the canonization. The Gnostic Gospels are these books that were written about 100 years or more after Jesus but promoted this esoteric mystical view that demonized matter and
00:39:41
Speaker
and exalted this higher knowledge, this seeking of the spiritual realm. And so they undermined the nature of the Gospel. I was reading an interesting article today. Actually, it was a chapter from a book written by a modern Gnostic who was making the connection between the modern New Age movement and the history of Gnosticism back in the first century.
00:40:06
Speaker
Now, this person was very anti-Christian. In fact, they were not happy with how the church had outright opposed Gnosticism over the course of the years. But he made an interesting accusation. He said that the Gospel of John and many of Paul's epistles were Gnostic in nature. And it was the church who changed that and changed the narrative to force an interpretation into the text that matched.
00:40:34
Speaker
how they aligned with Christian doctrine. And I thought that is so interesting that they would try to take the Gospel of John in Paul's epistles as a zanastic text.
00:40:48
Speaker
There's a couple reasons—and this is my personal commentary on this—that I think this is not only flawed, but kind of a double standard when it comes to incorporating Gnostic Gospels. If you remember, Gnostic works are like the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Mary.
00:41:08
Speaker
the Sophia of Jesus Christ and all these mystical books that are not teaching the true gospel, but were written in that ancient time.
00:41:22
Speaker
One of the things is that to understand John and Paul's writings, we have to understand their Hebrew heritage. And the Hebrew Judaic faith flies so in the face of Gnostic thought, it's not even funny.
Gnosticism's Influence on Church and Modern Beliefs
00:41:41
Speaker
If reading this chapter I could not help but think that this author is not familiar with the Jewish roots of Christianity or the Jewish background of who Paul was because the idea that matter is inherently bad or that you know living in your body is this temporary thing that doesn't matter is not
00:42:06
Speaker
consistent with Jewish teaching where the body and the soul this is a holistic person and you were to honor the body and care for the body just as you care for the soul and this is fundamental so what Paul would have understood what John would have understood what Jesus would have understood and
00:42:25
Speaker
is laced through their writing in addition to the more mystical elements that are included in what they say. And so ignoring that would allow a Gnostic to pull out the spiritual elements from that text without keeping the necessary roots of Christianity in them.
00:42:46
Speaker
Another thing that's interesting is that Gnostics were pretty big on the idea of women leading their gatherings. Now this is because of the concept of the eon. So there are these eons, there's like female eons and male eons and these female eons, they are like this force and women
00:43:11
Speaker
could represent these eons. This is my understanding from what I've read about it in their gatherings, these Gnostic gatherings. And so many Gnostic churches had a strong female presence in their leadership.
00:43:28
Speaker
And there is a theory that the reason that many women who were leading in the early church, many of those positions became eliminated or women were not put into positions of leadership as much as the church moved towards the Christianity became legalized and the church became more political, is twofold. The Gnostic influence
00:43:49
Speaker
and moving away. So seeing what was happening with women in the Gnostic churches and saying, okay, we need to make a distinction here. We're going to limit women in these positions.
00:44:00
Speaker
make a distinction between us and the Gnostics. And then also, of course, once Christianity was legalized, being a bishop or being in a position of leadership was also a political position. And since many women didn't hold political positions, those positions went to men. So this concept of Gnostic exaltation of women
00:44:21
Speaker
And then what we see Paul writing about gender, to me, isn't consistent. I think that Gnostics would not have been happy with how Paul dealt with gender in the church.
00:44:36
Speaker
to me that means that these books would not have been influenced by Gnosticism or could not be used as Gnostic sources. So just a little thing to think about when the Gnostic Gospels come up and people say, well why aren't the Gnostic Gospels included? Well we talked about that in in the previous episode but also the Gnostic thought process, the ideas,
00:44:59
Speaker
These ideas are inconsistent with the gospel and they still are today in the New Age movement because truly New Ageism I've always suspected that it was just a new Gnosticism and then this Gnostic New Age person just confirmed it for me so I think it's fascinating but it's also dangerous and it's very easy for it to infiltrate the church if we're not careful
00:45:20
Speaker
in understanding the correct doctrines of the gospel and how to live in our bodies well and honor the spirit in them instead of seeing body and self as bad and spirit as good. God redeems all. He is a holistic God and that is consistent with what scripture teaches.
Conclusion and Future Episodes Preview
00:45:39
Speaker
Alright guys, this was a lot as usual, but I hope it's helpful to you as you come to understand the Apocrypha and the Gnostic Gospels, why certain Bibles don't include them, why these are not some of them, especially the Gnostic Gospels are not to be trusted as sources, and why there's so many differences in how our Bibles are developed and different in different denominations and traditions.
00:46:03
Speaker
Next week we are going to start discussing translations primarily with a focus on the King James Version and then moving into kind of a high-level view of how translations happen and how we know what to trust. Get excited!
00:46:21
Speaker
Thank you for joining us for today's episode of Verity. You can connect with fellow listeners by following me on Instagram at Felicia Masonheimer or on our Facebook page by the same name. Also visit FeliciaMasonheimer.com for links to each episode and the show notes.