Does the Apocrypha Belong in the Bible?
Protestants and Roman Catholics read different Old Testaments. The reason can be traced back to a Bible that was translated before Jesus was ever born.
Different communities of people who call themselves Christians use different Old Testaments.
Everyone who claims to be Christian agrees about thirty-nine of the texts in the Old Testament, but — if you attended Mass in a Roman Catholic congregation this weekend — the Old Testament readings would come from a canon that includes seven books more than the thirty-nine books in the Old Testament at the Protestant church down the street. A few blocks further down the street at the Jewish synagogue, a reader who probably doesn’t believe in the resurrection of Jesus at all will be chanting a Hebrew or Aramaic text from the same Old Testament canon that the Protestants are studying in translated form. The Orthodox Church across town will be reading an Old Testament that encompasses a total of ten more texts than Jews or Protestants recognize.
All of these disparities spawn a difficult question: If people who claim to believe the Bible can’t be sure about which books belong in the Old Testament, how can anyone reasonably believe what the Old Testament has to say?
Some Christians answer this question by appealing to church tradition or to their conviction that the Holy Spirit mystically enables Christians to recognize which books are divinely inspired. Personally, I don’t find either of these answers to be particularly helpful. Church traditions have erred many times, and people’s convictions that they’ve received a supernatural impression from the Holy Spirit have erred even more.
Believing the Books that Jesus Believed
What I believe about the Bible is grounded in the words of a man who died and rose again. If Jesus is still dead or if later Christians fabricated his teachings, I have no reason to believe the Bible at all. But it seems more plausible to me that Jesus walked out of the tomb than that he remained dead, and the teachings attributed to Jesus in the Gospels seem more likely to have originated with Jesus than with anyone else. Because I believe that Jesus is alive, I trust what Jesus had to say. And so, when I consider which books belong in the Old Testament, my goal is simply to trust the same Old Testament that Jesus trusted.
Before peeling back the layers of history to determine which books Jesus trusted, however, let’s first take a look at how different churches ended up with different Old Testaments in the first place.
Aristotle, Alexander, and the Greek Old Testament
In some sense, the pathway that led to differences in the Old Testament began with Alexander the Great. Long before Alexander ever rallied an army into battle from the saddle of Bucephalus the warhorse, Alexander was the pupil of a philosopher named Aristotle. Aristotle was convinced that Greek language and culture represented humanity’s highest achievement, and his passion for Greek culture seems to have shaped young Alexander’s vision for his empire.
When Alexander undertook the military campaigns that would win him a domain that stretched from Macedonia to India, he also laid the foundations for Greek to become the common tongue that tied people together in the regions that would later become part of the Roman Empire. In the centuries that preceded the birth of Jesus, the Greek language grew so pervasive that there was no hope of gaining a broad hearing for any idea unless it was recorded in Greek — which is why, no later than the second century B.C., the literature of the Jewish people began to be translated into Greek. And that’s also how different texts ended up in different Old Testaments. When the Jewish Scriptures were translated into Greek, the editors included not only Greek renderings of the long-cherished Hebrew and Aramaic Scriptures but also a handful of other compositions from Jewish tradition as well as longer versions of a couple of books. These additional writings are important for understanding the history of the Jewish people, but the Jews never considered them to be the same type of texts as the Hebrew and Aramaic Scriptures. In fact, the author of one of these writings — the first book of the Maccabees — specifically stated that he composed this text during an era when prophetic oracles had ended for a time (1 Maccabees 4:46; 9:27; 14:41).
In addition to incorporating a few additional books, the editors of the Greek Old Testament — a text that came to be known as “the Septuagint” — rearranged most of the books in the Bible. The result was a sequence somewhat similar to what you might see in many English Old Testaments still today — a sequence that moves from Law to History to Wisdom and Poetry, then finally to the Prophets. The earlier Hebrew and Aramaic Old Testament had been arranged in three sections; in this venerable sequence, the Old Testament moved from
- 1. the covenants recorded by Moses that formed the Hebrew people in the first place (the Law of Moses) to
- 2. a prophetic perspective on Israel’s rise and fall as a kingdom (the Prophets) and then to
- 3. a medley of wisdom literature, songs, priestly histories, and texts for worship and festivals (the Writings).
Because the book of Psalms constituted the largest section in the Writings and stood near the beginning of this section, the third segment of the Old Testament was sometimes known as “Psalms.” Any ancient copy of the Hebrew and Aramaic Old Testament would have been spread over many scrolls, so there was no definitive table of contents of the same type that you might see in a book today. A particular order in a table of contents only makes sense if all of the texts are in a books that keep them in the same order. If the texts is inscribed in scrolls and especially if they extend across many scrolls, the order of the texts may not always be identical, even when the content remains the same.
The only people who learned to read Hebrew and Aramaic in the first century A.D. were Jews. And so, once the message of Jesus began to multiply beyond Jewish communities, many followers of Jesus were incapable of reading the Old Testament in Hebrew and Aramaic, so the Greek Septuagint became their Old Testament. In the minds of some of these Christians, so did the additional texts that the editors of the Septuagint bundled with their translations of the Hebrew and Aramaic Scriptures.
The Greek language did not, however, remain dominant forever. By the fifth century A.D., Latin was rapidly replacing Greek as the primary language for liturgy and literature in the western regions of the Roman Empire. While developing a Latin translation of the Old Testament, a biblical scholar named Jerome pointed out that certain texts in the Septuagint had never been part of the Hebrew and Aramaic Old Testament in the first place. Jerome referred to these compositions as “Apocrypha”, from a Greek word that meant “hidden” or “unclear.” Jerome contended that nothing in the Apocrypha should determine any doctrine that Christians believe.
Another prominent church leader — Augustine, overseer of churches in the North African city of Hippo — disagreed with Jerome’s assessment and demanded that Christians recognize every text in the Septuagint as Scripture. Augustine’s opinion prevailed in much of the Church and, as a result, apocryphal writings remain in the Old Testaments of the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches still today, designated as “deuterocanonical texts.”
What Bible Did Jesus Use?
According to Luke’s Gospel, Jesus taught from an Old Testament canon that began ‘with Moses and all the Prophets’ (Luke 24:27). As it turns out, the Law of Moses and the Prophets are the first two sections in the Hebrew and Aramaic Old Testament but not in the Septuagint. The editors of the Septuagint text that included the Apocrypha placed most of the prophetic texts later in the Old Testament. A few verses later in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus described the Old Testament as a collection that consisted of ‘the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms’ (Luke 24:44). Once again, these words from the resurrected Jesus describe the three-part Hebrew and Aramaic Old Testament — a collection that never included the apocryphal books.
In case it still seems uncertain whether or not Jesus received the Apocrypha as authoritative, consider this: Jesus never cited any apocryphal text as Scripture — and it’s not as if Jesus was unaware of the extra texts in the Septuagint! By the time Jesus began preaching and teaching along the Sea of Galilee, the Septuagint had already been in circulation for more than a century. And yet, even though Jesus cited Old Testament texts dozens of times in his teachings, he never once quoted any apocryphal text.
The first-century followers of Jesus seem to have followed this same pattern. The writers of the New Testament quoted the Greek Septuagint at least two-thirds of the time when they cited Old Testament texts. Yet none of them ever clearly quoted any apocryphal book as Scripture, even though the Septuagint included these additional texts. New Testament authors may have alluded to apocryphal texts from time to time, and they sometimes cited stories from Jewish tradition (see Jude 1:9–10, for example). Yet they never gave any hint that any apocryphal text might belong in the Old Testament canon.
