What is the Apocrypha?
Here is an excerpt from my forthcoming book Seven Things About the Bible That I Wish All Christians Knew available from Zondervan on 8 June.
What Is the Apocrypha and Should You Read It?
The Apocrypha, from the Greek apokryphos for “hidden,” refers to a number of books written by Jewish authors that were widely read by Jews and Christians, but were regarded as of questionable authorship or having dubious origins. This is why Jews omitted them from their canon and why Christians eventually assigned them secondary status.
While the Apocrypha has been read and studied throughout church history, Christian churches differ among themselves when it comes to the status and extent of the Apocrypha.
On the status and order of these books in the Bible, Protestants call these books “Apocrypha” and ordinarily place them between the Old and New Testaments, at least in the Tyndale-Matthews Bible, the Great Bible, the Bishops Bible, the Geneva Bible, and the King James Bible. Fun fact, the King James Bible (KJB) originally included the Old Testament, New Testament, and Apocrypha, and it was not until the 1880s that Bible Societies began to omit the Apocrypha from printings of the KJB due to anti-Catholic animus. Even today, many evangelicals Bibles, like the English Standard Version and the Common English Bible, include the Apocrypha in some printings. The reading of the Apocrypha was encouraged by Protestant denominations, not because the Apocrypha should be used in preaching or in the establishment of Christian doctrine, but because “they were received to be read for the advancement and furtherance of the knowledge of history and for the instruction” (Geneva Bible) and “for instruction in life and manners” (Anglican 39 Articles). In contrast, Catholics recognize them as “deutero-canonical,” a second canonical collection, not merely useful, but as God-given and authoritative. The Greek Orthodox church recognizes the Old Testament and Apocrypha, but don’t divide them up into those two categories, and they simply consider them to be anagignoskomena, meaning “books to be read.”
To make things ever more confusing, there are disagreements on what books should be in the Apocrypha. Alas, the Protestant apocrypha, the Catholic deutero-canonicals, and the Greek Orthodox anagignoskomena do not all contain the same set of writings. If that were not complicated enough, consider this: the Slavonic Bible, a literary forebear of the Russian Synodal Version (the standard Russian Orthodox Bible), has slight variations from the Greek Orthodox Bible in terms of which apocryphal books it includes. Somewhat more exotic, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church include in their Old Testament the entire Hebrew canon and the Apocrypha, but also add in “pseudepigraphical writings” (texts falsely or fictitiously attributed to ancient figures) such as Jubilees, 1 Enoch, and 4 Baruch, while rejecting books like 1 and 2 Maccabees. The Ethiopic New Testament includes the standard twenty-seven books but adds many other books related to church order such as the Didascalia and the Book of the Covenant, giving them a canon with a massive 81 books! So, when someone talks about the biblical canon, you almost have to ask, which one?
Let me be clear: Christians should read the Apocrypha! If you want to understand the historical period between Malachi and Matthew, then you should make a concerted effort to read the history, wisdom literature, and apocalyptic hopes contained in this body of writings. The books called by us “apocrypha” were widely read and used by Christians in the early centuries and only gradually were siloed away from the Old and New Testament. The Apocrypha provides a glimpse into the world of Second Temple Judaism and the backdrop to the New Testament period. So tolle lege, take up and read!
If you want to know more, I recommend David A. deSilva’s book Introducing the Apocrypha.