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Transcript 391C — Is the Apocrypha Authentic?
HC: Good evening. Welcome to Open Forum
CALLER: Yes, Brother Camping. Recently my wife gave me a Bible that had the Apocrypha in the middle of it. And I hadn't known anything about the Apocrypha before, and I began studying it. And according to what I read here, the books in the Apocrypha were incorporated in the Bible throughout history, up until about the early part of American history, in 1600 or 1700, when there were dropped because of Puritanism, according to what Goodsbe says here. And the question I have in mind is, if the Apocrypha carried so much, was in the Bible for such a long period of time, up until early American history, could it be that the early American Bible scholars, who were Puritans, were mistaken in dropping it and that it is part of God's Word?
HC: The question is concerning the authenticity of the Apocrypha as being part of the Holy Canon. Now these books were written in the period between the last revelation that was given by God to the nation of Israel, about 400 BC, and the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ, about 400 years later. This was a period of silence when there was no vision between God and man.
It's during this period that some of the history of the nation of Israel was written up, and so we have the Book of Maccabbes, and some of these books that are called the Apocrypha or the hidden books.
Now in the Bible that Jesus used, and remember, He came after the Apocryphal books were written, in the Hebrew Bible, the Masoretic text that Jesus used, there was no Apocrypha. If you even go into a Jewish synagogue today, and read the Jewish Bible, which is called the Tenach, you will find that it does not include the Apocrypha. That is not part of the Old Testament. It was not a part of the Bible that Jesus used. It is therefore not part of the Holy Canon.
Actually, I think, and I'm not absolutely positive of this, because I'm not too much of a student of history, I'm more a student of the Bible, but I think that the early Bibles did not contain the Apocrypha. But I believe that around the year 1400 or 1500 one of the churches decided that the Apocryphal books ought to be included. And it was from that period that they actually were included. The Puritans, of course, would have rejected it out of hand, because they recognized that these Apocryphal books were not part of the Holy Canon.
Now if you read the Apocrypha very carefully, and if you're a student of the Bible at all, so that you've really become sensitive to the way God writes, and understand the tremendous internal consistency and integrity and cohesiveness of the whole Bible, then when you read the Apocryphal books you will find that they do not have the same ring of authority. They do not present the truth, the Gospel, the same way the rest of the Bible does.
Now that doesn't mean that one cannot derive certain benefits from reading them. We for example have the writings of Josephus, an historian who lived about the time of Christ, or shortly thereafter. And his writings can be read. But when we read Josephus, or when we read the Apocryphal books, we have to realize that these are secular books. They are not authoritative. There are bound to be biases and prejudices and mistakes, the same as any history book would have these things. They are not the Holy Canon.
CALLER: I see. I felt that the fact that one large church (I won't name it) still uses the Apocrypha and do not necessarily separate it from the Old Testament and the New Testament, but interspersed in the Old Testament, the way it was originally handed down.
HC: No, it was not originally handed down that way. That is not possible. The Old Testament that we have today, the Bible that we have without the Apocrypha is the Old Testament as it was originally handed down.
CALLER: Okay. When I say handed down, I mean from the Greek translation. In other words, the Hebrew translation did not have the Apocrypha, but the Greek translation that the interpreters had throughout the centuries did have the Apocrypha in it.
HC: Yes, but the Septuagint, or the Greek translation, was not the authoritative text. It was not the Bible. It's just like today. You can find a lot of translations today that have taken liberties with the original. Now that doesn't mean that they're correct at all, you see, just because they're translations today. If we're going to try to get the most authoritative Bible, we have to go back as close to the original as we possibly can. And the Masoretic text, the Hebrew text, did not contain the Apocrypha. There's no possibility that it is part of the Holy Canon.
CALLER: I see. And so for that reason the Puritans dropped the use of the Apocrypha in early American church history. But I'm wondering how authentic the Greek versions were as they were handed down through the centuries. In other words, I'm wondering if we're missing something by not including them in today's usage of the Bible.
HC: We're not missing a thing, not a thing. You see, the Apocrypha are not part of the Bible. The Septuagint was not the authorized text. It was simply a translation. And when translators, for example, the King James Bible or any good translation of the Bible, work, they do not use the Septuagint. They use the Masoretic text because it is more authoritative.
You see, the Jews of Jesus' day, when they began to countenance the Apocrypha (because they did, of course. It was part of their Jewish history), had added so much to the official, authoritative Bible text, they had added laws and rules of all kinds and shades and descriptions, which they were very careful to be obedient to, in their adding all of these things, they had so much emasculated the true Gospel that when Jesus, the Messiah, came, they did not recognize Him. They did not know that He was the Messiah. Their problem was that they had added all of these other things to the Bible. They had added not only the Apocrypha, but they had added the commentaries of various learned Rabbis of earlier history. And all of this became the official text. And as a consequence they lost all sensitivity to the authority of the Bible, ant they did not recognize Jesus as the Messiah. When He came on the scene, the Sanhedrin, the ruling body in the church of that day, the high priests, the highest religious officials, rejected Christ altogether, and refused under any circumstance to recognize Him as the Messiah.
Now the same is true today. There are lots of people who are adding to the Bible. They're adding this, they're adding that. And while they still talk about Jesus as the Messiah (because after all, they can't deny Jesus; He did live and He did do what He did), they have lost their sensitivity to the will of God. They no longer recognize what really is the will of God.
Now the Bible as it stands is a book that no man in ten lifetimes (and that's not too exaggerated a bit) could really plumb the depths of the riches of the Bible. But we're living in a day when men are scarcely scratching the surface of the truths that are found in the Bible. And yet they are desirous of finding a little more here and a little more there, and adding something else the other place. Instead of sitting down and reading the Bible and feeding on the Word of God, listening to God speak to them, they would rather add this and add that. And of course in that way they get farther and farther away from what is truth.