The Biblical apocrypha () denotes the collection of ancient books, some of which are believed by some to be of doubtful origin, thought to have been written some time between 200 BC and 100 AD.
The Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodox Church, Oriental Orthodox Churches, and Assyrian Church of the East include some or all of the same texts within the body of their version of the Old Testament, with Catholics terming them deuterocanonical books.See the English Standard Version with the Apocrypha, the New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha, 3rd Revised and Expanded Edition: Revised Standard Version, and the New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha, 4th Expanded Edition: New Revised Standard Version Traditional 80-book Protestant Bibles include fourteen books in an intertestamental section between the Old Testament and New Testament called the Apocrypha, deeming these useful for instruction, but non-canonical.Bruce, F.F. "The Canon of Scripture". IVP Academic, 2010, Location 1478–86 (Kindle Edition). Reflecting this view, the lectionaries of the Lutheran Churches and Anglican Communion include readings from the Apocrypha.
Acceptance It was in Luther's Bible of 1534 that the Apocrypha was first published as a separate intertestamental section. The preface to the Apocrypha in the Geneva Bible claimed that while these books "were not received by a common consent to be read and expounded publicly in the Church", and did not serve "to prove any point of Christian religion save in so much as they had the consent of the other scriptures called canonical to confirm the same", nonetheless, "as books proceeding from godly men they were received to be read for the advancement and furtherance of the knowledge of history and for the instruction of godly manners."Geneva Bible, 1560. Full preface available online: http://www.bible-researcher.com/canon2.html Later, during the English Civil War, the Westminster Confession of 1647 excluded the Apocrypha from the canon and made no recommendation of the Apocrypha above "other human writings","The books commonly called Apocrypha, not being of divine inspiration, are no part of the Canon of the Scripture; 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." For more details see Development of the Old Testament canon#Church of England. and this attitude toward the Apocrypha is represented by the decision of the British and Foreign Bible Society in the early 19th century not to print it. Today, English Bibles with the Apocrypha are becoming more popular again, and they are often printed as intertestamental books.
Many of these texts are considered canonical Old Testament books by the Catholic Church, affirmed by the Council of Rome (382), Synod of Hippo (393) and Councils of Carthage (397), and later reaffirmed by the Council of Trent (1545–1563); and by the Eastern Orthodox Church which are referred to as anagignoskomena per the Synod of Jerusalem (1672).
The Lutheran Churches normatively include in the Bible the Apocrypha as an intertestamental section between the Old Testament and the New Testament. Of the Old Testamental Apocrypha, Martin Luther said, "These books are not held equal to the Scriptures, but are useful and good to read" (AE 35:337). The Book of Concord, the compendium of Evangelical Lutheran doctrine, quotes Tobit 4:10 and cites 2 Maccabees 15:14. The systematic theologian Martin Chemnitz, a leading figure in the development of Evangelical Lutheranism, cites Sirach 38:25-26 as helpful. Chemnitz also separates Old Testament Scripture into two categories: canonical and apocryphal. The Dietrich Catechism, once widely used in Evangelical Lutheranism, affirms that apart from the canonical books, the Bible does contain the apocrypha.
The Anglican Communion accepts "the Apocrypha for instruction in life and manners, but not for the establishment of doctrine (Article VI in the Thirty-Nine Articles)", and many "lectionary readings in The Book of Common Prayer are taken from the Apocrypha", with these lessons being "read in the same ways as those from the Old Testament". The first Methodist liturgical book, The Sunday Service of the Methodists, employs verses from the Apocrypha, such as in the Eucharistic liturgy. The Protestant Apocrypha contains three books (1 Esdras, 2 Esdras and the Prayer of Manasseh) that are accepted by many Eastern Orthodox Churches and Oriental Orthodox Churches as canonical, but are regarded as non-canonical by the Catholic Church and are therefore not included in modern Catholic Bibles.
, the Apocrypha are "included in the lectionaries of Anglican and Lutheran Churches". Anabaptists use the Luther Bible, which contains the Apocrypha as intertestamental books; Amish wedding ceremonies include "the retelling of the marriage of Tobias and Sarah in the Apocrypha". Moreover, the Revised Common Lectionary, in use by most mainline Protestants including Methodists and Moravians, lists readings from the Apocrypha in the liturgical calendar, although alternate Old Testament scripture lessons are provided.
Vulgate prologues
Jerome completed his translation of the Bible, the Latin Vulgate, in 405. The Vulgate manuscripts included prologues, in which Jerome clearly identified certain books of the older Old Latin Old Testament version as apocryphal – or non-canonical – even though they might be read as scripture.
In the prologue to the books of Samuel and Kings, which is often called the Prologus Galeatus, he says:
In the prologue to Ezra, Jerome states that the third book and fourth book of Ezra are apocryphal; while the two books of Ezra in the Vetus Latina version, translating 1 Esdras and 2 Esdras of the Septuagint, are 'variant examples' of the same Hebrew original.
In his prologue to the books of Solomon, he says:
He mentions the book of Baruch in his prologue to Jeremiah but does not include it as 'apocrypha'; stating that "it is neither read nor held among the Hebrews".
In his prologue to Judith he mentions that "among the Hebrews, the authority [of Judith] came into contention", but that it was "counted in the number of Sacred Scriptures" by the First Council of Nicaea. In his reply to Rufinus, he affirmed that he was consistent with the choice of the church regarding which version of the deuterocanonical portions of Daniel to use, which the Jews of his day did not include:
According to Michael Barber, although Jerome was once suspicious of the apocrypha, he later viewed them as Scripture as shown in his epistles. Barber cites Jerome's letter to Eustochium, in which Jerome quotes Sirach 13:2.; elsewhere Jerome also refers to Baruch, the Story of Susannah and Wisdom as scripture.Jerome, To Paulinus, Epistle 58 (AD 395), in NPNF2, VI:119.: "Do not, my dearest brother, estimate my worth by the number of my years. Gray hairs are not wisdom; it is wisdom which is as good as gray hairs at least that is what Solomon says: "wisdom is the gray hair unto men" [Wisdom 4:9]. Moses too in choosing the seventy elders is told to take those whom he knows to be elders indeed, and to select them not for their years but for their discretion [Num. 11:16]? And, as a boy, Daniel judges old men and, in the flower of youth, condemns the incontinence of age [Daniel 13:55–59 aka Story of Susannah 55–59]"Jerome, To Oceanus, Epistle 77:4 (AD 399), in NPNF2, VI:159.:"I would cite the words of the psalmist: 'the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit,' [Ps 51:17] and those of Ezekiel 'I prefer the repentance of a sinner rather than his death', [Ez 18:23] and those of Baruch, 'Arise, arise, O Jerusalem', [Baruch 5:5] and many other proclamations made by the trumpets of the Prophets."Jerome, Letter 51, 6, 7, NPNF2, VI:87–8: "For in the book of Wisdom, which is inscribed with his name, Solomon says: "God created man to be immortal, and made him to be an image of his own eternity." [Wisdom 2:23]...Instead of the three proofs from Holy Scripture which you said would satisfy you if I could produce them, behold I have given you seven"
Apocrypha in editions of the Bible
Apocrypha are well attested in surviving manuscripts of the Christian Bible. (See, for example, Codex Vaticanus, Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Alexandrinus, Vulgate, and Peshitta.) After the Lutheran and Catholic canons were defined by Luther (c. 1534) and Trent section titled "The Council of Florence 1442": "...contains a complete list of the books received by the Church as inspired, but omits, perhaps advisedly, the terms canon and canonical. The Council of Florence therefore taught the inspiration of all the Scriptures, but did not formally pass on their canonicity." (8 April 1546) respectively, early Protestant editions of the Bible (notably the 1545 Luther Bible in German and 1611 King James Version in English) did not omit these books, but placed them in a separate Apocrypha section in between the Old and New Testaments to indicate their status.
Gutenberg Bible This famous edition of the Vulgate was published in 1455. Like the manuscripts on which it was based, the Gutenberg Bible lacks a specific Apocrypha section. Its Old Testament includes the books that Jerome considered apocryphal and those Pope Clement VIII later moved to the appendix. The Prayer of Manasseh is located after the Books of Chronicles, 3 and 4 Esdras follow 2 Esdras (Nehemiah), and Prayer of Solomon follows Ecclesiasticus.
Luther Bible
Martin Luther translated the Bible into German during the early part of the 16th century, first releasing a complete Bible in 1534. His bible was the first major edition to have a separate section called an apocrypha. Books and portions of books not found in the Masoretic Text of Judaism were moved out of the body of the Old Testament to this section. Luther placed these books between the Old and New Testaments. For this reason, these works are sometimes known as inter-testamental books. The books 1 and 2 Esdras were omitted entirely.Preface to the Revised Standard Version Common Bible Luther was making a polemical point about the canonicity of these books. As an authority for this division, he cited Jerome, who in the early 5th century distinguished the Hebrew Bible and Septuagint,See the Theological Glossary of the Jerusalem Bible Reader's Edition: "One tradition within the Church excluded the Greek books, and this tradition was taken up by the 15th century {sic} Reformers, who relegated these books to the Apocrypha. 1 Maccabees 12:9." Note that the JB is explicitly approved by the CBCEW (the Bishop's Conference of England and Wales) stating that books not found in Hebrew were not received as canonical.
Although his statement was controversial in his day,Catholic Encyclopaedia, "St. Jerome evidently applied the term to all quasi-scriptural books which in his estimation lay outside the canon of the Bible, and the Protestant Reformers, following Jerome's catalogue of Old Testament Scriptures—one which was at once erroneous and singular among the Fathers of the Church—applied the title Apocrypha to the excess of the Catholic canon of the Old Testament over that of the Jews. Naturally, Catholics refuse to admit such a denomination, and we employ "deuterocanonical" to designate this literature, which non-Catholics conventionally and improperly known as the Apocrypha". Jerome was later titled a Doctor of the Church and his authority was also cited in the Anglican statement in 1571 of the Thirty-nine Articles."And the other books (as Hierome saith) the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine."