Change Outside the Canon: How Views of the Apocrypha Have Transformed Over Time

The initial part of Annette Yoshiko Reed’s essay “The Afterlives of the New Testament Apocrypha” introduces some of the afterlife paths of parabiblical texts, and it also provides general background on the separation and collections of apocryphal writings. By following this history, readers gain a better understanding of different views of the New Testament Apocrypha over its years of existence.

According to Reed, concern over false apocryphal writing has existed since the second century. Philosophers and theologians have worked to define Christian scripture and identify texts as authoritative scripture or parabiblical. Examples from this essay include Irenaeus’s concern with “apocryphal and spurious writings” and Athanasius’s defining of scripture, other books to read, and works to be dismissed (407-408). These strategies, along with the approaches of figures such as Eusebius, whose methods for determining the value of different scriptural texts were discussed during our last meeting, demonstrate the “rise of more systematic attempts to list the contents of Christian Scripture” into the fourth and fifth centuries. In Athanasius’s model, apocryphal texts were those outside of the most authoritative canon but that were still valuable and worth reading in some circumstances (408). However, throughout time this view of the Apocrypha changed. Today, it is popularly assumed that apocryphal texts are contrary to scripture, or countercanon, and according to Reed, this view largely arose from “anxieties about apocrypha…in the period of canon formation” (410). Interest in the Apocrypha has returned in a few different settings, such as the eighteenth century scholarly interest in England, but curiosity about these texts today are largely shaped by the presentation by popular media—and the fictional spinoffs and conspiracy theories that exist in today’s culture are still strongly influenced by the view of apocryphal texts as countercanon.

Growing up going to a Protestant church, I never encountered these parabiblical writings, so it is interesting to see how people’s perceptions of these texts have changed over time. Despite what I would have assumed from the portrayal of such texts today, apocryphal texts have not necessarily been considered as going against canonized scripture, implying that texts that are widely rejected may have had significant influence in the past and could still have an impact today.