Apocrypha

In the Medieval Canon by Frans van Liere, I felt like I learnt more about the Old Testament Apocrypha, as we have done more of the NT apocrypha. The Hebrew Bible which is dived into three groups of books, the five books of Torah, the Prophets and the Writings. All the scholars agree that there five books of the Torah but they come to disagree on volumes of the Prophets and the Writings. I thought the Christian church father Jerome was interesting the way he made the number of books as twenty two, and made it similar to the alphabets letters in the Hebrew bible. However he excluded/ refused to include the “apocrypha books”.

Later on Jerome Hebrew Bible Canon did become the Catholic Hebrew bible, however later on the catholic church did accept/consider these apocrypha books as scripture and so leads me to question whether these OT apocrypha were inspired or not.

This is what brings about division among the different Christians religion- Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant. Apocrypha that Catholic OT canon includes are Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, I and II Maccabees plus sections of Esther and Daniel which are absent from the other Christian OT. Whereas the Jews and the Protestant don’t believe apocrypha are not inspired as they were not fund in the Aleppo Codex.

Furthermore the fact that in the NT Jesus does not mention any of the OT apocrypha provides proof to some scholars and Christian religion that Apocrypha were not inspired. Now again, these books were written by God-fearing Jews—not Catholics nor Protestants. And they were written before Christ, so its authors did not have a chance to accept Jesus as Lord and Savior.

The Apocryphal books do not share many of the characteristics of the Canonical books: they are not prophetic, there is no supernatural confirmation of any of the apocryphal writers' works, there is no predictive prophecy, there is no new Messianic truth revealed, they are not cited as authoritative by any prophetic book written after them.

I also think that one thing that is influencing other Christian and Jewish religions from acknowledging the OT Apocrypha is because they think it’s Catholic, they don’t want to taint their theology with the view of Rome. However these “apocrypha” were not written by Catholics, for Catholics nor did the authors set to expand the Catholic doctrine.

Apocrypha provides us with books like Books like 1 Maccabees acquaint us with the history that branded the idea of the kingdom of God on the hearts and minds of first century Jews. 4 Ezra, which is in some versions of the Apocrypha) helps us to interpret the book of Revelation. It too talks about weird creatures coming out of the sea. In short, these books help us to situate the NT in its own context.