Between Malachi and Matthew

Have you noticed any or all of the following? A mail-order catalogue of household bric-a-brac encouraging you to buy and read “The Missing Books of the Bible”(2 vols. for $9.98)? A well-known Christian folk troubadour offering for sale a cd of songs “taken from Scripture and the Apocrypha”? A major evangelical Christian publishing house that has already won awards for a series of Scripture commentaries that collate the expository comments of early Christian scholars, promising that forthcoming volumes will cover the Apocrypha? A major Bible publisher that has already released an edition of the NRSV including these Apocryphal writings, now preparing a study Bible with explanatory notes on Apocryphal writings just as on Scripture?

All the signs point to the re-emergence of the Old Testament Apocryphal writings as a body of religious literature claiming the attention of evangelical Christians. We are going to be hearing a lot more, I expect, of Tobit, Judith, Susannah, Esdras, Wisdom of Solomon, and the books of Maccabees.

How did evangelical Christianity come to be in this situation, in which it is asked to take seriously once more books which have all but dropped out of sight in its reckoning? In the English-speaking world, at least, misgivings about the rightness of including the Apocrypha inside Bible covers came to a head in the middle of the 17th century. Puritan preachers and theologians such as John Lightfoot (1602-75) went contrary to current policy in advocating their exclusion. Subsequently, the first edition of the Bible printed in America in 1782 excluded the Apocryphal writings. After controversy on the subject in 1827, the British and Foreign Bible Society pledged to print no more Bibles which included the Apocrypha.

The attitude held toward the Apocrypha by the Protestant Reformers in the century preceding Lightfoot had been more cautious. They took their lead from Luther, who reckoned from the time of his 1518 debates with John Eck that the Apocryphal books, while deserving to be read, should be made the basis for no article of Christian faith. The Reformation insistence on “sola Scriptura” was an insistence on canonical Scripture as supreme for our faith and life. Bibles printed under Protestant auspices in Europe and England in the age of the Reformation therefore included the Apocryphal books in a specially marked appendix, placed between Malachi and Matthew. Luther’s German Bible as well as the English Bibles indebted to the translation of William Tyndale (such as that of Miles Coverdale) followed this policy.

Luther’s debates with Eck had themselves only been a replay of debates in earlier Christianity. Eck’s stance—that practices such as prayers for the dead could be supported from the Apocryphal books, considered as Scripture—was a continuation of the practice of mainstream Catholic theology of the preceding millennium. This policy would find its Counter-Reformation expression in the decrees of the Council of Trent (1545-63). In its very first session, Trent affirmed that the Apocryphal writings were part of the canon of Scripture proper and thus a legitimate quarry from which to draw Christian doctrine. Luther, on the other hand, was the continuator of an attitude toward the Apocryphal writings that could be found in Melitto of Sardis (2nd Century), Athanasius (c.296-373), Jerome (342-420), John of Damascus (675-749), Hugh of St. Victor (1096-1141), Nicholas of Lyra (1270-1340), the translators of the Lollard Bible (editions of 1384 and 1395), and Reformation-era Catholic Cardinals Ximenes (1436-1517) and Cajetan (1469-1534). In their collective view, the Apocryphal writings—because never reckoned part of the Hebrew canon of the Old Testament—were precluded from being used as more than edifying reading material.

Trace it back far enough and this long-running disagreement over the status of the Apocryphal writings turns out to be rooted in both the early Christian church’s declining ability to use and study the Hebrew Bible and strained Jewish-Christian relationships. In the first case, early Christianity had mirrored developments in the Judaism of that era. Far more persons followed the Jewish religion outside Judaea than in it; even at home Jews commonly spoke and read Greek. Greek translations of the ot writings were abundant and were widely used by Jews and Christians in Judaea and beyond. Greek versions of the Apocrypha circulated freely along with the biblical scrolls.

As to the second, practicing Jews—possessing a conviction about what comprised virtually all of the biblical canon datable back (at least) to the middle of the second century b.c.—were more adept than their Christian counterparts at distinguishing the actual ot writings from the literature of the intertestamental period (which is what the Apocrypha are). As Christianity became increasingly estranged from the synagogues, the church lost the ability to consult Jewish scholarship and gradually conceived of the ot canon in an uninformed way—hence the inclusion of varying collections of the Apocrypha in some of the church’s earliest codices (i.e., bound collections of Scripture). This uncritical embrace of the Apocrypha prevailed in much of Roman and all of Orthodox Christianity.

With this much said, how did we arrive at our present evangelical dilemma—the Apocrypha making a kind of a comeback? Part of the responsibility lies with the major revisions of the English Bible in the last century and a half. Several of these have worked to quietly recirculate the Apocrypha. Thus, in keeping with the decision that the Authorized Version of 1611 should maintain the Apocrypha as an ot appendix, the editors of the Revised Version of 1885 supplied a fresh translation of the Apocrypha by 1895. In America, while the adaptation of the 1885 effort we know as the American Standard Version of 1901 did not include the Apocrypha, the more influential Revised Standard Version of 1952 did provide them in a new translation by 1957. The updating of the rsv as the nrsv in 1990 has continued this making of the Apocrypha available in select editions. The impetus given to fresh Bible translation by the Second Vatican Council (1962- 65), resulting in the Jerusalem Bible (1966) and the New American Bible (1970), has given the Apocryphal writings further circulation in modern dress. But it is highly unlikely that the mere availability of these ancient writings in these formats is responsible for the rebound of interest we are witnessing just now. We can mention three additional possibilities.

First would be the suspicion among many younger evangelicals that our tradition has delivered to us a “stripped down” version of historic Christianity. Everyone knows some evangelical who has investigated and then put down roots in the Episcopal, Catholic, or Orthodox expression of the Christian faith on the basis of this sense of feeling “shortchanged.” Some have felt shortchanged as to reverential styles of worship, emphasis on creeds and confessions, and the loss of the conception of “one holy Catholic church.” The fact that the Apocryphal writings continue to play a somewhat larger role in these other expressions of Christianity will explain how easily they become, for these wistful evangelicals, a kind of an “exotic”—highly to be desired. Among such persons it has become common to hear assertions such as “the early Church accepted all the books of the apocrypha as inspired.” This, a case of wistfulness run wild, is a credulous appeal to tradition. Such wistful evangelicals need to take more seriously the whole early Christian tradition of caution toward the Apocrypha.

Second, and related to the first, is the fact that we find ourselves increasingly in a period of Christian History when official and unofficial dialogue between evangelicals and Catholics, and evangelicals and Orthodoxy, is called for. There is wide agreement that a certain range of cobelligerence is possible and desirable in defense of central Christian affirmations (such as the deity and authority of Christ, and the sanctity of human life). This climate of dialogue will perhaps render us sheepish in repeating our historic reluctance to give the Apocrypha any authoritative role in our teaching and believing—since Catholic and Orthodox traditions affirm the reverse. But surely the pre-Reformation caution on this matter was so robustly present in both traditions that we should overcome our reticence and speak up in settings where dialogue is the order of the day. This evangelical conviction about the Apocrypha is not a sectarian opinion of recent vintage. It is not accurately alleged to be part of some “unhappy legacy” of the Reformation.

Third, there is the difficult question of the influence of the academic guild upon the evangelicalism of today. It is both one of the crowning achievements of evangelicalism today and also one of its vulnerabilities that we have, collectively, found a place in research universities at home and abroad. We have found that views congruent with evangelical orthodoxy can be carefully articulated within venues such as the Society of Biblical Literature. Yet in such settings as these, definite notions of what comprises the biblical canon may not be welcomed. We should be careful not to trim our sails on such a sensitive matter as this. We are called on to maintain in such settings also this venerable perspective on the biblical canon traceable back to earliest Christianity.

In sum, the faith of the church has not been endangered when the intertestamental writings we call the Apocrypha have been printed as an appendix to the OT Scriptures. Assigning them this status of appendix is sufficient indication that they are not reckoned canonical by us. But before we hurry out and replace the Bibles we have, which likely contain no Apocrypha, with those that do, let us remember that from antiquity, the Christian thinkers who have labored hardest to read Hebrew and to dialogue with Jewish scholars have been the most resolute in cautioning us against making more of the Apocrypha than what they are: a collection of intertestamental writings of mixed quality and accuracy—yet which shed interesting and valuable light on the centuries between Malachi and John the Baptist.

Ken Stewart is chair of the Department of Biblical and Theological Studies at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia.