1689 Confession - The Apocrypha (part 2)

1. The books commonly called the Apocrypha were not given by divine inspiration and are not part of the canon or rule of Scripture. Therefore they do not possess any authority in the church of God, and are to be regarded and used in the same way as other writings of men.

Luke 24:27,44; Rom 3:2.

We have a bible that we believe is the inspired, inerrant Word of God. One of the few problems with this claim is that two Christian groups (Roman Catholics and Protestants) have different bibles. This leads sinful men (and women) to use this as an excuse to throw out the truth claims of the Holy Scripture. I'm sure most would find another reason even if this wasn't the case, but seeing how it's readily available, they use it. In this post I will reflect on the Apocrypha and the recognition of the Scriptures.

Bible is a collection of books, not a single volume. It contains 66 separate books or letters (Protestant bible), and has many authors over many hundreds of years. 2 Timothy 3:16 states that all scripture is God-breathed, meaning He is the ultimate author, and that there is nothing of scripture that He was not the author of. In the early church, there came to be false-teachers known as Gnostics that believed that God in the OT was a demigod that enslaved humanity and was generally a mean-spirited god, but Jesus was the High God, the "kind" God that would save humanity from the demigod of the OT. One of the followers of the Gnostic movement was a man named Marcion who was influential in the early church. He created the first collection of books for his "bible" that supported the gnostic teachings. He eliminated all of the OT, the book of Matthew, many individual scriptures of Luke, and any other scripture that didn't line up with the gnostic teaching. This lead the early church leaders to gather as synods to recognize the actual books of the bible. In 397 A.D. the 3rd Council of Carthage declared the official collection of inspired works.

By what criterion did the Bible get put together?

Almost every book in the NT was recognized universally by the early church. There were questions raised about Jude, 2 Peter, 1-3 John and Hebrews. The test criteria was as follows: 1) was it written or endorsed by an apostle? 2) was it received by the church from the beginning? 3) Does this book conform to the teachings that are universally recognized as scripture? All of the books mentioned met all three criteria, and were accepted as canon.

Some scholars believe that there were 2000 separate books considered by the synods, of which only 27 were in the NT. Only 2-3 books were given the slightest look: 1 Clement and Shepherd of Hermas being two of them. They disqualified themselves by the very authors that wrote them. The others were Gnostic frauds which were recognized and dismissed quickly.

So how did the Apocryphal books get in there? First we need to understand that the apocrypha was mostly written between the OT and NT writings. While valuable as history, there are some significant problems with both the theology and the history. The Jews never recognized the writings as scriptural as they were not written in Hebrew (as all other OT scriptures were written) but Greek and Latin. The Jews even went so far as to destroy copies of the apocrypha after 70 A.D. The church rejected them because they were not written by apostles nor endorsed by them, and they taught things which were in direct contradiction with teachings that were recognized. However, the Roman Catholic church recognized them officially at the Council of Trent (1546) after Luther and the Reformers officially rejected them. The books of the apocrypha do teach doctrine that the Roman Catholics hold dear to their traditions, namely purgatory, works, and immaculate conception, all of which is not taught elsewhere or is in direct contradiction to other scripture.

Roman Catholics believe that because the church is infallible, it's collecting and recognition of the scriptures is also infallible. An infallible collection of infallible books if you will. The Reformers however, believe that the church is fallible, but they have done their due-diligence in the collecting of the infallible books, a fallible collection of infallible books.

Why is this important? If we're understanding scripture to be the Word of God, and that we understand our theology, our worldview, our faith and obedience from this collection of books, we'd better be sure we have the right ones. I believe our 66 books are the right ones, and that any other writings which claim to be inspired but do not meet the standards of scripture should be written off as fraudulent at best, and works of Satan at worst.