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In Catholic history, the translator of much or all the Latin Vulgate Bible, Jerome, opposed the apocrypha's inclusion in Scripture, but Augustine, the great theologian and author of such famous works as "Confessions" and "City of God," wanted them included.
The ancient Council of Carthage in 397 A.D. accepted them as it followed the latter's lead. True, the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, had had many copies that included them. But there isn't a case in the New Testament of any author citing them at all, let alone
quoting them as having authority, such as by using a formula like, "It is written."
One way that exposes the problems with the apocrypha is their absurd stories and/or historical errors and contradictions. The literary quality simply isn't very good, and they fail what (say) Josh McDowell might call the "internal evidence" test. (You
may find it worth tracking down his book Evidence That Demands a Verdict for further research in the area of Christian apologetics, or his More
Than a Carpenter ). For example, Tobit, which Catholics do accept, describes a story in which a Jewish father,
blinded by bird's dung falling into his eyes, sends out his son to collect a debt. He gets a heart, liver, and gall of a fish on his journey. He runs into a widow who have married seven times, but had never consummated any of these marriages with her husbands because an evil spirit had killed each
husband on their respective wedding nights. Tobias (the son) marries this widow, and by burning two of the the fish parts, drives off the evil spirit called Asmodeus. He then uses the gall from that fish to cure his father's blindness. If one is familiar with the canonical Old Testament books, one
should then see how absurd this story's setting and miracles are by comparison. They lack what C.S. Lewis might call "fitness," or overall appropriateness. It's more superstitious than Godly.
There is also a historical error in Tobit concerning the age of the father, who would have to be well over 200 years old to have experienced personally the deportation of Israel to Nineveh by the Assyrians, but he's only 102 years old when he dies.
The book of Judith, which Catholics also accept, contains so many absurdities that even a Catholic Bible, the Jerusalem Bible, admitted:
"The book of Judith in particular shows a bland indifference to history and geography."
The traditional Christian scholar Bruce Metzger, in The Canon of the New Testament: Its Origin, Development, and
Significance , gives three basic guidelines that the early Christians used for determining their own canon:
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Agreement with the "rule of faith," or general traditional Christian teaching.
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General, long-standing usage among many congregations.
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Apostolic authorship, which inevitably led to the exclusion of post-100 A.D. writings.
Because the Catholic Church wasn't tightly controlled from the top down in its early centuries, before the time of Constantine especially, it wasn't as if (say) a given Pope or even church council just decreed what the canon was. There was a weight of tradition and usage that flowed also from the bottom-up as well. These are the reasons why the exclusion of (say) "The Gospel of Thomas," "The Gospel of Peter," "The Shepherd of Hermas," etc. wasn't some arbitrary or random process. J.N.D. Anderson noted the difference in "feel" between the canonical gospels and the later apocryphal ones, a difference that only becomes obvious upon becoming familiar with both by personal reading of them: "Who can read these stories [about the resurrection in the canonical Gospels] and really think they're legend? They are far too dignified and restrained; they are far too true to life and psychology. The difference between them and the sort of stories you find in the apocryphal gospels of but two or three centuries later is difference between heaven and earth." The Christian scholar F.F. Bruce commented about the ancient Gnostic movement's writings' general inferiority by comparison with the canonical ones: "The gnostic schools lost because they deserved to lose. A comparison of the New Testament writings with the contents of The Nag Hammadi Library [a collection of ancient Gnostic handwritten books discovered in 1945 in Egypt] should be instructive, once the novelty of the latter is not allowed to weight in its favour against the familiarity of the former." Similarly, we find M.R. James saying about their potential canonicity: "There is no question of any one's having excluded them from the New Testament: They have done that for themselves." K. Aland similarly proclaimed: "It cannot be said of a single writing preserved to us from the early period of the church outside the New Testament that it could be properly added today to the Canon." After all, as he notes, the canon was largely 5/6ths complete in describing its contents by around 200 A.D. Only places for a while and only in certain general or particular parts of the church were (say) Hebrews, 2 Peter , and Revelation doubted before being accepted. So as you can see, the canon is a broad subject, for it includes a discussion of books that (say) Catholics accept but Protestants and Jews reject, as well as many, many other apocryphal writings that orthodox Christians and Jews all reject as having binding authority.
Answer Given By: Eric Snow
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