Settled by Scripture: The Canon, the Apocrypha, and the Westminster Confession

In this episode of Catechizing Conversations, Cisco Victa and Drew Brackbill examine the formation of the biblical canon and the question: Who determines what counts as God’s Word?

Tracing the history of the Old Testament from early Jewish recognition of the canon to the Septuagint, the Latin Vulgate, and the debates of the Reformation, they explain why Roman Catholic and Orthodox Bibles include the Deuterocanonical books while Protestants affirm a 66-book canon. The conversation engages early witnesses such as Josephus and Melito of Sardis, as well as the disagreements between Jerome and Augustine over the Apocrypha.

They discuss why the Reformers returned to the Hebrew and Greek texts, why Protestants regard the Apocrypha as historically useful but not divinely inspired, and how the New Testament’s citation pattern shaped confidence in the Jewish canon. At the heart of the episode is a theological question: does the church authorize Scripture, or does Scripture authorize the church? Grounded in the Westminster Confession, this discussion connects canon formation to sola Scriptura, preaching, and the life of the church.

Transcript

Speaker 0:27

Welcome to Catechizing Conversations, a podcast focused on theology for the life of the church. I'm Pastor Cisco Victa, and today I'm joined by my guest Drew Brackbill. Drew leads our youth ministry here at Lebanon Valley PCA, also is leading one of our community groups, also known as the small group, which currently is going through the book of Romans. And Drew is also in our officer training program as a potential elder. And as if that's not enough, he's the father of three little children and one on the way.

Speaker 1 1:04

Soon to be four.

Speaker 1:06

Soon to be four, Drew. I'm happy that you're with me today.

Speaker 1 1:10

Thanks, Cisco.

Why Do Canons Differ

Speaker 1:11

So we have been working through, or just started working through the confessions of faith, namely the Westminster Standards and looking at the shorter catechism. And Drew and I are going to start right at the beginning, which really lines up with the second question of the shorter catechism. What rule has God given to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy Him? And the answer is the Word of God, which is contained in the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. That is the only rule to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy God. So we want to go a bit deeper beyond that shorter catechism, right into the Westminster Confession of Faith, which starts with chapter one of the Holy Scripture. And it raises a important question: what are the scriptures? And why do Protestants like us have 66 books, and most have more? And who decided that? How did that come about? And so whether you're a church member, a parent teaching children, or a young person uh seeking to understand Christianity, I'm glad you're listening. So, Drew, I'm glad again that you're here and we can tackle this together.

Early Jewish Canon And Josephus

Speaker 1 2:24

Yeah. So I I I did probably too deep of a deep dive into the history of the canon, the respective canons of the Protestant, Catholic, and even some of the Eastern churches. I don't I don't know if anybody has fewer books in their Bible than we do. Maybe there's some that and I don't know that we want to get into a discussion on the canonicity of Esther, for example. That's a real, a true rabbit hole that we probably don't have time for. But, you know, the one of these long-standing, I I would call it a bone of contention between the Catholics and and the Protestants is how many books are in the true Bible, right? What do we do with what they would call the Deuterot canon and and what we would and I'm you know, for Catholic friends that might be listening to this, I'm gonna use the word apocrypha. I'm not trying to trigger you. It's just that that's a deep-seated that's what I've always started called growing up. So what do we do with the Deuteroc canon? And for for those who don't know, you maybe maybe people have heard that Catholics have more books in their Bible. The Catholic Bible has 73 books, and they ours has 66, ours being the most accepted Protestant Bibles have 66, 39 Old Testament, and then 27 in our in the New Testament. And the Deutero Canon are seven books that the Catholics include in their version of the Old Testament, and we do not, and the Orthodox on for their part, so the Eastern Church, they have between 76 and 79 books, depending on which branch of orthodoxy you're talking about. So they have even more, and and then some of the really older non-Chalcedonian churches, so the ones that kind of split off pretty early on in the history of the church, like the Ethiopian church, they have like up to 88, which is huge. And they're deeply convicted that their version of the Bible is the best and most authoritative, and everybody else's is wrong. And so this is a a long, I think one of the most foundational discourses in in in interfaith dialogues what is scripture, and how do we decide on what is God's word? And it's foundational because you have to, at least for Protestants, you have to believe that the scripture is true, and that's how God is speaking to you is is through the scripture. And so now I I suppose there are Protestant sects that also believe God can speak to you directly. And you know, the the Pentecostals will talk about hearing a new word from the Lord, which we're probably not gonna talk about.

Speaker 5:25

Yeah, and but it really shows that this is a vast subject, yeah. And it's also, however, not just merely academic. Yeah. Because we want to know, and the Westminster Confession is emphasizing right at the beginning that the authority of Scripture depends on God, who's the author of truth. And as you said, the Protestants have historically believed that the 66 books enumerated from Genesis to Revelation is the rule of faith in life. But as you have begun to show, not all traditions calling themselves Christian believe that. There is that those who put their trust in the Apocrypha, and then beyond that, as you were saying, the Ethiopian church with this very much how many?

Speaker 1 6:11

Up to 88. I think I'm pronouncing G'As is the language that these are written in. So and I think that's the biggest.

Speaker 6:19

There's also some Syriac ones that are pretty substantial, but so why is the Protestant Bible smaller than all these other historical churches?

Melito’s List And No Apocrypha

Speaker 1 6:30

Yeah. So it's a very complicated answer. Like it's a simple question, but the answer is very complicated. And and I think I I I'm gonna go back to give it an explanation of the early church history of how the Bible that we have today, where it came from, right? Because this is relevant regardless of how many books you think the Bible should contain. Where did we get this stuff from is an important question. And you know, we know that uh the Old Testament is the Jewish scripture, and by the time of Christ, there is some pretty good evidence to suggest that the Jews had essentially settled on their own canon. The first century Jewish historian Josephus, who's you know one of the historical sources that we have that attests to the existence of Christ, right? We would point to Josephus. So Josephus lived not long after Christ, he offers a list of 22 books which we would say seem to match with our 29 or our 39 book collection. So the some of them they're combining what today are multiple books for us into one or two books. But so for Josephus, at least, the Old Testament canon seems settled. He says in his letter against Apion that for although such long ages have now passed, no one has ventured neither to add or to remove or to alter a syllable. So, and we know that the Jewish people had what we would call the silent period, they're the intertestamental period, a period of about 400 years between the end of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New Testament, where there was not really any new prophetic revelation. And so it seems pretty clear from the historical evidence that we have that the earliest known lists of canonical Old Testament books, so the the earliest one comes to us from a guy named Eusebius, who is the great early church historian, and he reports a letter from a bishop of Sardis who was named Melito, and Melito says this, right? He's his his list of early, early OT canonical books. He says, When I came to the east and reached the place where these things were preached and done, and learned accurately the books of the Old Testament, I set down the facts and sent them to you. These are their names. The five books of Moses, so the Pentateuch. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, the son of Nun, Judges, Ruth, four books of the kingdom. Here he's talking about kings, two books of Chronicles, the Psalms of David, the Proverbs of Solomon and his wisdom, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs, Job, the prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, the twelve, in a single book. So he's condensing some of the minor prophets into a single book, which Josephus probably was as well. Daniel, Ezekiah, and Ezra. Ezekiel and Ezra.

Speaker 9:45

So what should be noted there is that early list does not include any of the apocryphal books.

Septuagint Origins And Additions

Jerome, Augustine, And The Vulgate

Reformers Revisit Hebrew Sources

Speaker 1 9:52

Yes. So the the uh what the Catholics would call the Deuterocanon is seven books, Tobit, Judith, first and second Maccabees, what they call uh wisdom, Sirac or Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, which includes the letter of Jeremiah, and then there are some additions to Esther and Daniel that we consider apocryphal, and the Catholics don't. There's this scene in Daniel where he's there's a dragon in the historian Daniel, where Bell and the Dragon, and the you know, I've had conversations with Catholic friends, and they're like, Well, my Bible has dragons in it. And I'm like, Well, my Bible has a dragon too, it's just at the very end. So, anyway, so another thing to note, and I I earlier said we don't want to get into a discussion of the canonicity of Esther because it's a quite a rabbit hole, but Melito of Sardis does not include Esther in his list of canonical books. So, and this the canonicity of Esther is not attested until certainly in the Greek church, until like well into the Middle Ages. So that's something that every Christian church has had some degree of evolution on over time, whether we consider Esther to be canonical or not. But so the point of this discussion is the earliest list we have doesn't include the Apocrypha, right? So how did it get into the Bible? And the short answer is that it was present in the version in the versions of the Septuagint, which were used to write the predominant medieval Bible, Jerome's masterwork, The Vulgate, right? So hopefully nobody who's listening to a probably what'll probably end up being a 45-minute long podcast about reformed theology is unfamiliar with the term Septuagint. But if if you were not familiar, that is the term we use for the translation of the Old Testament scriptures into Greek. So the Old Testament, originally written by Jews in Hebrew, and by the late BCs, pretty much nobody spoke Hebrew anymore after the Jewish diaspora, and and the lingua franca, the prevailing lingua franca, you know, the the language of commerce and science of the ancient Mediterranean world was Greek from about 400 BC to well after the birth of Christ. So there's a you know hundreds and hundreds of years where Greek is the language, sort of like English is today. And you know, eventually it was supplanted by Latin as the language of scholarship and and the church. But the Septuagint began, we think, as a translation of just the Jewish Torah. So the five first five books of the Bible, what we would call the Pentateuch, commissioned possibly, we think, this might be a mythical story, but it we think it was commissioned by a a Greek Egyptian king named Ptolemy II Philadelphus, about 250 to 300 years before Jesus was born. And so Ptolemy lived in from 285 to 246 BC. And he wanted to have the Jewish law, the Torah, translated into Greek for his very famous library in Alexandria. And so we know that the Pentateuch, at least, was translated into Greek by a committee of 70 plus scholars, and that's the Septuagint, that's the 70, right? So there were 70 guys who worked on translating this from their native language into Greek for Ptolemy, and that's where we get the term Septuagint from. But the parts that we today, Protestants today, have an issue with, namely the Apocrypha, were almost certainly later additions to that, because if you just do the math about the timing here, the Maccabean revolt that's described in the books of First and Second Maccabees, which are about a Jewish revolt where they overthrew Greek Greek rule and set up their own kings, very based, they managed to overthrow the Greek rulers of Judea at the time, which was a big deal. And but that revolt happened a hundred years after Ptolemy Philadelphus uh died. So we know that at least Maccabees could not have been translated any earlier than the 160s so BC. So and the Deuterocanon in general are books that come from the so-called intertestamental period or the Second Temple period, where Hellenic influences, Greek influences were very strong in Judaism. And so we know that the Septuagint is the product of a relatively fluid religious environment in which predominantly Greek, probably predominantly Greek-speaking Hellenized Jews, are writing mainly in Koine Greek, and a lot of what they were writing, uh, like this is my pet theory, like about Judith, for example. Judith might have been fanfic. Like what they were writing may have been, for lack of a better term, fanfiction in the style of earlier Hebrew scriptures. And we do have Hebrew versions, Hebrew manuscripts of some of the apocryphal texts, including Sirach and Tobit. So we know that it's at least possible, at least possible that those two had a Hebrew origin. But we don't we don't know if that's true of some of the other apocryphal books. Like they could very well have been later inventions, they could have been written after the death of Christ, some of them. And there's some evidence to suggest that some of them were. It's depending on how much weight you put on textual criticism, which for my part, not a ton, but you know, some people do. So unfortunately, the answer to the question of like who translated the non penetruc parts of the Bible into Greek, and when did they do it? We don't know. It's that the answer to that question is lost to us. And some scholars even would say that the story about Ptolemy Philadelphus commissioning the Septuagint is is is made up, right? So but the early church settled on the New Testament canon pretty early on, right? And that's why there's not really a debate about what constitutes the New Testament, right? We agree with the Catholics that it's what about you know which New Testament books are authoritative. And the Old Testament canon took longer to establish, I think, mainly because there's this question of, well, what do we do with the books from the intertestamental period? Shouldn't there be some record, some of them are historical, some of them are wisdom literature? Shouldn't there be something from that 400-year period that's in there to explain what was going on between the end of the Old Testament and the birth of Christ? And I think part of why it took so long to establish an Old Testament canon is that very few people in the first centuries of the church actually spoke or read Hebrew. It was it was not a not a common language even in Judea. So and it's it's worth mentioning that many important figures in the early church thought that these seven books, the Apocrypha, were of dubious value, right? So Eusebius, who I already mentioned, was one kind of the great historian of the early church, he wrote in his Historia Ecclesiastica, which is the first volume that we have of church history in the early 300s, that you know the Maccabees, at least is not part of the canon, the accepted canon. And Saint Athanasius, who was the great defender of the faith against Arianism, the Arian heresy, was another who rejected apocryphal books. He even described them as heretical, right? So there's also Saint Jerome, like by the time of Saint Jerome, who wrote what became the Vulgate, which we'll talk about in a bit, the Deuterocanon was included in copies of the Septuagint. So, but even Jerome looked at the Hebrew manuscripts used by Jews of his day, and so this was in the late 300s AD, and he saw that they didn't have the Deutero-canonical books in their own scriptures, and he thought this was weird, and there's evidence that Jerome personally probably felt like the Jewish manuscripts were more reliable than the Greek translations, and there was a debate, we know, between him and Saint Augustine, whom we as Protestants love, right? Like Protestants love Augustine, over which source was the appropriate source for Jerome, as he was in engaged in this task of translating the Bible into Latin, which at the time was the language people could read. And he thought that he should possibly use the Jewish scriptures to do his translation. And Augustine was like, No, you gotta do the Septuagint, that's divinely inspired, right? So Augustine, for what it's worth, strongly preferred the Septuagint. And we the answer to why did if Jerome had these objections to the Septuagint and its inclusion of these kind of shady books, why did he use the Septuagint? And the answer comes down to the question of authority, right? Jerome ceded to pressure from the Pope at the time, Pope Demesis I, to use the Septuagint and to include the Deuterocanon in the Latin translation of the Old Testament. And that's how they got into the Bible that everyone used from 405 AD until the 1500s, when Luther and some of the other reformers, for a thousand years, this was the Bible and it had all the Apocrypha in there. And then a thousand years later, 1100 years later really, Luther looks at it and says, hold on a second. None of this stuff is in the Jewish versions of the Old Testament, you know. And and so it's interesting, though, that even though it was in the Vulgate, there was some there was still debate about whether this stuff was legit up even into the into the late 500s and and early six hundreds. So there are popes from also, you know, not that long after Damasus I. Gregory, Gregory the Great is the Pope I'm referring to. He was Pope in the late 500s, so well after had finished writing the Vulgate. And he cast doubt on the authority of the Deuterocanon in a book that he wrote called The Morals. In in Book 19, chapter 16 of the Morals, he he says, We shall not transgress the due bounds of order if we produce a testimony upon this subject from books not indeed canonical, yet set forth for the edification of the church. And then he quotes a passage from the Maccabees. So he's saying, Maccabees isn't canonical, but there, you know, it's not it's not a bad read. So and the reformers even thought that, right? They thought this stuff is obviously not canonical, but like it's funny. Maybe not funny, but it's edifying, right? There's there's it's it's an interesting read. And so I'm indebted to Whitaker, one of the an 18 a guy from the 1800s who wrote this book called The Disputation on Holy Scripture. For a lot of this, right? He he references this statement by Gregory to suggest that even 600 years after the death of Christ, the church didn't fully consider the book of Maccabees to be canon. And and of course, this is this is a contradiction with what Pope Damasus allegedly said about 200 years prior. So the Catholic Catholics make a case that pretty much everyone in the quote unquote early church agreed that the apocryphal

Speaker 22:05

Aaron Powell And let's just catch the lister up on why this is important. Because maybe somebody's listening saying, Well, what does it matter? But it matters when you hear Jesus say in John 10 35 that the word of God came in the scripture cannot be broken.

Speaker 1 22:19

Yes.

Trent’s Response And Protestant Moves

Speaker 22:19

It matters when you read Romans 15 and it says, Whatever was written in the former days was written for our instruction. And so to be able to determine what is scripture and what is not is of great importance. And as you're saying, some of these apocryphal books, we're not saying that they're evil. We're not saying that they're not a good read. We're not saying you cannot read them. But we are clearly saying they are not the word of God. This is what the Westminster Confession is going to say. They're not being of divine inspiration, and they are no part of the canon of Scripture. And that's very important because the Scripture is the rule of faith and life. And it's the only way for us to know how to glorify God. So you're giving us a very accelerated version of church history. Yeah. How this has come about, but it's of great importance because we need to know what is the word of God and what is not.

Speaker 1 23:13

Yeah, I'm I'm speeding through a thousand years. It's kind of hard for us to grasp in modernity the tremendous breadth of time that is reflected by the medieval church, right? They they essentially had a stable church order for a thousand years, which is with how fast things move and change in our society, I think hard for us to wrap our minds around. But and also the the the idea of what is the canon, right, and what is scripture is really important to Protestants because that's where our sense of spiritual authority derives from. And it's important to Catholics because their spiritual authority derives from the question of the legitimacy of the church hierarchy. It's not as important to the Orthodox. Like, again, I don't want to put words in the mouths of Orthodox people. I'm not an expert on Eastern Orthodox Church history or theology per se. I'm I'm interested in it, and that's about it. But it doesn't seem like they are that concerned about this. Like they they would say that strictly defining the canon is not as big of a deal for them because the church itself is the primary living witness of the faith. They the Bible is the Bible because it agrees with the church and and not the other way around, which we we do not we have a doctrine of solar scriptura, right? Right. So every the the from our perspective, the scripture is the law of God, and that's we think that that's the scripture, we think that because we think the scripture says so. You know, we privilege what the Bible, what the book tells us above our own interpretations and uh and above tradition. And we'll get into this too. I mean, we we had Sisko and I agreed we were going to structure this uh with saving the questions for why is this still important until the end. Like I keep I'm jumping around here.

Speaker 25:09

Well, no, it's very important what you're saying there in terms of the Greek Orthodox seeing the church as the source of authority rather than being under the word of God, which would be what we stress, right? Yeah. And what we're we're saying that, and what the Protestants have said historically, is that these writings became canonical immediately when God inspired them to be his word. It didn't happen because any man stamped his approval upon it. Yes. This truth is from God.

Renewed Interest In Extra Books

Historical And Theological Problems

Speaker 1 25:40

Yes. And it's that's a key distinction in our mindset from the Roman Catholic mindset, which says that they again they it seems to me they didn't always think this way, but from you know, probably about certainly from the Council of Trent on the idea that here's what the Bible says, the church agrees, this is what the Bible says, and you know, the scripture and tradition are equal legitimate sources of authority. And that was their reaction to the Protestants casting doubt on the question of whether the church had legitimate authority. And so I have here also, I think it's worth talking about if for a thousand years, because Jerome put it in his Vulgate in 400, and you know, yeah, everybody had some thoughts that maybe it wasn't, you know, like should Esther be in there? Ah, it does really matter, I don't know. You know, for a thousand years nobody really questioned it. Why did the reformers question it in the 1500s when they started asking questions about, hmm, does the Pope have all the authority, right? And so so the Reformation cast doubt on the Deuterocan because part of what animated the Reformers was a desire out of, I think, suspicion of the Catholic, not even necessarily dogma, but like Catholic personal piety of the time, like the sale of indulgences. Luther looked at that and he was like, this is nonsense. You know, this is attested nowhere in scripture. And Luther had started reading Augustine's words. And the the Luther Luther was an Augustinian monk, and so the Augustinian approach was sort of out of step with what the Catholic teaching of that day was. And so Luther says to himself, I'm gonna go back. I'm gonna look at I'm gonna look at the the original languages of the Bible, which for the New Testament was Greek, and for the Old Testament was Hebrew. He wanted to see what the Hebrews had written. And so, and there were parts of the Old Testament that were written in Aramaic, too. It's worth mentioning. But at the at the time of the Reformation, the whole church in the West read the Latin Bible, which was Jerome's Bible, the Vulgate. And Latin in general was the clerical language for more than a thousand years. Even even Calvin's institutes were originally written in Latin. And he quickly translated them into French. But Latin replaced Greek as the language of scholarship in the period that we call late antiquity, from around the 300s to around the 700s. And so, you know, when people wanted to read the Bible, they read the Latin one. If if you could read, you were probably able to read Latin. And so when the Reformers decided to go back to the original languages in which the Bible was first written down, they wanted to read Hebrew texts, and so many of them looked at the Hebrew manuscripts available to them at the time, which are were the Masoretic texts, what we would call the Masoretic texts, and found that certain books that were part of the Vulgate and even were in the versions of the Septuagint that they had access to at that time were not present in the Jewish versions of the Old Testament. So this led them to questions about whether these deutero-canonical books were inspired. So if the Jews, whose history and prophecy was all held in the Old Testament, if they didn't consider these extra parts of the Bible to be authentic, then where had they come from? And I think that's a legitimate question. And it's, you know, now with the evidence that we have, when we can look back at the textual evidence that we've recovered in the time since the Reformation, it does appear that, like, you know, the earliest canonical lists from the earliest Christian bishop that we have doesn't include the Apocrypha. So where did they come from? And, you know, there's a I think it's easy looking back at it with the weight of time bearing down on us to sort of underestimate how much time there is between, you know, this this Molito of Sardis in Did I put a date down for this? I think it was in the in 150-ish. And Jerome writing the Latin Vulgate in 405-ish. Like 250 years, right, if my math is right. So a lot can be added in in 250 years. And Catholics like to act like 250 years is just a blink of an eye, which if your church has lasted for 2,000 years as they believe theirs has, maybe it is a blink of an eye to you. But like 250 years is several generations, and we know from even like Paul's letter to the Corinthians, like the it doesn't take that long for error to sneak into the church and for innovations and people adding on their own ideas and thoughts and extra stuff to a crate. Like 250 years is is a long time. And so But the the Catholic answer to that Protestant question of hey, guys, we don't think this is legit, and we're worried that you know the Jews don't have this stuff in their Bible, so where did it come from? They didn't like the question because it was an attack on the authority and the legitimacy of the of the church. And so they set their their the Deuterone canon in in the Catholic Bible at the Council of Trent, which was in the 1550s. And this was the major Catholic council that was trying to counter the rising threat of Protestantism. And the Council of Trent lasted like 20 years, by the way. So at Trent they determined for realsies this time that as far as they were concerned, the seven books of the Duro Canon were legitimate, they were authoritative, and they were the inspired word of God. And that's been their line ever since, right? So for 500 years. And Protestants obviously disagreed with that assessment, partially because they were sort of iced out of the Council of Trinity. The Protestants were invited, but they were not given a vote because the Catholics didn't think that they had a legitimate foot to stand on. And partially because the Protestants, like Luther and the other reformers, had legitimate historical and theological concerns about the Apocrypha. So Luther, for his part, in his German translation of the Bible, just moved them. He took them out of the OT and he put them in an appendix, and he he didn't call them part of the Old Testament. And Calvin considered the Apocrypha to be not a part of divine scripture, but he he still considered it possibly edifying. The Geneva Bible included the Apocrypha. So it's not like the Protestants immediately threw these out the window. It took a while, a couple hundred years, for the Protestants to stop even printing the Apocrypha in their Bibles, for our part. In the English-speaking Reformed tradition, our canon was sort of set in stone in the 1640s at the Westminster Assembly, where the divines, like you said earlier, Cisco, the divines said that the books commonly called Apocrypha not being of divine inspiration are no part of the canon of the scripture, right? And therefore are of no authority in the Church of God, nor to be any otherwise approved or made use of than other human writings, which is a sterner condemnation of the Apocrypha than, for example, Calvin or Luther was given. But even though the divines said that it's not canonical, English Bibles would still sometimes include the Apocrypha up until the 1820s. And it was actually the Scottish, based Scottish, who petitioned the British and Foreign Bible Society, which was the main Bible printers in England at the time, to st in Britain, I should say, to stop including the Apocrypha in their printed Bibles. And so from the 1820s on, their Protestant Bibles almost never include the Apocrypha. And you could like you can still buy copies of Protestant Bibles that have the Apocryphas, you know, but for the most part, they're not they're not included.

Speaker 34:36

Yeah, and there seems to be a renewed interest in some of these extra biblical books.

Speaker 1 34:41

Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 34:42

And there's particularly among some young people and students.

Did Jesus Quote The Apocrypha

Speaker 1 34:46

We were talking about this on Sunday, but like I actually see more interest in like the Enochic literature, which is which we would also call extra biblical. And we we agree with the Catholics that that's apocryphal, right? They don't they also don't think Enoch, they don't know what's going on with Enoch, and neither do we. And we're like, we're worried about this. This this could be demonic, right? So yeah, so but in general, there's an interest, and I think a renewed interest in the non-canonical, but as you said, extra-biblical writing from around the time of Christ. And some of it can be instructive and very interesting, but you know, we don't include this stuff in our Bibles as a result of you know, five centuries of not considering it to be the inspired word of God. And so we can get into some of the not just the historical reasons like why we don't do this, but the theological reasons. What are our what are our real reasons why we don't trust these books?

Speaker 35:48

Well, Drew, you're giving us an in-depth uh view, or you know, very broad view, but starting to go much deeper than most people do historically looking into this subject. Um, but we're constantly needing to be reminded that the reason for this is because without identifying what scripture is, we cannot properly distinguish truth from error. Yeah. That's what it comes down to. And and so we we have an obligation, and the and the Westminster divines recognize that obligation to distinguish truth from error.

The Real Issue: Authority Of Scripture

Speaker 1 36:19

Yeah, and so one of the I suppose I'll use the term accusations, one of the accusations that gets leveled at Protestants by Catholics is like, well, you guys got rid of the Apocrypha because it supports certain doctrines that Luther didn't like, right? Like there's verses in the Apocrypha that support purgatory, and you know, there's verses in the Apocrypha that support the idea of prayers for the dead helping people to escape eternal punishment. And I I I do think that's probably part of why Luther didn't like them, but the real reason why Luther questioned the legitimacy of these is that they they weren't attested in in the earliest sources, right? Or at least to his eyes, because there's a whole debate to be had over are the Masoretic texts better than the Septuagint. And we don't have time to get into that. But to Luther's eyes, it looked like this stuff snuck in under the radar and wasn't in the OG Jewish scriptures. And actually, it turns out Luther probably was right about that. So but there is also there's also a lot of like issues with the Apocrypha. There, like Maccabees particular, is in particular, is riddled with contradictions. So again, I owe a debt to Whitaker for this. Like I'm I I won't say I copy-pasted, but like I read through uh you know a portion of his of his disputation on the holy scriptures, and you know, he mentions at least just for one example in first and second Maccabees, which are depicting this revolt, like I mentioned, about the the there's these Jewish brothers who are revolting against a Greek ruler in uh Judea at the time who was named Antiochus Epiphanes. So Antiochus Epiphanes is the bad guy of the Maccabees. And there are in 1st and 2nd Maccabees, there are three separate and contradictory accounts of the death of Antiochus Epiphanes. So in in one, it says he dies in bed, and and in and then another account has him being beheaded by I believe by Judas Maccabius. So which is it, right? Was he did he die in bed or was he beheaded? So the apocryphal books also contradict the the canonical, from our perspective, canonical Old Testament books. There's some portions of Maccabees that contradict Jeremiah, right? So it says in, I think it's in 2nd Maccabees, that Jeremiah hid the sacred fire, the ark, the tabernacle, and the altar in inside, he spirited them away from Jerusalem before the Babylonians destroyed the city and hid them in a mountain. Mount Nebo is the mountain where he was supposedly hid the Ark of the Covenant. And but we know from Jeremiah that Jeremiah was in prison until the destruction of the city. It says so in Jeremiah chapters 37 and 38. And so he couldn't when would he have had the opportunity to take these things away and to hide them? And we also read in 2 Kings that after they took the city, the Babylonians burned the temple down and they carried off everything valuable that was in it. Now, admittedly, not to you know to give to give the Catholic Catholics their due, it doesn't list the Ark of the Covenant in the list of things the Babylonians stole. So, you know, I mean, I guess it's possible Jeremiah took it and hid it in a mountain, but if that's the case, you know, why hasn't it been recovered since the Ethiopians would say that it was recovered and that they have it. So the Ethiopians have have this longstanding claim that they have the Ark of the Covenant in their possession. And who knows if that's true, but they they're not showing it to anybody. That's not a good sign. Yeah, I mean it's you know, it it does I can understand like being as charitable as I as I as possible to the Ethiopians. If you had the Ark of the Covenant, I don't imagine you would show it to everybody. Like it does have the tendency to strike people down, and so anyway.

Speaker 40:34

So if we're looking at the counter contradictions and errors, and even the heresies that are in the Apocrypha, they have not stood the test of canonical truth. Yeah. And as you have said, uh there's historical problems with the inerrancy of some of these books. And the dates are really messy.

Speaker 1 40:55

Yeah.

Speaker 40:55

And then the the theological issues of promoting purgatory justification of faith, uh, plus works. You have strange notions of divine creation. Yes.

Speaker 1 41:07

This is this is the big one for me.

Speaker 41:09

In wisdom, speak more to that.

Speaker 1 41:11

There is a suggestion that the world was created out of pre-existing matter, right? So, which it says that God brought the world into being out of formless matter, and wisdom also contains references to the idea of the pre-existence of souls. So this is like rock solid Catholic and Protestant doctrine and orthodox doctrine, right? We all agree, God created the world ex nihilo, out of nothing. And so if you have a book that says, well, actually, God created the world out of some formless wood-like substance, you've got to be able to admit that that that can't possibly be right, you know. So, and there's more issues with the day, like Tobit claims to have been alive during Jeroboam's revolt and the Assyrian conquest, and those, you know, his lifespan is given as 158 years. Well, the Assyrian conquest and and Jeroboam's revolt happened more than 200 years apart. So Tobit can't have lived as long as he claims to. Anyway. But yeah, I I think that that's the main argument against the Apocrypha, is not necessarily that we just disagree with the Catholic interpretation of them as supportive of some of their doctrines. But we do, but that's not why we worry about whether they're the Word of God. Because they seem like shoddily written frauds. They seem like you know, apocryphal. They seem like stuff that's written by people after the fact to attempt to, you know, influence the minds of people, but not being from the sincere prophetic revelation of the Holy Spirit. And that's why we have a problem with the Apocrypha.

Speaker 43:03

And and I think we could also show that Jesus and the New Testament writers never once quoted the Apocrypha.

Speaker 1 43:09

Yes. There is a debate over this.

Speaker 43:11

But there's a few that there's the debate, but unlike the hundreds of quotes and references to the canonical books of the Old Testament that Jesus and the Apostles make.

Back To Westminster And Next Steps

Speaker 1 43:20

Yeah. There there is not a single so so pretty much one of the ways that Jesus or the uh the apostles, Paul particularly tags things when they're quoting from the Old Testament, they would say, It is written. So there's not a single reference to the Apocrypha that's you know tagged with that it is written statement. So there's there's also there's some some particularly Catholic scholars think that Jesus in particular is alluding to the Apocrypha. And it I think there's it's like Like it's not impossible that he would have been aware of the Apocrypha, right? If indeed the parts of the Apocrypha that that we have an issue with were written before his life, which there's some debate over, right? Like maybe the Apocrypha was written after the death of Christ. And and some of the New Testament Apocrypha, one of the one of the reasons why we don't consider it to be sincerely part of the New Testament canon is because it was clearly written later. But if these books were written between the time when the Septuagint was being translated into the Pentateuch was being translated into Greek and the life of Christ, it's possible Christ and Paul, being a very learned man, would have known of them. So but they never use that it is written language when talking about the Apocrypha. And that I think is telling, right? And there's also no, at least to my knowledge, and the research that I've done for this, there's no direct evidence that the apocryphal books were contained in the versions of the Septuagint that Jesus and his apostles would have been able to read. You know, almost all of the textual evidence we have is from the mid-400s AD. So from after, well after the death of Christ, uh and or well after the life of Christ, I should say. And the earliest versions of the Septuagint that we do have are very fragmented and they all it's it's all Pentateuch. So there's no there's no manuscripts from before Jesus' day that contain the Apocrypha in them. Now, this is arguing from a Lacuna in the historical record, right? So that doesn't mean that I'm right and the Catholics are wrong. I just think it's telling that you know they they don't have any evidence to suggest that Jesus was reading the Apocrypha. And but all this aside, like you keep trying to bring me back to the point here. The main issue is not really one of content, right? It's not that there's inconsistencies and contradictions in the Apocrypha, because people will level those accusations at the canonical books too. I I don't think that that that they're right, but people will say that about the gospels. You know, the gospels have contradictions. Okay. But the the issue that is the bone of contention between us and the Roman Catholic Church is one of authority. Because even the reformers thought that the Apocrypha might be at least edifying reading. And the so the main issue is one of authority of who gets to say what is God's word and whether God's word is supreme over human institutions or not. And so it's essentially an ecclesiological issue. So we should talk about what the reformed perspective is on scripture, what role does it play in our spiritual lives, and why we think it's it stands on its own.

Speaker 47:13

Yeah, and that's a good place for us to transition because we're attempting to explain, and Drew has given us this excellent overview of historically why the church uh should and has rejected the Apocrypha and any acceptance of it is erroneous. And it's because we're going back to the confession that says that the Holy Scripture, the Word of God written, is contained in all the books of the Old and New Testament, uh, those sixty-six books, which are given by inspiration of God to be the rule of faith and life. And so who is an authority and who are we to listen to? I hope you'll join us as we continue this conversation with Drew and myself and gain further insight into that important question. Thank you for listening.