But my answer to this more broadly is; so what?
All of these ancient books should be read,
because the New Testament writers were familiar with them and used them.
Heidi asks,
Question: I have heard some Catholic scholars suggesting that Martin Luther
removed the apocryphal books from the canon,
but they were originally included. Is this correct?
Well, it's not really...
This is a difficult question because the question has to be asked, what was the canon?
And you have two sources.
The best thing to do is get my course here on how we got the Bible.
I'll see if I can condense this.
What you're talking about specifically here is the Old Testament.
That's what the question is concerning,
whether you realize that or not. That's what it is concerning.
We're not talking about New Testament books here.
We're talking about Old Testament and "extra" Old Testament books.
So the Jewish canon was composed of those books that could be witnessed in Hebrew.
And there was a certain number of them, depending on how they're divided,
in English Bibles they're divided into 39 books.
In Hebrew Bible, it's less than that.
But you get the same set of books that that would be in the Protestant canon.
Martin Luther's canon would align with the Jewish canon.
And the reason it is because Luther went back to the Jewish litmus test
of: was the book witnessed in Hebrew?
Now, in the meantime, you have the Septuagint, which is a translation
of the Hebrew Bible that was done a couple hundred years before Jesus.
And this is the Bible of the earliest church, because the early church spoke Greek,
not Hebrew.
Now that Bible in Greek, the Old Testament in Greek, contains these extra books.
So in one sense, if the Catholics want to say; «what was the Bible
that the earliest church used, and we're going to consider that the canon»,
then you have to include those other books,
because the Septuagint was the Bible of the early church.
The Protestants said, «we're going to go back to the Jewish way of looking at this,
the Jewish way of looking at the Hebrew Bible:
What were the books witnessed originally in Hebrew?
That is our canon.»
And that matches the English Bibles list that we use today as Protestants.
Catholics still have the extra book, because they're taking the canon question
back to the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament
that was the Bible of the early church, the earliest church,
and they're saying that's what we should consider authoritative.
So that simple decision; do we go with what's witnessed in Hebrew
or do we go with the Septuagint,
is why we have these differences when it comes to the Old Testament.
So that's the answer as to why there exists a difference.
For me, I think it's wise to go with the Jewish community's own perspective
of their Old Testament and restrict it to what is witnessed in Hebrew.
I'm going with their community, which is why I accept the books that I accept
as canonical and the other ones I don't accept as canonical.
But my answer to this, more broadly is; so what?
All of these ancient books should be read,
because the New Testament writers were familiar with them and used them.
You will find allusions and quotations to "non-biblical material"
in the New Testament from these other books.
You just will.
And there are a whole list of them.
In my first reader's commentary in the Book of Enoch,
there's an appendix in that book that lists all of them,
and it's a substantial list of places in the New Testament
where books of the Pseudepigrapha are alluded to.
And you get the same thing going with apocryphal books,
what the Protestants call apocryphal books of the Old Testament,
these other books that were in the Septuagint.
They do get alluded to, maybe not quoted, with one or two exceptions
in the New Testament. But the New Testament writers do allude to them,
and their content aligns in many cases quite substantially
with the New Testament, so that at the very least we ought to be reading them
to become better readers of our New Testament,
and better readers of our Old Testament as well,
and not worry so much about who guesses right on the Old Testament canon debate,
because that's what it is. It's a guess. Which side to go with?
Again, that's where I land, with my choice of the Jewish view,
but I think we ought to be reading that other stuff as well.