May/June 2003 Religion & Theology Features

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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.

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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 ...