What about the apocryphal books?

Open a Roman Catholic Bible beside a Protestant one and you will find seven books in the first that are not in the second — Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, and 1 and 2 Maccabees. There is more than that. Esther and Daniel appear in both, but the Catholic versions are longer, carrying material a Protestant Bible does not print. These writings are known as the Apocrypha, from a Greek word meaning hidden or concealed.

Roman Catholics prefer the term deuterocanonical, “of the second canon,” by which they mean these books were recognised later or after dispute, not that they are Scripture of a lower grade. They receive them as the word of God. Protestants do not. Behind the disagreement stands a prior question that settles it: God gave the Old Testament to the Jewish people, and it is theirs that decides what belongs in it.

Paul answers that question directly when he lists what God gave the Jewish people.

Romans 3:1–2 (NKJV)

What advantage then has the Jew, or what is the profit of circumcision? Much in every way! Chiefly because to them were committed the oracles of God.

God did not scatter His words and leave them to be sorted out later by whoever came along. He committed them to one people, and that people knew what He had given them. The Apocrypha was never part of it. The Hebrew Scriptures have never contained these books, and the community that received, guarded, copied and died for the oracles of God did not treat them as the oracles of God. That is the argument. Everything that follows shows how consistently the evidence confirms it.

Josephus, a Jewish historian writing at the end of the first century, described his nation's Scriptures as twenty-two books — the same material as your thirty-nine on the standard reckoning, differently divided, since Ruth was joined to Judges and Lamentations to Jeremiah. He then said something more useful still. From the reign of Artaxerxes onward, he wrote, later works had been produced but were not given equal credit, because the exact succession of the prophets had failed. Josephus was not defending a Protestant position; he wrote fifteen centuries before there was one. He was reporting what his own people believed about their own Bible, and what they believed leaves these books outside it. This is the testimony of history rather than of Scripture and should be weighed as such — but on a question about what the Jewish people received, a first-century Jewish witness is precisely the right sort of evidence.

The apocryphal books say the same about themselves, which is the most telling evidence of all. The author of 1 Maccabees records repeatedly that no prophet was to be found in Israel in his day. Notice what that admission costs him. A writer who tells you plainly that no prophet was speaking in Israel has ruled himself out. He cannot be delivering the word of God in a book that says God is not currently giving it. The writer of 2 Maccabees ends his book by apologising for his own limitations as an author and hoping the work is good enough — a sentence no prophet in Scripture ever felt the need to write. And the translator of Ecclesiasticus opens by praising the Law, the Prophets and the other books of the fathers, and then sets his grandfather's work beside them as something different in kind. These writings do not present themselves as the word of God. They present themselves as good Jewish work produced in a period when the word of God had gone quiet.

Jesus and His apostles treated them accordingly. They quoted the Old Testament constantly, from Genesis to the Prophets, introducing it with “it is written” and settling disputes by it. Not once do they quote an apocryphal book as Scripture. A Catholic will reply that Hebrews 11:35 appears to allude to the martyrdoms recorded in 2 Maccabees, and that is a fair observation — but an allusion is not an endorsement. What is absent from the New Testament is not familiarity with these writings. What is absent is any occasion on which an apostle treats one of them as God's word.

Here the strongest Catholic reply deserves a hearing. The Greek translation of the Old Testament used by Jewish communities outside Palestine, and quoted often by the New Testament writers, circulated alongside these books; and among the Dead Sea Scrolls the community at Qumran kept copies of Tobit and Ecclesiasticus. Does that not show they were received as Scripture? It does not, and the reason is worth understanding. A library is not a canon. Qumran held a great deal of literature no one has ever claimed was inspired.

The Greek Old Testament needs explaining, because the name misleads. It was not a book. Nobody in the first century could take one down and look at the contents page, because there was no contents page and no single volume. It was a collection of separate scrolls, translated at different times by different hands, and no two collections were the same. A synagogue in Alexandria owned whatever scrolls it had acquired. So when we say Tobit was “in the Septuagint,” all that means is that somebody, somewhere, owned a Greek copy of Tobit alongside his Greek copies of Genesis and Isaiah.

The first actual lists come three hundred years later, from Christian scribes who bound the scrolls they had into single volumes. Those men were doing something useful, but they were not reporting what Israel had received centuries before. They were writing down what was on their own shelves.

So the case for these books rests on Christian book collections, not on Jewish reception. That is not a small correction. It means whatever was in a fourth-century scribe's cupboard tells us nothing about what God handed to Israel.

The books themselves also carry mistakes of a kind the Old Testament does not. Judith opens by placing Nebuchadnezzar on the throne of Assyria, reigning in Nineveh — but Nebuchadnezzar ruled Babylon, and Nineveh had been destroyed years before he came to the throne. Roman Catholic scholars generally answer that the error is deliberate, that Judith was written as a story with a moral rather than as history, and that a parable is not disproved by its setting. A writer who signals from his first sentence that he is not recording what happened may be doing something honourable, but he is not doing what Moses, Samuel and Luke were doing. Tobit has troubles of another sort, calling Sennacherib the son of Shalmaneser when he was the son of Sargon II, and sending travellers on journeys the map will not allow. These are not the difficulties of a careful writer working from awkward sources. They are the mistakes of men writing about a world they had never seen — wrong king, wrong empire, wrong century, wrong road — the kind of thing that happens when a story is set in a past the author knows only by hearsay. The men who wrote the Old Testament were describing the world they lived in. God does not need a research library to say what happened.

The early church was divided about these books, and the division ran along a revealing line. In the Greek-speaking East, where the Hebrew tradition was better known, the great teachers repeatedly distinguished them from Scripture proper — listing a canon of twenty-two books to match the Hebrew and assigning the rest to a second rank, useful for instructing new converts but not for settling doctrine.

In the Latin West they were used more freely, and regional councils in North Africa listed them among the Scriptures. But the man best placed to judge stood with the East. Jerome translated the Bible into the Latin that Western Christendom would read for the next thousand years, and unlike his contemporaries he learned Hebrew and worked from the Hebrew text. He knew this material better than anyone alive. Writing around AD 400, he drew the line plainly: the church may read Judith, Tobit and the Maccabees for the good of the people, but not to settle doctrine. The man who produced the Bible in which these books were afterwards carried did not believe they were Scripture.

Rome's binding answer came at the Council of Trent in April 1546. Trent declared the disputed books canonical and pronounced a curse on anyone who refused to receive them. Rome maintains that this settled what the church had long held rather than adding anything new, and as an account of how the books travelled in the Latin Bible that is fair enough.

The timing is the difficulty. Trent was the council called to answer the Reformation, and among the doctrines the Reformers were attacking were purgatory and prayers for the dead — teachings with no support anywhere in the Hebrew Scriptures, and clear support in 2 Maccabees. The book that settled the argument was declared Scripture by the men who needed it to. And they were the wrong men to decide.

Underneath the historical argument lies a doctrinal one, and it is the reason this is not a dispute about the length of a book list. 2 Maccabees records an offering made so that the dead might be delivered from their sin. Nothing in the Old Testament God gave to Israel teaches that anything can be done for a man after he has died, and nothing in the New Testament restores the idea. It appears in this book and nowhere in the Scriptures on either side of it. That is the shape of the problem. Where the apocryphal books add to what God has said, they add at exactly the point where sinners are told there is something more to be done about sin — and there is not. Christ has finished what was required.