Today we are going to look at the canonical and the apocrypha books. How did we come to the sixty-six books of the Bible? What does it mean that they are canonical? And what are the apocrypha? Many of us have never read them. Are those books at all useful? Why do some Bibles have the Apocrypha and others don’t? These are just some of the questions we hope to answer in this evening worship services. The history of our faith is so important because it is God’s History. This week we are going to look specifically at the history and formation of the canon, and next week we will see more what it is for.
Before we begin, just a clarification of terms. The word Canon means “rule” or “regulation”, and Apocrypha means “things that are hidden.” The Canon refers to the books of the Bible that we have, and the Apocrypha refers to the those books that are not part of the inspired Word, but still useful to a an extent.
The Canon that is God’s Word
- History
- The Old Testament
- The New Testament
History
So how did the canon come to be. Was it just decided upon one day at a church council as many will claim? That a few people just sat down one day and decided what the Bible would be? Was there discussion about it? Well let’s look at it. But up front I will tell you people didn’t decide what books would be in, but they were convicted by the Word that it was from God. Second there was very little discussion as to which books belonged to the Scriptures and which didn’t. Only a few books were questioned. So how did the Canon of scripture come to be? Well let’s look at it. Here I would like to split it between the Old and New Testaments. First then the Old testament.
Old Testament
First, when we speak about the Old Testament, we do not mean that is old in the sense that it is outdated, but in the sense that it is older than the NT. The Old Testament contains the gospel albeit it not in its fulness and is necessary in order to understand the new. The Old Testament grew as history went on. From the five books of Moses, to Joshua, and Judges to 1 and 2 Samuel. Then the prophets added to the writing. The last of the writings in the Old Testament was completed probably no later then 420 BC. Almost all the books in the OT were accepted as Gods word almost immediately or shortly after they were written. We do not have evidence of any real disagreement among the Jewish people as to what made up their Bible. Their Bible is our Bible.
That did not mean that history stopped in the year 420 BC, or that God stopped working in history. It did not even mean that other books were not written. In fact, there is much writing during these years, especially good historical accounts of what Israel endured during these times. But these books were never accepted as inspired. And in fact many of them do not even make that claim.
Again, we have to make that distinction: Gods people never decided which books were inspired and which were not, they accept those books were inspired. Many of the OT writers were aware that they were writing the very words of God. The prophets throughout say, “Thus says the LORD.” It was not just Gods ideas they were writing but Gods Words! And this is what sets the Canon and the apocrypha books miles apart. One is written by God the others by man.
These books written by man are we call the Apocrypha books. We read about them in article 6 of the Belgic confession, “3 and 4 Esdras, Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, additions to Esther, the Prayer of Azariah and the song of the Three young men in the furnace, Susannah, Bel and the Dragon, the Prayer of Manasseh, and 1 and 2 Maccabees.”
These books were not accepted as inspired, and neither do most of them claim to be. In fact, in the book of Maccabees we read that the prophetic ministry had ceased. (1 Macc 4:45-46, 9:27, 14:41). Even thought this book is in the Roman Catholic Bible, it itself claims not to be inspired, the opposite of what they claim.
The Historian Josephus who lived around the time of Jesus, clearly says these books were “not deemed worthy of equal credit with earlier records.” Even ancient Jewish teachings states that, “After the prophets Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi had died, the Holy Spirit departed from Israel.” So we have generally speaking an great consensus when it comes to the OT at least among the 1st century Jews. To this the New Testament also adds its witness.
In the new testament we have no argument at all between Jesus and his disciples and the Jewish leaders and the people about the extent of the Old Testament Canon. The New Testament, according to one count, quotes the OT 295 times as authoritative, but not once do they quote from any of the books of the Apocrypha as authoritative. This shows they saw the old testament as the Word of God.
The apocrypha were never accepted by the Jews as Jewish scripture. Early Christian evidence is against accepting the Apocrypha as scripture, and Jesus and his disciples did not seem to accept them.
So why do we have the Apocrypha? Because it is very useful in understanding that time, and the early church used it as a resource. But just because they used these books as resources does not mean they thought they were scripture. It is similar today. A preacher uses other books and may even put a quote from a theologian in his sermon but that does not make it scripture. One of the earliest “canons” we see he earliest Christian writing is from 170 where the writer lists none of the Apocrypha as scripture
So where is the controversy? Why do we have two articles on this in the Belgic confession – one on the canonical and one on the apocrypha our of 37 articles? Because as history went along the use of the apocrypha increased all the way up to the reformation. And in 1546 in the middle of the reformation that the Catholic Church made this officially part of the Canon.
This Council was the response of the Roman Catholic Church to the teachings of Martin Luther and the rapidly spreading Protestant Reformation, and the books of the Apocrypha contain support for the Catholic teaching of prayers for the dead and justification by faith plus works, not by faith alone.
By making this decision the Roman Catholic church shows how different their understanding fo the formation of scripture was from the protestant understanding. The Catholic Church believed that the church said what was scripture, was rather then receiving as the word as scripture. By saying in 1546 that the Apocrypha was Scripture, Roman Catholics would hold that the church has the authority to say if a literary work is “Scripture,” while Protestants have held that the church cannot make something to be Scripture, but can only recognize what God has already caused to be written as his own words.
For example, an investigator can recognize counterfeit money as counterfeit and can recognize genuine money as genuine, but he cannot make counterfeit money to be genuine, nor can any declaration by any number of police make counterfeit money to be something it is not. Only the official treasury of a nation can make money that is real money; similarly, only God can make words to be his very words and worthy of inclusion in Scripture. The church does make human words, Gods word.
Thus the writings of the OT Apocrypha should not be regarded as part of Scripture: (1) they do not claim for themselves the same kind of authority as the Old Testament writings; (2) they were not regarded as God’s words by the Jewish people who wrote and read them; (3) they were not considered to be Scripture by Jesus or the New Testament authors; and (4) they contain teachings inconsistent with the rest of the Bible.
We must conclude that they are merely human words, not God-breathed words like the words of Scripture. They do have value for historical and linguistic research, and they contain a number of helpful stories about the courage and faith of many Jews during the period after the Old Testament ends, but they have never been part of the Old Testament canon, and they should not be thought of as part of the Bible. Therefore, they have no binding authority for the thought or life of Christians today.
The New Testament
How did we receive the new testament writings, and not other writings in the Bible. Let me give you ten quick reasons. The Books are the earliest books that we possess all were written within the first century, by an apostle, or by someone who knew them well. This was the foundation of the apostolic minister. The latest possible date for the last book is Revelation which could be dated in the mid 90’s although many date it earlier. This does not mean that just because something was written in the 1st century it became scripture. But it does mean it was all during the time of the apostles. With the dying of the last apostle John was also the end of the Writings of Scripture.
The Apocrypha books for the New Testament were all written after the 1st century. They were all written in the second century or later.
Now many might ask also as they did with the Old Testament, didn’t the church council decide which books should be in and which books should be out? No, many of these books were considered scripture at the time that they were written. Just think of 2 Pet 3:15-16 where Peter refers to Paul’s letters “Scripture” on the same level with the books of the Old Testament. Peter mentions multiple letters of Paul, indicating that he was aware of some sort of collection. And, even more importantly, he assumes his audience is aware of this collection as well. There is no indication that the scriptural status of Paul’s letters is a new or novel idea—Peter mentions it quite casually and naturally.
Or 1 Tim 5:18 which says: “For the Scripture says, ‘You shall not muzzle the ox while it treads out the grain’ and ‘the laborer deserves his wages.’” While the first quote comes from Deut 25:4, the latter quote is an exact match with Luke 10:7. Placing Luke on the same page as Moses in terms of authority. This is all in the first century. No church council decided that it was God-breathed, but the church cimply accepted it as such.
These books were not decided later, in facr we have a document that is dated to around 180 called the Muratorian Canon. This is one of the earliest compilations of NT scripture we have and it already had 22 of the 27 books of the NT. This means that at a remarkably early point (end of the second century), the central core of the New Testament canon was already established and in place. If there was a core canon from an early time period, then there are two implications we can draw from this. First, this means that most of the debates and disagreements about canonical books in early Christianity only concerned a handful of books. Books like 3 John, James, 2 Peter and so on. Early Christianity was not a wide open where everyone would write something and hope it would get into the Bible. It was not as if there was no agreement on much of anything. Instead there was an agreed-upon core that no one really disputed.
Finally before we conclude, this does not mean it was always a nice smooth process, God works through history, in the messiness of human struggles and through human reason, as they pray and struggle with God in the fight for truth. There were books that were disagreed upon. Books like James or 2 Peter. But that Should not bother us at all.
The canon was not given to us on golden tablets by an angel from heaven (as claimed for the Book of Mormon). God, for his own providential reasons, chose to deliver the canon through normal historical circumstances. And historical circumstances are not always smooth. Those who disagreed were in the minority, and in most cases, there was complete consensus.
Which brings us to our conclusion and aims us toward our next sermon on article 5 of the Belgic confession. Nothing in this sermon will ultimately convince you that the Bible is the Word of God. It is God and God alone that convicts. It is the very words themselves that speak of their own divine origin. It is they that illumine us, and assure us of their divine origin so that we are brought to tears of repentance, or the heights of joy as we come to know our God through them. It is the Holy Spirit himself that witnesses to the truth of these words. It is the voice of God that can be heard in these books, unlike any others.
We along with the early church fathers believe that ultimately that canonical books are self-authenticating. As Jesus said in John 10:27: “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.”
As one church father said, “it is certain that in the very act of reading and diligently studying them his mind and feelings will be touched by a divine breath and he will recognize the words he is reading are not utterances of man but the language of God.”
The shape of our New Testament canon was not determined by a vote or by a council, but by a broad and ancient consensus. Here we can agree with skeptic, Bart Ehrman, “The canon of the New Testament was ratified by widespread consensus rather than by official proclamation.” Or as another scholar says, “The canon is not just a man-made construct. It was not the result of a power play brokered by rich cultural elites in some smoke filled room. It was the result of many years of God’s people reading, using, and responding to these books.”
In the end, we can certainly acknowledge that humans played a role in the canonical process. But, not the role that is so commonly attributed to them. Humans did not determine the canon, they responded to it. In this sense, we can say that the canon really chose itself. God gave it to us, and the church received it as such throughout the centuries. So that in them we might find the words of eternal life which is Bound up in the person of Jesus Christ – the word of Life!
Yes that is why it is important that we know what is the Bible and what is not. So we spend our time wisely. This is the word of life. Read it. it has been given to you not by the church, but by God. The church has received and passes it on to every generation. These words are alive and active, in a very real sense they speak for themselves, they need no one to speak for them. So we must submit to them, and hear them, and obey them. Behold all men are like grass, and all there glory is like the flow of the field. The grass fades, the flowers wither, but the word of our God endures forever.
Amen.