Is the Apocrypha Scripture?

“Why do you guys reject certain books of Scripture?”

That was a loaded question if I ever heard one, but still my Catholic friend had a good question. Why do we Protestants not accept some of the books that they have in their Bible?

The books in question were all written by Jews in what is known as the “inter-testamental” period (430 BC-AD 40). Some of these books can be helpful for understanding the history during this time. Other books are entertaining stories. Some sound like typical biblical Wisdom texts like the Psalms or Proverbs.

So why don’t we accept them as Scripture? There are 5 main reasons, but first I think its important to understand a fundamental difference in the way Roman Catholics view the formation of the canon and the way we Protestants view the formation of the canon.

For Protestants the canon is not an authorized collection of writings (in that the church conferred authority or approval upon a list of books). Rather, the canon is a collection of authoritative writings. In other words something isn’t Scripture because the Church says it is. Something is Scripture because God wrote it. In forming the canon folks weren’t giving authority to the Scriptures—they were just acknowledging the fingerprint of God.

So for Protestants we are able to say we don’t believe these works are Scripture because we don’t believe they are God-breathed. But why? Here are 5 reasons that have been given:

1. The Apocrypha does not claim for itself the same kind of authority as the OT. If this was the only argument we had it’d be on shaky grounds. There are other works in the OT (like Esther) that doesn’t seem to claim for itself the same kind of authority. So this one isn’t definitive.
2. The Jewish people did not regard the Apocrypha as God’s words. This to me is a nail in the coffin. The very ones who wrote the books did not consider them to be on the same plane with the God-breathed Scriptures.
3. It was never cited by Jesus or the NT authors, whereas almost every OT book is cited by the NT. If one considers the way that Jesus referred to the Scriptures on the Road to Emmaus one would notice that he left off these particular books.  
4. It contains teaching inconsistent with the rest of Scripture (praying for the dead, etc.) and clear factual errors. Again if this was the only argument we had then it wouldn’t be decisive. It sounds as if one is saying, “We don’t consider this Scripture because we don’t like what it says”. But when considered with the other arguments this one is helpful.
5. The acceptance of the Apocrypha was slow, irregular, and unfortunate. It was not accepted by the Roman Catholic church until the Council of Trent in 1546—and this may have had more to do with a reaction against Protestantism than anything else. History tells us that we probably have the Apocrypha alongside the OT and NT because of St. Jerome. He placed it in his Latin Vulgate. He was unsure of whether to accept it and leaned towards not including it—but because he felt that it was somewhat beneficial he put it in the Vulgate. So, over the years it just kind of slipped in alongside the others, but remained disputed until the Protestants firmly rejected it and the Roman Catholics warmly embraced it.

It is also important to keep in mind that these aren’t the same books as the Gnostic books like The Gospel of Thomas. Many times when we are discussing this we confuse the NT Apocrypha with the Apocryphal books that Roman Catholics accept. Roman Catholics do not accept the NT Apocrypha as legitimate Scripture. There is a massive difference between the two.

But for us Protestants we don’t accept either—because we don’t believe they contain the fingerprint of God.