"Apocrypha"

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zdf21 said:
The word apocrypha means,“empty.” The reason Protestants do not accept the apocrypha as the inspired word of God is because ancient Jews did not either, as well as Jews today. When the OT was translated into Greek from Hebrew the apocrypha was translated after the OT book Malachai. Malachai from what we know from OT scripture was the last prophet in Israel before Jesus Christ would appear on the scene around 400 years later.
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catholicdefense.blogspot.com/2009/04/apocrypha-or-deuterocanon.html#uds-search-results

Hmmm…No. The reason you cited was just an afterthought. This was proposed only in 1871…The “Council” is just a hypothesis put forward in 1871 by Heinrich Graetz, to explain how the Jews ended up with a single canon. As a hypothesis, it’s a very weak one. There are no early sources which speak of a Council at Jamnia. You could just as easily claim that there was a Council in Beijing. For whatever it’s worth, the majority of scholars have finally realized the obvious: there’s no reason to believe that the Council existed.

catholicdefense.blogspot.com/2011/07/can-protestants-rely-upon-council-of.html

The reality is…protestant and catholic Bibles almost had the same books…thought arranged differently.

It was the action of a Bible society that caused the separation of Catholic and protestant Bibles:

handsonapologetics.com/King_James_Bible.htm

Now You Read Them, Now You Don’t…
Those who viewed the “Apocrypha” as somehow being the last vestige of “popery” pressed for the Apocrypha appendix and its cross-references to be removed altogether from the Bible. In 1615, George Abbott, the Archbishop of Canterbury, went so far as to employ the power of law to censure any publisher who did not produce the Bible in its entirety (i.e. including the “Apocrypha”) as prescribed by the Thirty-nine Articles. However, anti-Catholic hatred and the obvious financial advantages of printing smaller Protestant Bibles began to win out against the traditionalists who wanted the Bible in the form that was given in all previous Protestant translations up until that point (in the form of Luther’s Bible - with the Apocrypha between the Old and New Testaments). The “Apocrypha” remained in the King James Bible through the 1626, 1629, 1630, and the 1633 editions. By 1632, public opinion began to decidedly turn against the “bigger” Protestant Bibles. Of the 227 printings of the Bible between 1632 and 1826, about 40% of Protestant Bibles contained the “Apocrypha.” The Apocrypha Controversy of the early 1800’s enabled English Bible Societies to flood the bible-buying market with Apocrypha-less Protestant Bibles and in 1885 the “Apocrypha” was officially removed with the advent of the Revised Standard Version, which replaced the King James Version.
It is hard to pin point the exact date where the King James Bible no longer contained the “Apocrypha.” It is clear that later editions of the KJV removed the “Apocrypha” appendix, but they continued to include cross-references to the “Apocrypha” until they too (like the Geneva Bible) were removed as well. Why were they removed? Was it do to over-crowded margins? The Anglican scholar William H. Daubney points out the obvious:
“These objectionable omissions [of the cross-references] were made after the custom arose of publishing Bibles without the Apocrypha. These apparently profess to be what they are not, entire copies of the Authorized Version … Plainly, the references to the Apocrypha told an inconvenient tale of the use which the Church intended should be made of it; so, either from dissenting influence without, or from prejudice within the Church, these references disappeared from the margin.” [The Use of the Apocrypha In the Christian Church (London: C. J. Clay and Sons, 1900), 17]
What was the inconvenient tale these cross-references told? They showed that the so-called Apocrypha actually plays a much greater role that most modern Protestants are willing to admit. Moreover, the cross-references showed that the church believed that knowledge of the so-called “Apocrypha” and their use in the New Testament benefited Christians who wished to understand the Bible. Sadly today, many Protestants use the King James Bible have been handed on to them in an unaltered and uncompromised form. The reality is that its contents had undergone several substantial changes beginning with Martin Luther’s gathering together the Deuterocanon and placing it in an “Apocrypha” appendix and later when that appendix (and its cross-references) were removed altogether from Protestant Bibles.
 
zdf21 said:
The word apocrypha means,“empty.” The reason Protestants do not accept the apocrypha as the inspired word of God is because ancient Jews did not either, as well as Jews today. When the OT was translated into Greek from Hebrew the apocrypha was translated after the OT book Malachai. Malachai from what we know from OT scripture was the last prophet in Israel before Jesus Christ would appear on the scene around 400 years later.
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There is much more to this than you may think. You will see that the remnant of Hebrew-speaking Jews may not have accepted or even had these books, since many of the Deuterocanonical books were written by Greek-speaking Jews in the dispersion.

A few points that you may not have considered:
  1. The Christian Church used these books since day 1.
  2. The 39 book canon of OT is the canon of the Pharisees, made final after their rejection of Jesus.
  3. Jesus teaches us that the Law and the Prophets prophesied until John the Baptist. Our Lord never declared that Malachi was the final prophet - Pharisees did. If you are Christian, John the Baptist is the final OT prophet, actually.
  4. Jesus condemned the Pharisees seven-fold, which as we know, is a complete and total condemnation. Would Jesus use the canon of the Pharisees?
  5. The Church, as Paul went to in Acts 15, is the only authority on earth with the power to test the Christian canon. That Church declared the books canonical.
  6. 1,500 years later, a small group of rebellious men declared them not to be inspired.
  7. Saint Jerome, you say? OK, but then you must also agree with Jerome that the One Church was the final authority on all scriptural matters, as well as the Eucharist, the Priesthood, the veneration of Mary and all of his other views.
 
Compare Romans 1:18-31 with Wisdom of Solomon 13:1-10,14:22-31 to see a strong example of how Paul writing to the church in Rome relied on Wisdom of Solomon.

Read Wisdom chapter two for strong prophecies of Christ.

Martin Luther threw them out because he didn’t like what they taught just like he tried, and failed, to shorten the NT canon as well.
 
In addition to several other books, the Pharisees rejected the books of 1 & 2 Maccabees, which document the overthrow of the oppressive and murderous Seleucid Empire, the restoration of the practice of Judaism to Israel, and the purification and rededication of the temple in what is known to this day as Hanukkah. Those books also detail not only the restoration of the Mosaic Covenant to Israel in time for Christ to be born under it in order to fulfill it, but also speak of the resurrection to eternal life.

If God did not inspire those incidents to occur, and those books to be written in time for His Son, then just who did?
 
zdf21 said:
The word apocrypha means,“empty.” The reason Protestants do not accept the apocrypha as the inspired word of God is because ancient Jews did not either, as well as Jews today. When the OT was translated into Greek from Hebrew the apocrypha was translated after the OT book Malachai. Malachai from what we know from OT scripture was the last prophet in Israel before Jesus Christ would appear on the scene around 400 years later.
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Welcome. I know you are a sincere believer in Christ. I know I won’t change your mind, I was once baptist like you and I challege you to at least ponder the following and read the link.

Paul, Matthew and Christ were Jewish.

Have you taken the time to read and compare these books with the new testament ? Are you aware of the prophecies of Christ in Wisdom 2 and that Christ himself paraphrased from this book ? Are you aware of how much Paul used Wisdom of Solomon when he wrote Romans 1 ? This knowledge was known to all readers of the KJV bible from the earliest versions until the mid 1800s when the books and their cross references removed from where they had been moved.

beyond-m42.net/deutero/articles/

Take a look at the bit about Christ and Matthew, along with Paul and Romans, and the 1611 KJV Cross References link in sidebar.

There are other sources online for duetero/nt parallels, but I never found the full set of 1611 KJV cross references, so I keyed them in here so others can read them.

Like I said we probably won’t reach agreement, but I suspect you will at least learn something about the familiarity of Christ and the NT authors with these books.
 
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