I was reading a Christian apologetics website that claimed that the Apocrypha is not inspired because it contained superstitious behaviors. People on this website say the following: 2 Maccabees 12:43 is wrong since it deals with offering money for the sins of the dead; Tobit 6: 5-7 permits magic; Baruch 6:2 is not accurate since it says that Jews would be in Babylon for 7 generations when in Jer. 25:11, it says it was 70 years.
They keep saying that the Apocrypha is not accurate and doesn’t relate to the rest of the Bible. I believe the Apocrypha is inspired, but where do they get these ideas from and can anyone please help explain the above Scripture correctly? Thank you so much.
Baruch 6.2 is different from the others, as it is not about ethics. It’s not wrong - merely different from Jeremiah. Which is one of the reasons for thinking it is later than Jeremiah’s time, and probably from about AD 100 - “thirty years” after the fall of Jerusalem; the one in AD 70, not the one in BCE 586. This is not a new dating BTW. As to the difference from Jeremiah, why can’t authors re-interpret other authors ? This happens all the time in the “real world” - so iot should not be too surprising tofind happening among the authors of the Biblical books, who were genuine authors, and not sanctified fax machines. A literary text - which this is - is not a proposition in maths, and should not be treated as though it were: for they are two very different things. Not everything in life can be treated like a proposition in maths, in which triangles must have three angles exactly, and cannot possibly have fewer or more.
Some of the Bible is morally disgraceful. But it is part of the Bible’s revelation. Not everything in the Bible - a body of texts that cover over a thousand years, and originate in very varied places - is good or defensible. The Bible contains lies ans blasphemies, and countless crimes: murder, rape, incest, to name only three. That does not mean that we have to commit rape, because “it’s in the Bible” - only a very sick mind would think in so depraved a way. Is incest a Christian value ? The question answers itself.
If people do not throw out 2 Samuel, which contains the pretty tale of the lustful, adulterous, treacherous, deceitful, murderous and hypocritical behaviour of David, when he lusted after Bathsheba wife of Uriah, lay with Bathsheba, arranged for Uriah to be sent into the thick of battle, and took the woman with whom he had committed adultery to be his own, and lived in that state until rebuked by a prophet - if that is not an outstandingly vile story, what is ? Yet it is part of a supposedly holy book. As is the lust of Amnon son of David for his half-sister Tamar, the full sister of Absalom, Amnon’s half-brother. Amnon raped her, and she complained to Absalom, who plotted the death of Amnon and murdered him while he drunk - which to cut a long story short led to his being exiled by his father, and to his rebellion and his own murder. One can only apologise for mentioning such foul things, which ought not to be so much as named, as Paul says: the only excuse for mentioning them is their presence in a supposedly perfect book; vague assertions about the badness of parts of the Bible are too easily ignored if examples of badness are not given.
These two episodes can be found in one book of the OT - would they be acceptable in a soap opera ? My guess is that no script-writer would hand in a script with such muck in it; it would never be broadcast. Yet this is alleged to be the Holy Word of God, as though God were a pornographer
Children are exposed to this kind of thing
- which is a good reason to forbid the young to read the Bible in full until they are at least 18.
To accept stuff like that as holy while complaining of the moral problems in Tobit or 2 Maccabees, is like swallowing a camel, while straining at a gnat. The objections people raise against the morals in the deutero-canonical books of the OT are as nothing compared to the ocean of moral sewage many of the same people accept in not complaining about similar stuff in the OT.
