Is there any evidence that Bibles printed between 400 AD or so and up to the Reformation all contained the Apocryphal books?
I listened to a Protestant radio show and the apologist said many Bibles issued before the Reformation did not contain the Apocryphal books. He sounded pretty confident on this and mentioned a source which I did not take down correctly.
This is a hard one to track down.
Any ideas?
My first piece of advice is that you should be pretty skeptical of anything you hear on the radio, wherever it’s coming from. People say all sorts of things that they aren’t held to account for.
Part of this question also depends on what you mean by apocrypha–one church’s apocrypha may be another church’s scripture–and vice versa.
In any event, some of the oldest Bibles contain texts that are outside of an Evangelical understanding of canon–and I’m assuming that the person you were listening to was probably an Evangelical…
Anyway, among the oldest existing Bibles:
Codex Sinaiticus (fourth century) contains:
2 Esdras,
Tobit,
Judith,
1 & 4 Maccabees,
Wisdom,
Sirach.
The Epistle of Barnabas
The Shepherd of Hermas
Codex Vaticanus (fourth or fifth century) contains:
Judith
Tobit
Wisdom
Sirach
(but does not contain any of the four books of the Maccabees).
Codex Alexandrinus (fifth century) contains:
1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th Maccabees
Psalm 151
Song of the Three
First Esdras
First and Second Clement
Psalms of Solomon
Wisdom
Sirach
Judith
Tobit
So there are three examples of Bibles that contain apocrypha that date back before the Reformation. For that matter, Luther’s translation of the complete Bible contained the books later Protestants assumed to be apocryphal.
