Greetings folks,
Well … read through the first 7 pages to get the gist of what is going on here so if I may contribute.
The answer to the original question was given back early on, perhaps by drbible as to why protestants don’t accept the apocryphal writings as inspired Scripture. That is Jesus in the New Testament defined the canon of the Old Testament Himself, the writings, the law and the prophets. (Nevuiim, Torah and Ketuviim) please forgive my spelling as I’m sure I misspelled something there.
Protestants agree with this.
During the course of time however the apocrypha was included with bibles and as some have accurately pointed out were preserved with the Dead Sea Scrolls and if I’m not mistaken a number of Apocryphal books were a part of Codex Vaticanun and Codex Siniaticus. This however does not prove that they were considered inspired by the early church. Fortunately the early fathers were not silent about the issue either. There was a sense in which they would refer to it as in the canon or cannonical but not in the way they refer to inspired Scripture.
As I reserach the early fathers on the issue of the apocrypha I would just like to answer the original posters question because we would agree with this direct quote from Augustine. This is from The City of God, Book 15 and chapter 23. Many of the ECF’s held the same opinion.
Chapter 23
Let us omit, then, the fables of those scriptures which are called apocryphal, because their obscure origin was unknown to the fathers from whom the authority of the true Scriptures has been transmitted to us by a most certain and well-ascertained succession. For though there is some truth in these apocryphal writings, yet they contain so many false statements, that they have no canonical authority. We cannot deny that Enoch, the seventh from Adam, left some divine writings, for this is asserted by the Apostle Jude in his canonical epistle. But it is not without reason that these writings have no place in that canon of Scripture which was preserved in the temple of the Hebrew people by the diligence of successive priests; for their antiquity brought them under suspicion, and it was impossible to ascertain whether these were his genuine writings, and they were not brought forward as genuine by the persons who were found to have carefully preserved the canonical books by a successive transmission. So that the writings which are produced under his name, and which contain these fables about the giants, saying that their fathers were not men; are properly judged by prudent men to be not genuine; just as many writings are produced by heretics under the names both of other prophets, and more recently, under the names of the apostles, all of which, after careful examination, have been set apart from canonical authority under the title of Apocrypha.
(from Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series 1, Volume 2, PC Study Bible formatted electronic database Copyright © 2003, 2006 by Biblesoft, Inc. All rights reserved.)
In fact Jerome, the very translator of the Latin Vulgate had some very colorful things to say about the Apocrypha.
Briefly in his preface to the Vulgate’s Old Testament Canon he states rather clearly.
“As, then, the Church reads Judith, Tobit, and the books of Maccabees, but does not admit them among the canonical Scriptures, so let it read these two volumes for the edification of the people, not to give authority to doctrines of the Church.”
Peace,
theLogos
