The issue of the Apocrypha is a complex one, but a basic outline of the major points is very interesting and enlightening.

The early Christians were Hebrews (that is, Jews) who saw Jesus as a fulfillment of their sacred Hebrew (or Jewish) writings. Accordingly, the early Jewish Christians retained and promoted the Hebrew Scriptures among Christians and urged people to read these alongside the gospels and letters that would later become the Christian New Testament.

Even as the Christian New Testament was being formed, these sacred Jewish writings were retained and eventually became collected together with the new Christian writings, hence the Bible contains the Old Testament (Jewish sacred scripture) and the New Testament (Christian sacred scripture).

When the first Christians spoke of their Jewish “Sacred Scriptures” they probably did not have a one fixed canon in mind, the way we think of the Old Testament. There were at least two official collections, one in the Hebrew language called the Masoretic Text and one in a Greek translation of that text called “The Septuagint.”

The Hebrew language Masoretic text and the Greek language Septuagint were different in this one way: the Septuagint contained the seven additional books we call the Apocryhpa, which were not in the Masoretic text.

Probably because Greek was a widely understood common language of the time, the early Christians used the Septuagint as it spread across the ancient world
€“ meaning that the Sacred Scripture that Jesus and the early Christians knew did contain the apocrypha.

Eventually, the Septuagint version of the “Old Testament” with the extra books was so commonly used by early Christians that it officially became part of the Christian Bible when the Church fixed the canon of the Bible at 73 books at a council of Bishops in the 3rd century.

About that same time, the Jewish scholars got around to deciding on their own canon. The Jewish scholars rejected the extra seven books because those books were not originally written in Hebrew, or so they thought at the time. Early Hebrew versions of some of the Apocrypha have been found since then.

Scholars disagree as to whether there are any clear references to the apocrypha in the New Testament, but the seven books were quoted frequently by the early Church Fathers and used by early Christians as apologetic tools. Still, St. Jerome, the great Biblical scholar who made the first translation of the Bible into Latin, acknowledged the ambiguous status of these books.

The leaders of the Reformation were instrumental in having the Apocrypha completely rejected as the inspired Word of God. However, when Martin Luther was making his great translation of the Bible into German in the 16th century, he did include the Apocrypha in an appendix as “useful and good to be read,” but Puritan opposition to the books, along with the British and Foreign Bible Society’s decision to omit them from their versions of the Bible finally relegated them in the Protestant world to a place outside of Sacred Scripture.

The Catholic Church continues to consider these books as canonical, confirmed at both the Council of Trent and the First Vatican Council.

At the turn of the millennium it was estimated that there are about 2 billion Christians in the world. Half of them, or one billion belong to one of the various Protestant denominations. The other half are Catholic, which means that half of the Christian world considers the Apocrypha as Sacred Scripture, and half does not.