What Are the "Apocrypha?"

***Why are the protestants trying to hide seven books of the Bible?***

They are not hid. they were in the original KJV and you can still get them in a separate printing at any bible book store.

I have read them several times and find them to be just pious fiction on the level of the Shepherd of Hermas and other tall tales.

The books do not have errors; they were too Christian for the translators, that’s all.

1611 KJV translators...

The Sixth Company of Translators at Cambridge translated the apocryphal books.

Dr. John Duport, Dr. William Brainthwaite, Dr. Jeremiah Radcliffe
Dr. Samuel Ward
Dr. Andrew Downes, John Bois
Dr. John Ward, Dr. John Aglionby, Dr. Leonard Hutten
Dr. Thomas Bilson, Dr. Richard Bancroft

“The Lost Prophet” by Margaret Barker. Read it, then Enoch. The Bible is not a “BOOK”, but a collection of books put together by so called “Holy Men” who had nothing to to with the creation of the inspired writings. They came in as men and chose from that perspective. They chose as men, as corruptible by politics, money, and personal ambitions as any other. I see no evidence of their “Inspired Holiness” to make such decisions. It was their closed minded opportunistic endeavor that shaped “Christianity” away from it’s original roots.

“The Bible” is incomplete...period. This is derived from my “Objective Spiritual Inspiration”. If you believe that a handful of men from Africa had the official authorization from God to censor the scriptures for all time...then show me the proof of that.

The books in question were regarded as less than scripture from the earliest times by even popes and early church fathers. So, Luther and others didn’t just “decide.” The books were retained by Luther but separated from scripture and identified as being good for edification, which is the identical, historical stance of the Catholic Church itself up to that point and until the Counter-Reformation, at which point the books in question were canonized.

“The books were retained by Luther but separated from scripture and identified as being good for edification, which is the identical, historical stance of the Catholic Church itself up to that point and until the Counter-Reformation, at which point the books in question were canonized.”

Ummmm, no. Not even.

I should point out that the canon of Scripture was actually fixed by the disciplinary session of the Sixth Ecumenical Council in 692 (called by Western scholars variously the Trullan Synod or Quinisext Council — though both Orthodox and Latin hierarchs, at least before the Latin Schism referred to its canons as those of the Sixth Ecumenical Council). One of its canons explicitly gave the canons of the Synod of Carthage of 419 universal force throughout the Church.

There is the fact, very uncomfortable for protestant defenders of the short canon, that it is not only the Latins, whom they like to vilify as “adding” books to the Bible, but the Orthodox and Monophysites (Copts, Armenians Ethiopians, Syrian Jacobites) and the Nestorians (Assyrian Church of the East), that is all Christian confessions still extant and dating from before the 16th century, include in their canon of Scripture all or most of the books the protestants reject under the name “the Apocrypha”.

You can quibble about 4th Maccabees and 2nd Esdras, maybe they don’t belong, but all of us in the East think that all of you in the West (Latin and protestant alike) are missing the 151st Psalm and the Prayer of Manasseh, and most of us think you should all have 3rd Maccabees in your Bibles — the Copts and Ethiopians stand with you Westerners on that one and against the Armenians and the Jacobites.

I would observe that this unanimity exists despite the fact that the Assyrians have been out of communion with the rest of us since 431, the Copts, Ethiopians and Jacobites since 451, the Armenians since 506.

Rubbish (at least if you use “catholic” the way most Westerners do to mean folks in communion with the Pope of Rome — of course if you’re using it another way, say in the sense St. Ignatius gave it when he first used the phrase “ekklesia katholike”, it’s not clear why you’d want to be in disagreement). See narses’s post #29 — copied verbatim from one of my posts to another thread — below.

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