But books that made the canon like Revelation, Jude, Hebrews and James were questioned by many of the Church Fathers for the same reasons they questioned some of the Old Testament books.
My argument is Protestants undermine themselves by claiming the so-called “Apocrypha” isn’t scripture because certain Church fathers had issues with them while ignoring the questions surrounding these books in the NT.
Luther threw them out, but what authority states that Revelation, Hebrews, etc. belong in the Bible or that they are inspired, considering they fail the Protestant test for OT canonicity.
Polycarp references all 27 of the (Protestant) New Testament books without any reference to your apocrypha and called these references scripture...
Polycarp knew he had the written scriptures as we have them in the 2nd century...
What you, and every Roman Catholic thread on the Apocrypha, fail to mention is that THE JEWS THEMSELVES rejected the Apocrypha (which are Jewish-authored books, before Christ) as inspired canon.
Luther didn’t just pull his rejection of the Apocrypha out of a hat—but had centuries of Roman Catholic scholarship to back him up too (including that of St. Jerome—the translator of the Vulgate...who coined the word “Apocrypha”), besides ancient Jewish unanimity in rejecting these intertestamental books.
Even the Greek LXX—the translation of the Old Testament probably most familiar to 1st Century Jews, written sometime around 200 BC, had the books we call the Apocrypha in a separate section (translated after the original biblical canon) indicating that as early as 200 BC the Jews did not accept these books as of the same quality and authority as the Tanak itself.
The last recognized prophet before John the Baptist was Malachi—of the last Old Testament book of his name. He was dead long before the Apocryphal books were written—which means one has to posit that inspired canon was written by people who had no word from God (prophets, by definition had a word to communicate from God)...a contradiction.
In both New Testament and Old Testament formation, there is a phenomena one can call “universal organic canonization” meaning, long BEFORE a council formally recognized books as canonical, the usage and informal recognition in the Churches was already there....(with some exceptions, like 2, 3 John or Revelation) with (near) universal agreement. The same is true for Old Testament canon...long before the Jews formally identified the Old Testament books (without the Apocrypha) as canonical...usage was already ahead of them...
Since they were orthodox Jews, very likely Jesus and the Apostles never regarded the Apocrypha (with it’s silly superstitious legends and such...(see Tobit, or Bell and the Dragon) as canonical. But since the Jews declared the Apocrypha NOT canonical (early 2nd C) ...of course later Roman counsels had to NOT agree with them...