LOL Go I am NO scholar at all. I just love the word of God and like to read in context..Most of the "cross references "do not fit in context.....This is terrible scholarship
Still, I will maintain that no one has refuted that these books were in the bible of the time of the apostles and Jesus Christ and if they were, why would they not today be considered Scripture?
Were they part of the Jewish canon at the time of Jesus or simply historical and wisdom writtings ?
The Hebrew Canon: Among Jews, the oldest canon appears to have been the one defining the Torah (the first five books of modern Bibles), which was not only the central document of Jewish faith but also the fundamental law of the Jewish nation. These five books reached final form and were set apart not earlier than the mid-sixth and not later than the fourth century b.c. It is the one canon upon which all Jewish groups, and also Samaritans and Christians, have usually agreed.
Alongside the Torah, most Jews of the first century a.d. appear also to have accepted a second canon of somewhat less authority, called the Prophets. This included historical books (Joshua through 2 Kings, but not Ruth), as well as the more strictly prophetic books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Twelve Prophets (Hosea through Malachi in the Protestant order). The remaining titles of the Hebrew Biblethe total list corresponding to the canon of the Protestant otare known as the Writings (Ruth, Esther through Song of Solomon). The canon of Prophets may be almost as old as that of Torah, but neither it nor the Writings was accepted by Samaritans or, perhaps, by Sadducees. The canon of Writings probably reached final form only after the first Jewish war against Rome (a.d. 66-70), under the leadership of the rabbinic courts at Jabneh (Jamnia). In the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were hidden away during that war, a wide variety of writings are found, with no obvious canonical distinctions among them.
The Hebrew canon was developed among Jews who spoke Hebrew or Aramaic. Many Jews of late antiquity, however, spoke only Greek. As early as the third century b.c., Greek versions of the Hebrew books were being made for their use. Some of these Greek books have rather different forms from those they took in the Hebrew canon (e.g., Jeremiah and Daniel); others were ultimately excluded from the Hebrew canon (e.g., Ecclesiasticus). There were also original works written in Greek, such as the Wisdom of Solomon, which came to be canonical only in the Greek language realm. The result was a larger, but somewhat ill-defined, canon of writings revered among Greek-speaking Jews.
This is the million dollar question. If the Apostles used, as I believe, the Greek version of the bible, then they did include the DC's, and there has been no refutation by Jesus that there were books in the OT that should be removed. If the Apostles didn't have the DC's in their bible, they I would be on your side. However, all the early church fathers from the first and second centuries A.D. referred to the DC's in their writings, and made no distinction between them and the other books of the OT. I'm inclined to think that they believed, from the earliest Christian times, that the DC's were inspired. I am not a biblical scholar, I rely on others more educated on theology and scripture and Greek to help me understand. I consider myself fortunate that I have my church and 2,000 years of faithful teachings to help understand complex theological matters.
But I know that I will never sway you! That's OK ... we're still friends :-)
God bless!