Come now, you can't answer that yourself at this point?! The Jewish canon is true without doubt. The NT scriptures are true. The apocrypha is pretense hoping to be believed but with only an element of truth. As I'm fond of noting, you don't give pure poison to a rat. You feed it 95 Percent real food and 5 percent poison so that in tasting and finding the real food to be good, they will devour the poison without notice. That was the approach with the apocrypha - an attempt to get the congregations to devour the poison without notice. Christians rejected it - sensing the poison. The problem isn't whose is the true one. The question is why people accept the untrue knowing they are wrong in the doing and fighting to keep false doctrine based upon that untrue message. The answer is comfort over self-deception. It's easier for the inmate to sit in jail and scream that his lawyer screwed him than to admit he's there because he broke the law. It's human nature. Human nature, though, is precisely what we're supposed to be working to defeat.. not excuse.
You and I can answer that because we believe that. A Hindu, a Muslim, a Buddhist will disagree. Faith in God is not a choice, but which faith in God is. How we choose which faith is ours is a mystery -- but I am sure the devil has a lot to do with it. As Thomas Merlton says, regarding what the devil teaches us, is that it is "important to be absolutely right and prove that everyone else is absolutely wrong." So, once we choose which faith in God is right, we go on proving everyone else wrong.
The apocrypha is pretense hoping to be believed but with only an element of truth
You seem to have this conspiracy theory about the apocryphal books -- but you don't explain just who was feeding the poison? And why? Of course, nothing like that took place. The plain truth is: the Greek-speaking Christians (Jews and Gentiles) simply found support for their beliefs in these books because of what they already believed. They predate Christianity.
That was the approach with the apocrypha - an attempt to get the congregations to devour the poison without notice
Havoc, the Church did not have a canon for more than three hundred years after Jesus died. It had Gospels, as witness accounts of what Jesus Christ taught, and it had the Septuagint as the Torah. Christianity was in a state of flux, unregulated. Not everyone who claimed to be a Christian taught what Jesus taught. That much is clear just from reading the 1st century Epistles. There was no secret plot to "feed the congregations" any poison! The Church Fathers were devout Christians, many of whom died for the faith. If they agreed that there was something in the Apocrypha that was inspired, they had their reasons that were neither sinister nor frivolous.
It's human nature. Human nature, though, is precisely what we're supposed to be working to defeat.. not excuse
Well, I'll be...finally on that we agree!