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"The books of the Apocrypha, Jewish in origin, were not considered Scripture by any rabbinical authority. The Jews themselves have never viewed the books as inspired... Thus, their rejection as Holy Scripture by Protestants."

This is the claim, but it is not true. The Jews at the time of Christ did not have the modern Protestant understanding of a canon. There was the Law (the Pentateuch, or the Torah), which all Jews believed was divine in origin. Than there were the writings of the Prophets (the Nevi'im), including the book of Psalms, and the books of Samuel and of Kings, but not including some "Prophetic books" such as Daniel. These were held to be sacred by the Pharisees, but not the Saducees. But they were the books which the Jews brought back from Babylon, and were part of the Temple worship when it was re-established, so their contents were very precisely defined.

Lastly, there were the Khetuvim, a poorly defined class of literature. At the time of Christ, there was no authority on which of the Khetuvim were divinely inspired. It was only a generation AFTER Christ, and AFTER The Jewish leaders rejected Christ that anything resembling a "canon" came into being. Several books of the Khetuvim were found by the Pharisees and Sadducees to have caused the Christians to have "gone astray," and so they were left out the Tanakh PRECISELY BECAUSE THEY WERE SO PLAINLY POINTING TO CHRIST.

By then, the Christian church had taken to using the Septuagint as its canon. The Septuagint was the result of a Jewish project to translate the scriptures into Greek, for the benefit of the Gree-speaking Jews living in exile, at the request of Ptolemy. It was started THREE CENTURIES before the "Palestinian Canon," which I described in the preceding paragraph, and SIX centuries before the Masoretic text, which is the basis for most Western translations of the Old Testament.

The Septuagint is far more similar to the Essene texts found at Qumran (John the Baptist, and several of the disciples were Essene), than the Masoretic text. And like the Essene texts, it includes the entire Catholic bible. (The Essene text actually lacks Esther and Daniel 12, but that is probably because those books had not been completed.)

The early Christian church simply regarded the Septuagint as the Old Testament Although it is fair to say that the Septuagint was not perfectly defined, the books of the Catholic bible were uniformly accepted, except that some churches used a shortened version of Ezra-Nehemiah, which has become known as 3 Esdras, or "Greek Ezra." There were some Greek writings of the Hebrews which were not universally accepted by the ancient Church, and these are not found in Catholic bibles, although some Orthodox churches refer to them. There were also many books which were deemed legendary, not inspired.

Hence, when refering to which books Catholics accept but Protestants do not, "Apocrypha" is not a useful term, since the term has for almost two millennia included books which Catholics did not accept as scripture. The Catholic church regards all Old-Testament books in its bible as equally scriptural, but recommends Protestants refer to the Catholic books which they reject as "deuterocanonical" (secondary canon), for the purpose of making this distinction. Oddly, several "Catholic versions" of Protestant bibles include books of the apocrypha which have been rejected by the Catholic church