“...aside from the empty authority of some church tradition, there is no internal or truly historical reason to accept them.”
This is ahistorical nonsense. I’ll leave aside the snarkiness about tradition, except to say “see 2 Thess 2:15.”
As for no reasons... Surely you mean aside from the reason that “the Scriptures” referred to in the Gospels reference the only set of scriptures that were available to Jews of the day, i.e., the Septuagint, which includes all the books mentioned in the article.
-yudan, adult convert to Holy Orthodoxy
“This is ahistorical nonsense”
How, exactly, is that ahistorical nonsense? Is there any proof that Jerome, Pope Gregory, and many many others were wrong in their rejection of these works? And supposing you’re an Eastern Orthodox, is there any real logical reason why I should pick and choose which early church Fathers to believe? Unless there is a majority consensus going back to antiquity, there’s no reason to value their opinions. More importantly, however, if there is no internal consensus (that is, within the scripture as compared with the scripture), then we cannot consider your position correct.
“As for no reasons... Surely you mean aside from the reason that “the Scriptures” referred to in the Gospels reference the only set of scriptures that were available to Jews of the day, i.e., the Septuagint, which includes all the books mentioned in the article.”
Actually, there was no monolithic group of books called the Septuagint in those days. Nor did every book that was translated in Greek automatically considered divine scripture. Only the Books of Moses were translated by the Jews and made up the LXX originally, supposedly translated by the “70” translators under divine inspiration. At least, so goes the legend, and that’s all it really is. No one knows when the rest of the Old Testament was translated into Greek, or by who, or by whose authority. The same goes for the Apocrypha, some of which was originally written in Greek in the first place, and some of which were translated, and retranslated, multiple times. Josephus himself, in giving the Jewish understanding of the canon, ruled out those books since they were all produced during that period in time where there was no Prophet. Furthermore, none of the copies of the LXX we have today actually possess all of the same books, and some even have extra books which you don’t believe are scripture anyway. Furthermore, as I showed with my previous quotes, the existence of these books in a codex to begin with don’t imply that the people who used them believed they were inspired scripture either, since they included just about any book they thought was useful to read.
Thus all your arguments are irrelevant.