Replies

RS: "I think it all depends on what you mean by "closed canon."

FL: "Indeed it does, particularly if he means observing the Council of Jamnia's edited version of the Old Testament."

Get over it. The Apocrypha is not divinely authoritive.

If the sovereign God thought that the Apocrypha should have been included in the canon of Scripture, it would be there.

Even though Jerome included those books in his Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible (A.D. 404) he specifically said himself that they were not "books of the canon" but merely "books of the church" that were helpful and useful to believers.

The Roman Catholic Church didn't even declare the Apocrypha to be a part of the canon until 1546. In affirming the Apocrypha as within the canon, RC's held that the RCC had the authority to constitute a literary work as "Scripture".

The Apocrypha CONTRADICTS the Scriptures, but they do serve to support Rome's teachings -- such as prayers for the dead and justification by faith _PLUS_ works, not by faith alone.

REFORMERS deny that Rome can make something to be Scripture that God hasn't already caused to be written as his own words. The Apocrypha are not "God-breathed" words, and they weren't even considered to be Scripture by Jesus or the NT authors.

Roger Beckwith writes: "On the question of the canonicity of the Apocrypha and the Pseudepigrapha the truly primitive Christian evidence is negative."

(The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church and Its Background in Early Judaism - London: SPCK, 1985, and Grand Rapids: Eerdman's, 1986 - esp. pp 436-437)