Apocrypha-lypso: The Post-Game Show

“Scripture cannot be broken,” declared the Lord Jesus. He meant the Old Testament, of course; the New Testament had yet to be written. Today, his words legitimately apply to our entire Bible, but we must be careful not to hurl around the word “scripture” too casually, or to knowingly go beyond what the Lord Jesus intended when he made this powerful and sweeping claim.

My goal in examining the Apocrypha at length was not merely to provide light entertainment by snidely dissing books other people have found spiritually helpful. At the outset, I expressed the hope that the exercise would help us better define what it is about the canonical Old Testament that “distinguishes it from all the other religious writings, folktales, stories and myths with which human history is replete,” and I trust we’ve made good on that to some extent.

Nevertheless, it’s sometimes useful to spell these things out rather than expecting people to read between the lines.

Apocrypha-lypso (1)

In my mid-teens, I finished Tolkien.

I mean completely finished him: Lord of the Rings, Hobbit, Silmarillion, all done and dusted, multiple times even. And the man was dead. There were no more books coming. Imagine my despair. Then my cousin put me on to Terry Brooks’ Shannara series. “Aha,” I thought to myself, “perhaps there is a solution.” So I read Sword.

I may never recover. In those early years of his career, Brooks was nothing like Stephen R. Donaldson, who cobbled together Tolkienesque tropes with originality and genius. No, Brooks was a straight-up knock-off J.R.R. wannabe hack. He may have improved since, but I never went back. I have had bigger disappointments, but none at such a tender age.

I feel like that about the Apocrypha.

Gotta Catch ’Em All?

A teen asks, “How can we know for sure that we have all the books of the Bible?”

That’s a very good question. But if I were to try to answer it as written, I’d have to ask the writer, “Which Bible do you mean?” The Hebrew Bible? The Catholic Bible? The Protestant Bible? The Orthodox Bible?

The word “Bible” comes from an old Greek word that means “book”, and in our culture merely describes a collection of ancient documents compiled by groups of men with religious affiliations over a period of a couple thousand years.

If we are being technical, they’re ALL Bibles.

Truth by the Bucketload

We have a lot of truth available to us, almost surely more than at any previous period in human history. We certainly have everything we need for the purpose of pleasing God during this present era. We have truth by the bucketload. Truth by the truckload. Torrents of cascading truth.

But we do not have it all. Not by a long shot.

Pseudepi-Whatsit?

Relax, I’m not talking about revisiting the question of inspiration in the Apocrypha or credulously skimming pseudepigraphal volumes in hopes of finding hidden spiritual gems. Some of these ancient sources may indeed preserve words that originated with God, but sifting such gold out of all the inauthentic dross in which they now reside would be a task no scholar, however spiritual, could credibly presume to undertake.