“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.