Throughout this series we’ve been examining ancient books that some non-Protestant Christians feel have
been wrongly excluded from our Bibles. I’ve read, summarized and critiqued eleven
of the most popular claimants to date, but there are plenty more out there, enough
to keep me at it well into the next decade.
Tempting as that may be, I won’t go down that road for several reasons: (1) the further down
into the Apocryphal jungle you travel, the feebler and less substantive the contestants
become, such that anyone reading them with the least discernment starts to feel
like the exercise of critiquing them is something akin to clubbing baby seals
on the beach, as opposed to putting up a valiant defence against plausible
error; (2) I promised to do a 12-part series, and I plan to keep that
pledge; and (3) the reasons for excluding books from the canon begin to
repeat themselves.
We wouldn’t want that. After all, figuring out which qualities make the canon the canon is pretty much
the point of the exercise, right?