A Compact Guide to the Whole Bible: Learning to Read Scripture's Story by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Bible—Introductions, REL006080, REL006000
ISBN: 9781441221995
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2015-02-09T23:00:00+00:00

The Shape of the Story: Arrangement and Placement

The previous section argued for the importance of intertestamental history for understanding the dramatic social, political, and religious changes that took place between the conclusion of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New Testament. The obvious dilemma this poses in a book on the biblical metanarrative is that Alexander, Antiochus, and the Maccabees are never directly mentioned in the Bible that Protestants read. However, we do learn about these figures from a number of books Jews wrote in the intertestamental period, many of which are included in the canons read by millions of faithful Catholic and Orthodox Christians. Catholics refer to these books as deuterocanonical, from the Latin word meaning “secondary canon,” and Orthodox communities call them anagignōskomena, from the Greek for “things that are read.” Among Protestants, these texts are called Apocrypha, a word deriving from the Greek for “hidden things.”

So what is the Apocrypha? Basically, it is a diverse collection of texts written by Jews during the intertestamental period. Together with other writings from the same period—such as Josephus’s histories, the Dead Sea Scrolls, books ascribed to famous biblical figures such as Enoch, and the writings of Philo of Alexandria—these texts provide a window into the history and theology of the time between the Testaments. Some Christians tend to avoid the Apocrypha, assuming it is unnecessary to understanding the biblical metanarrative. But as we have already begun to see, these texts help to set the stage for the New Testament, and readers wanting to bridge the historical, literary, and theological gap between the Old Testament and the New would do well to learn something of them.

The Apocrypha’s use and authority among early Christians is complex and somewhat obscure. On the one hand, it was the Christian community that preserved these texts, specifically as part of the widely used Greek translation of the Old Testament, the Septuagint. Furthermore, that several of the New Testament authors were familiar with the apocryphal writings is clear. The New Testament contains a handful of allusions to the Apocrypha and, as we will see below, some New Testament theology is indebted to some apocryphal texts. On the other hand, while New Testament authors frequently cite the Old Testament and other ancient Jewish texts (cf. 1 Enoch in Jude 14), it is striking that they never directly quote the Apocrypha. Moreover, while the church fathers made regular, unambiguous use of the Apocrypha in the decades after the New Testament, it remains unclear precisely how much authority they gave these texts.

The status of the Apocrypha becomes somewhat more intelligible beginning in the fifth century, when Saint Jerome developed a new Latin translation of the Bible called the Vulgate. Because Jerome worked from the original Hebrew texts of the Old Testament and not from their Greek translations, the Vulgate was limited to those books found in the Hebrew canon of Scripture. The remaining texts—that is, the ones found in Greek versions of the Old Testament but not in

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