Appraising The Apocrypha

After reading four books from the apocrypha recently (Tobit, Judith, Susanna, and Bel and the Dragon), noticing that there is a possible historical error in Judith 1:1, I felt like posting about something important that must be remembered by Protestant Christians when reading the apocrypha.  While Catholics and (unless I'm mistaken) the Greek Orthodox hold the Old Testament apocrypha to be authoritative and divinely inspired, those with a Protestant background could find apocryphal works quite foreign, perhaps even frustrating or alarming.

In a post around a year ago (ironic that at almost the same time of the year I'm writing about the apocrypha again!) I explained how some seeming contradictions between the apocrypha and the accepted Protestant canon of Scripture might not be contradictions at all [1], much like some claimed contradictions in the Old and New Testaments can be demonstrated to not actually be contradictions.  Now I want to focus on something else--what follows and doesn't follow from a book in the apocrypha being proven to be incompatible with the established Protestant canon.

If one book of the apocrypha, like Judith (I will use this as an example because of the potential error in its first verse), turns out to be demonstrably false, no other work of the apocrypha is discredited.  The individual books can stand or fall on their own.  If one is objectively not inspired, this does not mean that another one isn't, and vice versa.  The seeming error I have referred to in Judith is how Judith 1:1 says that Nebuchadnezzar was the king of Assyria, not of Babylon.  Now, perhaps the verse uses Assyria as an interchangeable term for Babylon, as someone has suggested to me.  This is logically possible.  But until I see more evidence beyond mere speculation I do not know if Judith 1:1 is historically accurate or not.  Even if Judith is historically inaccurate, however, the veracity of books like Bel and the Dragon is still a separate issue.

I do want to affirm that the book of Judith does contain a major theological error, regardless of whether or not the first verse is historically flawed.  Judith 16:17 clearly describes eternal conscious torment as being true, yet, as I have shown elsewhere [2], the Protestant canon actually teaches that neither the human body nor mind/soul is immortal on its own and that only those who are saved (with the possible exception of Satan and two other figures) will have eternal life, with the unsaved being annihilated by God on a physical and conscious mental level.  Because of this teaching, Judith contradicts what the Old and New Testament teach.

But just because Judith contains erroneous teaching does not mean that the other apocryphal books do.  This is where Protestant Christians must be careful--in order to pursue God's revelation and live rationally they must not overreact to an actual error in an apocryphal book by rejecting all of the other works.  That is a fallacious response.


[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-veracity-of-apocrypha.html

[2].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-truth-of-annihilationism.html