Monday, April 17, 2006

Regarding the "Old Testament Apocrypha," for want of a better expression:

We try to make this a Catholic-Protestant issue but when I read English history, the Catholic element seems to be disenfranchised rather handily, rather early on, and the religious struggle seems to be an Anglican/Nonconformist one.

And, so, when I read F. F. Bruce's The Canon of Scripture, Chapter 7 "Before and After the Reformation", it seems to be the Calvinists/Puritans who object to the Apocrypha, even Calvinists within the C of E. And many today quote the well-known section of the WCF on this ... Chapter I -- Of the Holy Scripture**.

Bruce writes on page 111:
It may be indicative of the Puritan or nonconformist influence in American Christianity that the first edition of the English Bible to be printed in America (Philadelphia, 1782) lacked the Apocrypha. (The first edition of the Bible in any European language to be printed in America was a German Bible of 1743; it did include the Apocrypha.)

Luther's canon was not an instant influence on German Bibles. The Puritan canon eventually won the day on modern English Bibles.

Elsewhere, Bruce notes that "every major Protestant version of the English Bible from Coverdale to the Revised Standard Version" included the Apocrypha. (footnote 32, page 114).

Myself, I still await the ESV's Apocrypha which I recall being promised early on ... but my hope of fulfillment is waning.

If I may offer a lighthearted thought to this serious topic: we might chalk this anomaly of the Apocrypha up to Scottish thrift as much as to Scriptural purity. To wit, again, Bruce: "The [British and Foreign Bible] Society's Scottish Auxiliaries in particular opposed the use of the Society's money, however indirectly, for the distribution of Bibles containing the Apocrypha."

In the end, unfortunately, the dropping of the Apocrypha seems like pragmatism as much as anything to me.
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**Please be patient with the link. I love the CRTA site but their document server is a mystery.

3 comments:

Fred said...

deuterocanonical is a handy word that separates Sirach from the Gospel of Judas . . . It means between the canons (OT and NT).

Moonshadow said...

Of course I agree with you, fred k: "deuterocanonical" is an appropriate and descriptive designation.

I consider "apocrypha" pejorative and am uncomfortable using it. However, I retained the terminology of the original discussion, in my comment there and in the re-post here, for the sake of continuity.

I'm not really tackling the canon question in this, not yet. I'm merely thinking about why Protestant Bibles do not print the OT Apocrypha like they used to not more than 150 years ago. I say, due to thrift as much as anything! We might call it "stewardship"!

Thank you for your thought-provoking comment.

Moonshadow said...

Just for my own reference: http://www.cin.org/users/james/files/deuteros.htm