Western Christendom was torn asunder by an Augustinian monk named Martin Luther. On October 31, 1517, Luther posted 95 theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. Composed in Latin, these assertions were intended to stimulate debate among theologians on the nature of indulgences – donations made to the Catholic Church in exchange for spiritual benefits. Luther initially had no intention of creating division in the church; his goal was to reform an ecclesiastical practice which he regarded as corrupt and spiritually harmful. But as time went by, Luther views hardened. He came to see the Medieval Catholic Church as fundamentally flawed and out of step with her own scriptures. Historians today regard the posting of the 95 theses as the event which marks the beginning of the Protestant Reformation.
Throughout the Middle Ages, Jerome’s Latin Vulgate was the Bible used by the Catholic Church. Jerome – the leading scholar of his age – acknowledged only the Hebrew scriptures as canonical. He considered the Apocryphal books beneficial but not possessing the authority of sacred scripture.
However, Jerome was spitting into a strong wind. The Apocrypha had been circulating with the Septuagint (the Greek Old Testament) for hundreds of years. These writings had become familiar to Christians around the world and were accepted by many of the early church fathers as canonical or at least edifying. In the end, Jerome included the Apocrypha in his Latin translation but composed prefaces in which he clearly differentiated them from the Hebrew scriptures.
During the Reformation, Martin Luther and his fellow Protestants appealed to the authority of the scriptures over against the authority of the Pope and the Catholic Church. But this raised the crucial question, “Which version of the scriptures?” Catholics appealed to the book of 2 Maccabees in order to provide support for the doctrine of Purgatory and the efficacy of prayers for the dead. Protestants (in agreement with Jerome’s perspective) espoused the view that only the Hebrew scriptures ought to be used to formulate doctrine.
One of Martin Luther’s great convictions was that the Bible must be accessible to all people. But at the dawn of the Reformation, Jerome’s Latin Vulgate was the dominant version of the Bible and had been so for a thousand years. Latin was the language of the Catholic Church, and the scholarly language used in European universities. Well-educated royalty and nobility were well-versed in Latin. But the vast majority of the German people could not read the Bible for themselves.
Moreover, throughout the Middle Ages, copies of the Bible were quite rare. It wasn’t until the mid-15th century that the printing press was invented. (Johannes Gutenberg printed about 180 copies of his eponymous Bible in 1455.) Before this time, Biblical manuscripts had to be copied by hand – a process which was time consuming and enormously expensive. As a result, very few people could afford to own their own Bible. So, while Europe was notionally Christian during Medieval times, the general populace had only a tenuous grasp of the scriptures.
Luther set about to change this. Beginning in 1517, he translated the Psalms into German. On April 17, 1521, Luther famously stood before Holy Roman Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms and refused to recant his teachings; he was soon declared to be a heretic. Luther was in grave danger. If he fell into the hands of the imperial authorities, he would have been executed. The renegade monk was fortunate to have the protection his local ruler, Frederick the Wise, the elector of Saxony. For the next 10 months, Luther took secret refuge at the Wartburg Castle.
Luther used his time at the Wartburg to great advantage: he translated the entire New Testament into German! Rather than basing his work on the Latin Vulgate, Luther opted to use the original Greek text.
By early 1522, Luther was safe enough to return to Wittenburg. Along with several assistants, he continued to work on his German translation of the Bible. The Old Testament – rendered from the original Hebrew – was finally completed in 1534.
Luther included the Apocrypha in his German Bible. However, he placed these books in a separate section following the Old Testament. (In the Vulgate, the Apocrypha were incorporated into the sequence of OT books. Tobit & Judith came after Nehemiah, Wisdom of Solomon & Ecclesiasticus followed the Song of Songs, Baruch came after Lamentations and 1 & 2 Maccabees concluded the OT.) In a preface to the Apocrypha, Luther wrote that these works were “not to be held equal to holy scripture but are useful and good to read.”
Other Reformers took a similar position to Luther. Andreas Bodenstein (also known as Carlstadt, the town where he was born) wrote a treatise on the scriptures in 1520. Carlstadt encouraged Christians to focus their studies on the books which are “canonical beyond all controversy” – that is, the books of the Hebrew canon. Some of the apocryphal books Carlstadt thought helpful but others he totally rejected as unworthy of any attention whatsoever.
The claims of Protestants eventually called forth a vigorous response from the Catholic Church. In 1546, the Council of Trent affirmed the Latin Vulgate as the authoritative Bible of the Catholic Church. (This had effectively been the case for many centuries, but Trent made it official.) The Council embraced the full canonicity of Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch and 1&2 Maccabees. The Greek additions to Esther and Daniel were also acknowledged as sacred scripture.
The Council of Trent condemned anyone who “does not accept as sacred and canonical the aforesaid books in their entirety and with all their parts as they have been accustomed to be read in the Catholic Church and as they are contained in the [Latin Vulgate]” Thus, the Catholic Bible contains 7 books not found in Protestant Bibles.
Catholic scholars soon began referring to these additional writings as the deuterocanonical books – a practice which continues to this day. The Hebrew scriptures are called the protocanonical books. Catholics emphasize that the term deuterocanonical does not imply a lesser status, but simply denotes those works were “later added to the canon.”
Notably, the Council of Trent did not grant canonical status to 1&2 Esdras or the Prayer of Manasseh. Both Catholics and Protestants designate these as Apocrypha.
For a time, Protestant Bibles continued to follow Martin Luther’s practice of separating the Apocrypha from the canonical books, usually placed them after the Old Testament. This was true of the Geneva Bible (1560), produced by English Protestants who had sought refuge in that city during the reign of Mary (“Bloody Mary”) Tudor.
The Apocrypha were also initially included in the King James Version (KJV), the hugely influential English translation first published in 1611. For three centuries, the KJV served as the standard Bible throughout the English-speaking world. Even today, not a few fundamentalist Protestants insist that only the King James Version is the “true” word of God. (These folks might be surprised to learn that the original KJV contained the Apocrypha – although this inclusion never suggested that these books were canonical).
However, Protestants – especially English Puritans – became increasingly uncomfortable including the Apocrypha within the covers of the holy scriptures. We know that some Englishmen soon began printing Bibles without the Apocrypha, because in 1625, George Abbot, the Archbishop of Canterbury, threatened to imprison such persons for a full year!
In 1646, the Westminster Assembly (a body controlled by Puritans and other “nonconformists”) produced the historic Westminster Confession of Faith. This confession unequivocally declared that only the books of the Hebrew scriptures were to be considered holy scripture. The Confession added: “The books commonly called Apocrypha, not being of divine inspiration, are no part of the canon of the scripture; and therefore, are of no authority in the Church of God.” The men who composed this strict statement insisted that the Bible ought to contain only the inspired word of God and nothing more.
This trend would continue. By 1826, the British and Foreign Bible Society adopted a formal policy of distributing only Bibles without the Apocrypha.
American Protestants today know little or nothing about the apocryphal books. This should not be surprising. After all, Protestant Bibles have lacked these writings for several centuries. But this raises the question: Were the Reformers correct to excluding the Apocrypha from the canon?
