Characteristics of Apocryphal Writings

To this day, the definition of apocryphal differs between and among different strands of Christianity. In the broader culture, apocryphal is now means a false story or statement which, although widely circulated and often believed, is nonetheless false. This, however, was not its original meaning, which merely referred to a document of unknown origin. Such a document might or might not contain what is true or beneficial (edifying).

The Apocrypha was included in the Bible from at least the time of Augustine (354-430). It appears that early Christians, finding apocryphal writings to be inspiring, read them privately. But these writings seem not to have been used much in corporate worship.

Some groups of Christians today include many apocryphal books in their Old Testaments. But even these groups do not always agree on where these documents stand in relation to the rest of that Testament. Some view the Apocrypha, what these books are collectively called, as inspired by God and therefore on a par with the rest of the Old Testament. Others see them as spiritually valuable but not necessarily inspired. Still others include them in their Bibles but rarely bother to read them. There are also groups of Christians who view the Apocrypha with suspicion and dismiss it as foreign, misleading, or detrimental.

Leaders of the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation tended to put segregate apocryphal works as an independent division of the Old Testament, or omit them altogether. In his translation of the Bible, for example, Luther included the Apocrypha but put it in a separate section. Over time, the designation apocryphal in much of Protestantism took on the meaning of untrue, untrustworthy, or heretical.

The Roman Catholic reaction to the Reformation was to convene the Council of Trent (1545-1563) in northern Italy. Near the beginning of the Council, the church officially declared there to be forty-six books in the Old Testament, seven more than the thirty-nine that had come to be regarded as canonical by many Protestants.

Catholicism treats the books in the Apocrypha as deuterocanonical, meaning writings comprising a second canon, the term theologians use to designate documents accepted as inspired and thus authorized for inclusion in the Bible.

Virtually all Christians groups include in their Bibles the thirty-nine books that routinely appear in Protestant Bibles. In line with traditional Catholic practice, however, some Protestant bodies, such as the Church of England, continue to include the Apocrypha in Bibles.

Bodies within the Eastern Orthodox tradition include a few more apocryphal books than do Roman Catholics, bringing the total to forty-nine in an Orthodox Old Testament.