Joe Heschmeyer delves into the fascinating history and evidence supporting the inclusion of the deuterocanonical books in the Bible. He provides compelling examples from early church fathers and scripture, demonstrating that these books were widely recognized and quoted as authoritative texts by early Christians. Discover why these books are an essential part of the Christian tradition and how their inclusion sheds light on our understanding of faith and history.
Transcript:
So I’ve been talking with a couple of Protestants recently and we started talking about the deuterocanonical books and I was wondering for any proofs of those in either the early church or just throughout scripture or anything that you might have.
Yeah, so let’s go one by one through them. That work?
So let’s start out with Tobit. Tobit appears to be prophetic, meaning in Tobit 12 the angel Raphael introduces himself and says he’s one of the seven angels who in turn served before the glory of the Lord and he describes how he presented and read the record of your prayer before the glory of the Lord. And if that manuscript tradition is right, that certainly seems to predict Revelation chapter 8 which talks about there being seven angels that stand in the presence of the Lord. That’s a remarkable thing for him to get right that there are seven angels that stand in this way. Nevertheless, we also see the book being quoted. So Origen in Contra Africanus, there’s a back and forth about which books belong in scripture. And one of the points that Origen makes is that the churches use Tobit. He makes it very clear, it’s not just his own personal view, but that every Christian church in his day, which is like the mid 200s, is using Tobit. And even before that you find, for instance, Clement of Alexandria in the stromata talking about, he cites Tobit 12:8 and describes it as scripture, and that’s late 100s, early 200s. So that’s Tobit.
Then Judith, Origen also mentions in the letter to Africanus as being one used by the churches. Clement of Alexandria also talks about Judith in terms of the model of virtuous womanhood. So there’s often this lie that Protestants have believed that the early Christians use these but not as scripture. And it’s just not true. They’re regularly cited and quoted as scripture. Augustine mentions every one of the 73 books of the Catholic Canon when he says which books he considers canonical. The third council of Carthage in the 300s does this as well. So every one of these is individually named and described as scripture. But you can find even before the 300s plenty of references to this. So the epistle of Barnabas, which is an early, maybe late first century, early second century document, we don’t know a ton about it. But there is at one point where it speaks of the prophet speaking against Israel and it provides a quotation that’s a blend of Isaiah 3:9 and the book of wisdom and wisdom 2:12. And so it’s treated as scripture. It’s quoted alongside Isaiah as scripture. So it’d be preposterous to say, oh, no, it wasn’t taken as scripture.
In terms of Sirach, there is a good chance that Jesus is quoting it, although it’s a little unclear whether he’s quoting or alluding to this. In Matthew 7, when Jesus talks about knowing them by their fruits, this certainly seems to recall Sirach 27:6, which says the fruit discloses the cultivation of a tree. So the expression of a thought discloses the cultivation of a man’s mind. Jesus is using the exact same image in the exact same way. Likewise, you’ll find James doing something similar to Sirach 5:11. The first Council of Ephesus refers to Sirach explicitly as divinely inspired scripture when it quotes Sirach 32:19. The Didache, which is maybe the earliest document outside of the scripture itself in terms of Christian writings, quotes from Sirach as well. When it quotes Sirach 4:31 to not let your hand be extended to receive but withdrawn when it’s time to repay. And on and on and on we go.
Baruch there, let’s see, Tertullian quotes Baruch in the 200s.
So first and second Maccabees Jesus, we find him going to Jerusalem for the Feast of Dedication. The Feast of Dedication is only mentioned in first and second Maccabees. Additionally, you have 2 Maccabees 7. We have the woman with her children who are martyred. They were tortured, they didn’t accept release, so they might obtain a better resurrection. Hebrews 11:35-37 mentions this. The early Christians considered canonical Origen again says that we believe on the authority of Holy Scripture that such is the case, here, however in the book of Maccabees… you’ll notice he’s citing it in De Principis on the principles as scripture. I think that’s all seven. All that’s to say, you don’t have to go to the 300s, you can go before that and find all of these books being cited and all of them being cited as scripture.
The idea that they weren’t considered that because Jerome questioned them in the 400s is a very strange understanding of how chronology and timelines work. Like the early Christians knew that these were not… one of the things in Origen and Africanus’ debate, they both realize that the Christian canon of scripture differs from the Jewish canon of scripture. Now, you could add to that by saying the Jewish Talmud quotes Sirach as scripture and calls it scripture and places it in the third section of scripture in the Tanakh. You have the law, the prophets, and the writings. That third section called the Ketavim in Hebrew, it quotes Sirach and places it in that section. So we know that both the early Christians and the Jews of their day considered books like this inspired. It is later that they became rejected in Judaism and much, much, much later that they became rejected in Protestantism.
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