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Writer's pictureDr. Dilday

Heidegger's Bible Handbook: OT Apocrypha: Ecclesiastical Books

3.  The Apocryphal Books pertaining to this enumerated.  By Eusebius and others they were called Ecclesiastical Books and Hagiographa.  By the Ancients they were also improperly called Canonical and Divine.


Now, while the Apocryphal Books, distinguished from the proper, fixed, and indubitable canon of faith and manners, are of an exceedingly great number, we here exert ourselves over those to be expounded, which have had some value in the Church for a long time, and have at least been read privately in the Church, conjoined or placed with the Canonical books in the same binding, at least in some editions, especially the Greek.  But into the number of these chiefly come the Book of Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Tobit, Baruch, the Epistle of Jeremiah, Judith, the third and fourth of Esdras, that Additions of Esther, the history of Susanna, Bel, the Dragon, the Hymn of Azariah and the three children, the prayer of Manasses, and three books of the Maccabees.  Nearly all which have indeed been published in the Biblical Codices of the Reformed Church, both Latin, and vernacular, for the reading of all; but by the Papists, if you remove the third and fourth of Esdras, the prayer of Manasses, and the third of the Maccabees, in the Council of Trent with incredible temerity, that is, with men daring to weigh Divinity by their own will, were referred into the register of Canonical Books properly so called.  Others are added either whole books, or fragments of books, for example, the appendices of Job and the Psalms, the Preface of the Lamentations of Jeremiah, a fragment of Sirach, and a fourth of the Maccabees, which, having been removed from the reading of the Church, do not appear in the Biblical binding of the Codices, at least the Western one, both Latin and vernacular.  But of these Apocryphal books, not others, it is our intention here to treat:  so that thus to the reader an account of all the books might be presented that hitherto have been inserted in the Biblical Codex, although with a quite disparate evaluation, and so have been set before the eyes of the Church and for its use.  Hence also most of those, which Jerome calls Apocryphal, were called Ecclesiastical Books and Hagiographa by Eusebius[1] and others, as if occupying a middle position between Books properly called Canonical and Apocryphal, that is, altogether spurious, useless, and ἀποβλήτους, liable to rejection.  Moreover, sometimes the Holy Fathers call them Canonical and Divine, that is, improperly, comparatively, and on account of the use of Ecclesiastical reading.


[1] Eusebius (c. 267-338) was Bishop of Cæsarea, author of that famous Ecclesiastical History, and supporter of Constantine the Great.

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