What is the Apocrypha? Should I read it?

[@Dust337]

Thank you friend ✝️

[@rakovsky3901]

It's arguable that some of the "Apocrypha" should be counted as canon and not just as "Apocrypha." If you go back to the oldest Christian lists of biblical books like the Muratorian Canon from the 2nd century, they typically include some books in the "Apocrypha" as canon. The New Testament quotes from the Greek Septuagint version of the Old Testament about as often as it quotes from the Hebrew version, as when Jesus refers to the Abomination of Desolation in the "Holy Place", which matches Daniel 9 in the Septuagint, not the Hebrew Masoretic. The Septuagint version of the Bible, like the Septuagint version of Daniel, include texts found in the "Apocrypha", like the story of Susannah. The NT at times also alludes to places in the Apocrypha, like how Jesus' debate with the pharisees about the afterlife of the 7 husbands of the woman who died references the 7 husbands in the story of Tobit. I have spent the last couple years learning about the Apocrypha in order to better my knowledge of the Bible, so I'm familiar with the arguments that Pastor Sardinas, the narrator makes. I don't have a strong opinion myself on the issue, but the fact that the early Christians counted some of the Apocrypha as canon and treated the Septuagint Old Testament as legitimate should be pretty weighty. As for the narrator's points, the issue is still debatable. So for instance, he asserts at 0:29 that at the end of the Old Testament period (like with Malachi), God did not give any prophetic word until the New Testament. This premise would imply that therefore we should not count the Apocrypha's books as Scripture. But there are two issues here. First, how do you know that none of those texts were written after Malachi or the closing of the Old Testament prophetic period? Since some of those texts like the Davidic Psalm 151 and Tobit were found in the Dead Sea Scrolls and concern the Old Testament period, it seems hard to automatically make that conclusion. Second, how do you know as fact that there was Zero prophecy or inspiration between Malachi and the NT? Neither the Protestant Old Testament books nor the New Testament ever specify that there no inspiration in that period. The narrator makes generalizations about the Apocrypha's texts that don't apply to every one of them. So for instance he says that the Apocrypha's books go against the rest of the Bible. However Psalm 151 is a summary of David's young years and doesn't go against the Bible, and Luther's commentary on Susannah, which Luther considered Apocrypha, said that he didn't find any problems in that story. In any case, even if we make the conclusion that the Apocrypha is not in the canon, it still makes sense to read it even from a Protestant perspective, as Pastor Sardinas says at 3:22. Luther, the Calvinists at Geneva, and the King James Bible all included an Apocrypha section in their Bibles, and Luther made a commentary on some of those books. They are part of the Christian traditions that give us a better idea about the canon of the Bible even if they aren't in the canon.