Before We Start: The Shelf with No Edges

No one did. Not in my time, and not for centuries after.

My people’s shelf

In my lifetime, every Jew agreed on the five books of Moses. Nearly everyone agreed on the Prophets. Beyond that, the edges were soft. Jewish teachers were still arguing, long after I died, about whether the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes belonged.¹

And there were many more books than the ones that made it into your Old Testament. Some had been written only a century or two before me, and one in my own lifetime: Tobit, Judith, the Wisdom of Ben Sira, the history of the Maccabees, the Wisdom of Solomon. Some, like 1 Enoch and Jubilees, were among the most-copied books at Qumran. My people read them, prayed with them, and argued about them. Some they treated as scripture, and some they did not, and different communities drew the line in different places.

The Greek translation of the scriptures used in Egypt and across the Greek-speaking world, which you will hear called the Septuagint, carried several of these books alongside the others. The early Christians read the Greek, and so they inherited those books too.²

In the end, the rabbis who rebuilt Jewish life after Rome destroyed the Temple kept to the Hebrew books. The church kept the Greek ones. That is the first fork in the road.

The church’s long argument

For three hundred years after me, there was no official list of Christian scripture at all.

In AD 367, a bishop of Alexandria named Athanasius wrote an Easter letter to his churches listing the books to be read. His New Testament is the first list that matches yours exactly: twenty-seven books. For the Old Testament, his list stayed close to the Hebrew books, though it counted Baruch with Jeremiah. Wisdom, Sirach, Esther, Judith and Tobit, he said, could be read by new believers for instruction, but were not in the canon.³

A few decades later Jerome, who translated the Bible into Latin, made the same distinction. He translated Tobit and Judith anyway, quickly, and said the church read such books for the edification of the people, but not to prove its teaching. Augustine, the great bishop of Hippo in North Africa, disagreed, and the African councils of Hippo and Carthage, in 393 and 397, listed Tobit, Judith, the Maccabees and the books of Solomon as scripture.³

For the next thousand years, the Western church mostly followed Augustine in practice, while its scholars often quoted Jerome.

The Reformation splits the shelf

Then, in the 1500s, the argument became a war.

Martin Luther translated the Bible into German. In his complete Bible of 1534 he took these books out of the Old Testament and printed them in a section of their own, between the Testaments, under the heading Apocrypha: books which are not held equal to the holy scriptures, and yet are useful and good to read.⁴

The Catholic Church answered at the Council of Trent. On April 8, 1546, the council declared that Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, 1 and 2 Maccabees and the additions to Esther and Daniel are scripture, equal to the rest, and cursed anyone who said otherwise. It left out 1 and 2 Esdras and the Prayer of Manasseh. Catholics call the books it kept deuterocanonical, of the second canon.⁴

The Church of England took Jerome’s middle road. Its Thirty-Nine Articles say the church reads these books for example of life and instruction of manners, but does not use them to establish any doctrine. So the 1611 King James Bible printed all fourteen, in their own section between the Testaments. That is Part One of this book.⁵

The stricter Protestants went further. The Westminster Confession of 1646 said these books are no part of the canon of the Scripture and no more to be approved than any other human writings. In 1826 the British and Foreign Bible Society decided it would no longer pay to print Bibles that contained them. Within a generation, most English Bibles simply left them out.⁵

That is why, if you grew up Protestant, you may never have seen these books at all, while your great-great-grandparents’ King James had them.

The East, and Ethiopia

The Orthodox churches of the East never had a Reformation, and never felt the need to decide so sharply. They kept the Greek Bible as they had always read it, which included a few more books: 3 Maccabees, Psalm 151, and in an appendix, 4 Maccabees. Those are Part Two.

The church of Ethiopia, one of the oldest in the world, kept the widest shelf of all. Its Bible holds more than eighty books, among them 1 Enoch and Jubilees, which were lost everywhere else for more than a thousand years. Those are Part Three.⁶

The gospels that no one kept

Part Four is different. These are not books my people read before me. They are books written about me, after I was gone, in the hundred years or so after the four gospels in your Bible.

There were many of them. Some were told by communities who believed secret knowledge was the way to God. Some were simply stories, written for people who wanted to know what my mother was like as a girl, or what I was like as a boy. Some made the churches very angry. None was ever put into any Bible. Most were lost, and several were found again only in the last hundred and fifty years, in the sand of Egypt.

The yardstick

So how will I judge books that some of you call scripture and some of you have never heard of?

The same way I would judge anything said in my name. I will hold each one up against what I taught. Not against what the churches later decided, and not against what any one church calls scripture, but against what the gospels remember me saying and doing.

If you have read the other books in this series, you know what I keep coming back to. Here it is, in five lines:

1. God’s kingdom coming on earth, not only in heaven.
2. The poor and the outcast first.
3. Forgive debts and enemies, and do not strike back.
4. Love your neighbor; the stranger counts.
5. The greatest serves; no one lords it over anyone.

At the top of every chapter you will find a line called How close it stays to me. It is not a score. It tells you, in a few words, where the book stands near what I taught, and where it walks away.

You will find that the books in this volume are like the books in your Bible. Some of them are beautiful. Some of them are cruel. Most are both. A book being left out of your Bible does not make it worse than the books that were kept, and a book being kept does not make it better than the ones that were left out. You can read them all, and weigh them, the way my people always did.