The Name of the Month

 It is the sixth month of the year.   The common name for this month is June, a name derived from Juno, the Queen of the Olympians in Roman mythology corresponding to the Greek Hera.   While occasionally one encounters a Christian who has a problem with the month’s name on the basis of this pagan origin, most of us are sensible enough to recognize that words take on new meanings, that “June” now simply means “the sixth month of the year”, and that one is in no way evoking the pagan goddess by calling the month after its common name.   The more educated among us will also recognize that the kind of reasoning used to condemn those who call the month by its common name would also condemn the writers of the New Testament who employ the word “Hades” to refer to the place the Old Testament calls “Sheol” because of the similar concept – a dark, shadowy, underworld, inhabited by the spirits of the dead – even though “Hades” as a name for the underworld is borrowed from that of the god who ruled it in Greek mythology, the god the Romans called Pluto.   A good rule to follow when trying to determine whether you are taking a principled stand for Christ or just being a nut is that if you are doing something that the Puritans, Jacobins, Bolsheviks, and Maoists liked doing, such as renaming everything, then you are probably just being a nut.

 

At any rate, June is certainly a better name than the alternative name that so many now use for this month.   The sort of people who identify themselves by one of the letters in the alphabet soup – LGBTTQAEIOUandsometimesY – and others, businesses and politicians mostly, who wish to be seen as supportive of the alphabet soup gang, refer to it as Pride month.   It was not that long ago that it was Pride Week.   Now it has grown into a whole month.   Originally there was a Gay before the Pride but at some point this was dropped presumably because the other letters in the alphabet soup had grown jealous of the G.   

 

The irony of this, for orthodox Christians, of course, is that of the two terms, Pride is by far the most objectionable.   Gay, which in this context does not have its older and, until well into the twentieth-century primary, meaning of light-hearted, cheerful, and happy, but rather its more recent and as of late sole sense of homosexual, denotes something that violates the standards of orthodox moral theology on the basis of both explicit Scriptural passages against it (Genesis 19, Leviticus 20, Romans 1, and Jude being the most obvious examples) and its deviation from the exemplary pattern of a man leaving his father and mother, being joined to his wife, and the two being one flesh.   Pride, however, is the name of the worst of all sins.

 

While the ancient Greeks did not have the same view of Pride as orthodox Christianity they did, in a way, anticipate the Christian point of view in their concept of hubris, which was a form of Pride.    It had various connotations depending upon context.   In early Greek literature it frequently designated words and acts by which men insulted and offended the gods with arrogant boasting.   Cassiopeia, queen of Ethiopia, boasted that she and her daughter Andromeda were more beautiful than the sea nymphs the Nereids, which brought upon her and her kingdom the wrath of Poseidon.   This was an example of this sense of hubris.   Numerous similar examples could be given, in each of which the person who offended the gods with his or her arrogance met with swift punishment, sometimes fatal, sometimes non-fatal but permanent, often involving a transformation.   The myth of Arachne whom Athena transformed into a spider for boasting that she was a superior weaver is an example of the latter sort.  So, for that matter, is basically every example of hubris related by Ovid in his Metamorphoses.  Occasionally the punishment was thwarted, at least in part, by another agent.   In the aforementioned example of Cassiopeia, Andromeda was as much an object of Neptune’s wrath as her mother and to spare Ethiopia, Cassiopeia was told she would have to sacrifice Andromeda to a sea-monster.  The hero Perseus intervened and rescued the princess whom he then married.   In Greek mythology, both hubris and the divine wrath that punished it, like most abstract concepts were personified as divinities, Hubris and Nemesis.   A more general version of this same basic concept, that arrogance brings about one’s downfall, also appears in Greek mythology and literature of equal vintage.   Think of the myth of Icarus, the son of Daedelus, architect of the Labyrinth.   Daedelus, having offended his king, Minos of Crete, was imprisoned and escaped the prison with his son, on wings he constructed of wax and feathers.  Icarus, ignoring his father’s warnings, flew too high, the sun melted the wax, and he plummeted to his death.    It can also be found illustrated, along with other themes, in “The Tortoise and the Hare”, from Aesop’s Fables.   Aesop lived the century after Homer and Hesiod – he is believed to have been born only a few decades after the latter died – and this particular of his fables is of unquestionable antiquity, having been famously referenced, albeit with the details altered and with an entirely different point, by Zeno of Elea in one of those delightful paradoxes “proving” motion to be impossible.   

 

The Greek poets and storytellers who related the above myths stressed the offensiveness of mortal hubris to those above men, the gods.   One of the most well-known definitions of hubris to come down to us from ancient times is that of Aristotle.   It comes from the second book of his Rhetoric, a work that both defines the principles and rules and instructs in the art of persuasive speech.      This is the section in which Aristotle is exploring the usefulness of pathos – emotion – both on the part of the speaker and the audience, in making an argument.   His definition of hubris – which is generally rendered “insult” in English translation of Rhetoric – emphasizes its offensiveness in the opposite direction to that stressed by the ancient myths, i.e., to its human victims.   As translated by J. H. Freese it says that hubris “consists in causing injury or annoyance whereby the sufferer is disgraced, not to obtain any other advantage for oneself besides the performance of the act, but for one’s own pleasure”.   At first glance, it seems almost as if Aristotle were discussing something completely different from the hubris of Greek mythology and, indeed, he obviously had the laws of his city-state Athens in mind here.   In Greek law in general, hubris denoted a wide category of crimes.   The Athenian lawmakers had put more effort into defining the category than most and in Athenian law hubris consisted of crimes that deliberately inflicted shame upon their victims.   Some recent classical scholars have argued on the basis of this definition that our entire traditional understanding of the Greek concept of hubris is mistaken, an anachronistic reading of English usage and Christian concepts back into ancient thought.    This, however, reads too much into this one passage of Aristotle.   It is understandable that the legal connotations of hubris, in which its effects on human victims would be stressed, would be foremost in Aristotle’s mind in Rhetoric – consult Plato’s dialogues that feature Socrates interacting with the Sophists, or for that matter Aristophanes’ lampooning of Socrates himself in the Clouds, and it will quickly become obvious, as in fact, it is self-evident, that the main reason rhetoric teachers were in demand was because people wanted to win lawsuits in court.   

 

Aristotle was also the author of Poetics, the work that established the framework in which theoretical discussion of drama, regardless of whether one agrees or disagrees with Aristotle – and everything he wrote, from the basic unities to catharsis has been subjected to rigorous debate - has been conducted ever since.   While other forms of poetry such as Epic, and of drama such as Comedy, are discussed, the bulk of Poetics, which is not a long work, pertains to tragedy.    Aristotle, remember, lived in the period immediately after tragedy had come to dominate the Greek theatre.   Two of the great Athenian tragedians, Sophocles and Euripides, had been contemporaries of Plato, Aristotle’s teacher, and of Socrates, Plato’s teacher, while Aeschylus, the father of tragedy, had lived into Socrates’ youth.   Tragedy, according to Aristotle, was a form of dramatic poetry that like Epic but in contrast with Comedy, involved an imitation (Gk. Mimesis) of the higher sort of character in serious events or actions, the purpose of which was to achieve a cleansing or purging (Gk. Catharsis) of the emotions, particularly of the fear and pity that the play was supposed to produce in the audience through empathy with the characters.   It had six parts – Plot, Character, Diction, Thought, Spectacle, and Song – and of these, the Plot, the most important of the six parts, had to involve a Reversal (Gk. Peripeteia) of fortune and circumstance from good to bad, brought about not by vice or depravity, but by a great error, weakness or failing (Gk. Hamartia) of the hero.    Hubris was the most common example of this Hamartia.  Hubris, as an Aristotelean tragic hero’s “fatal flaw”, is more recognizable as the hubris of Greek mythology than the legal hubris of the Rhetoric.   The tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were, for the most part, retellings – in the case of Euripides often radical re-interpretations – of the older Greek myths.  

 

The Greek view, as I pointed out at the beginning of this discussion, anticipated the Christian view but was not identical to it.   This is evident in Aristotle.   By contrasting Hamartia, the general category to which hubris belonged, with vice and depravity, he spoke of it in terms that had a less harsh moral tone to them, although, interestingly, about a century after Aristotle, the Jewish scribes who translated the LXX for Ptolemy II Philadelphus would use it to render Chata, the basic Hebrew word for “sin” in the Old Testament, which led to it becoming the main word for “sin” in the New Testament.     Hamartiology is the designation of the study of the doctrine of sin in Christian theology.  It was the natural translation choice – both Chata and Hamartia have the same root meaning of an archer missing the mark he is aiming for – but when it comes to usage, Chata in the Old Testament has the same general connotations and tone that “sin” does in English, which is not true of Hamartia in Greek literature prior to the LXX and New Testament.   Thus Aristotle, using Hamartia, “missing the mark”, to mean the “mistake” “error” or “flaw” that brings about the Peripetia of his tragic hero – someone, whom he says, should be depicted as neither exceptionally virtuous or villainous – contrasts it with moral depravity and vice, whereas St. Paul, also alluding to the basic meaning of the word when he writes that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23), does so after making the point with a series of Old Testament quotations that emphasize the depravity of the sinner (“their throat is an open sepulcher; with their tongues they have used deceit; the poison of asps is under their lips: Whose mouth if full of cursing and bitterness: Their feet are swift to shed blood:” etc.).

 

Neither Aristotle nor the ancient Greeks in general thought of Pride in general in the same terms in which they thought of Hubris.   The former they thought of as a good thing, the latter as Pride taken to excess.   Excess, of course, was fundamental to Aristotle’s entire concept of Vice, just as moderation was to his view of Virtue.   A Virtue was the middle path of moderation between two Vices of excess.   Indeed, in Book IV of his Nicomachean Ethics, he speaks of Pride as the Virtue (Gk. Arete) that falls between a false humility and excessive Pride.   Spoken of in these terms, it means the acknowledgement of one’s own strengths, accomplishments, etc. as they actually are, as opposed to speaking of them as if they were less than they are in reality (false humility) or laying claim to greater strengths and accomplishments than one actually possesses (excessive Pride).   From this perspective, since people’s strengths etc. can be ranked in terms of best, various degrees of better, good, bad, various degrees of worse, and worst, for the person who actually belongs to the top rank of best to acknowledge such is ordinary Pride and not Hubris.

The Holy Scriptures, by contrast, never speak of Pride positively, in either Testament.   Nor do they ever speak negatively of humility.   To be fair to Aristotle, it should be noted that they never use these words with precisely the same sense that he gave them either and that the Scriptures do indeed place a high premium on speaking of things as they are.   The closest thing to even a neutral use of the word “Pride” in the Bible that I could find is Job 41:15, which describes the scales of Leviathan as his pride, although, since the sea-serpent discussed in that chapter almost certainly represents Satan, this may not be as neutral a usage as it seems.   Pride is the sin that brought about the devil’s fall.   This is explicitly stated by St. Paul in the New Testament (I Tim. 3:6), and if the traditional interpretation of Isaiah 14:12-15 and Ezekiel 28:12-19 as God speaking to the devil through the human representatives of the kings of Babylon and Tyre and describing his fall is accurate (1), it is found in the Old Testament as well.   The Isaiah passage does not use the word Pride, but it is clearly the motive of the actions described.   The expression “thine heart was lifted up” in Ezekiel 28:17 essentially means “you became proud”.   Just as Pride led to Satan’s own downfall, it was the means he used to bring about the Fall of Man as well.  He tempted Eve to eat the forbidden fruit by telling her that the only reason God had forbidden it to her and Adam was because it would open their eyes, giving them the God-like knowledge of good and evil, leading her to distrust God and to desire the forbidden God-like knowledge.   The Temptation worked by stoking and appealing to Pride.  When later, Satan unsuccessfully tempted Jesus, each of the three Temptations was an enticement to act based on Pride in one form or another.  

The Bible uses the word Pride to characterize the wicked (Job. 35:12, Ps. 10:2) and the foolish (Prov. 14:13).   It leads, like hubris in Greek thought, to a fall and to destruction (Prov. 16:8) and brings God’s judgement both upon Israel (Is. 9:8-12, Jer. 13:9)and the nations around her, (Ez. 30:6, Zech. 9:6) including or perhaps especially the powerful ones that she relies upon instead of God and which He uses as a scourge against her (Zech. 10:11).  It deceives (Obad. 1:3) and prevents the wicked from seeking God (Ps. 10:4).   To fear the Lord is to hate Pride (Prov. 8:13).   Interestingly, it is said to lead to shame and being brought low in contrast with humility and (voluntary) lowliness leading to wisdom and honour (Prov. 11:2, 29:23), which may be where Greek and Biblical thought on the subject were the furthest removed from each other.   Very interestingly, considering the occasion of this essay, is that Ezekiel gave it as the first example in his list of the iniquities that brought judgement upon Sodom (Ez. 16:49).   Jesus spoke of Pride as one of the things that comes from out of the heart and defiles a man (Mk. 7:22).   The cognate adjective proud is used less frequently and no differently.  

 

It is only when it comes to the conceptually related verbs “boast” and “glory” that we find references that are positive and these generally speak of a “boasting” or “glorying” that is fundamentally the opposite of the kind that would be associated with Pride.   Here are a few examples:

 

My soul shall make her boast in the LORD: the humble shall hear thereof, and be glad. (Ps.  34:2)

 

In God we boast all the day long, and praise thy name forever. Selah. (Ps. 44:8)

 

God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me and I unto the world. (Gal. 6:14)

 

While Greek thought with regards to hubris approached Biblical thought regarding Pride, it fell short.   The Greeks worshipped gods whom they thought of as being superior to mortal men in terms of strength and power but generally not in terms of righteousness and justice.   Indeed, it could be argued that Greek mythology generally presented the gods as men’s moral inferiors.   There are some exceptions to this among the ancient writers, but it was noticeable enough to attract attention, comment, and attempts at reform from Plato and Euripides among others.   Something like hubris that offended such deities, therefore, simply could not be thought of in the same terms as that which offends the True and Living God of the Bible, Who is man’s superior in every way, in the superlative and not just the comparative degree.   Since the Scriptures tell us that men were created Innocent by the True and Living God, but fell into sin which offends against Him Who is Supremely Perfect in His Holiness, Righteousness, and Justice, it can hardly be surprising that the same Scriptures universally condemn human Pride, and counsel sinful men to adopt an attitude of brokenness, contrition, and humility, warning them that if they lift themselves up in Pride He will bring them low, but promising that if they humble themselves in the sight of the LORD, He will lift them up (Jas. 4:10).    The Church’s traditional identification of Superbia – Pride – as the source of all other sin, the worst and deadliest of the Seven Deadly Sins, represents Scriptural thought faithfully.   In this as in many other areas, ancient Greek thought demonstrates how far human philosophy can go relying upon General Revelation, but also how far it falls short of the Special Revelation of the Scriptures and the Incarnation of Jesus Christ.  This is the Hamartia of human philosophy.

 

When it comes to the Pride that is contemporarily celebrated on the sixth month of the year, however, ancient Greek thought would condemn it as much as Christian thought.   This might seem paradoxical, in that the ancient Greeks were famously tolerant of some of the sexual conduct associated with Pride month, but as noted earlier the modifier which once qualified Pride was dropped years ago, the reference to the lesser sin which the Greeks tolerated being eliminated leaving only the name of the worst of all sins.   The arrogance of the current demands of the intolerant Left that everybody pay homage to the celebration or face “cancellation” is such than any of the ancient Greeks would have recognized it as hubris.  

 

It is best that we stick to using the name of Jupiter’s wife for this month.   Pagan in origin, thought it undoubtedly be, it is far less objectionable than the other alternative.

 

(1))   In my opinion the traditional interpretation is correct.   Although the early Reformers rejected it, it has strong Patristic support, going back at least as far as Tertullian and Origin in the second century.   That this interpretation may have dated back to the intertestamental period cannot be ruled out – there is insufficient evidence from the period itself.    The Church Fathers, however, relied upon a handful of New Testament passages that speak of the fall of Satan using language that suggests allusion to the Isaiah passage. The two passages in question use language that obviously does not apply literally to the kings of Babylon and Tyre and which it would be rather a stretch to apply to them in any metaphorical sense.

What Books Make Up the Bible?

The twenty-second chapter of the Gospel according to St. Matthew records events that took place in the final week of Jesus’ earthly ministry, after He had openly presented Himself to Israel as their Messiah on the first Palm Sunday, as recorded in chapter twenty-one, and before the Last Supper, in which He partook of the Passover Seder of the Old Covenant with His disciples for the last time and instituted the sacrament of the Eucharist of the New Covenant on the evening of His betrayal, arrest, and trial, as recorded in chapter twenty-six. During that last week, Jesus taught in the Temple and His enemies came to Him posing trick questions in vain attempts to trip Him up. Three such occurrences are recorded in the chapter we are considering, the first and third by the Pharisees and the second by the Sadducees. After the final question – the one about which commandment is the greatest – Jesus turned the tables on His interrogators and asked them a question which they could not answer after which, the Apostle records “neither durst any man from that day forth ask him any more questions.”

The question from the Sadducees and Jesus’ response is particularly interesting. The Sadducees, whom the Apostle reminds us did not believe in the resurrection from the dead, asked Him:

Master, Moses said, If a man die, having no children, his brother shall marry his wife, and raise up seed unto his brother. Now there were with us seven brethren: and the first, when he had married a wife, deceased, and, having no issue, left his wife unto his brother: Likewise the second also, and the third, unto the seventh. And last of all the woman died also. Therefore in the resurrection whose wife shall she be of the seven? for they all had her. (vv. 24-28)

Jesus answer is to say:

Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven. But as touching the resurrection of the dead, have ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living. (vv. 29-32)

There are two parts to His answer, the first part which addresses the question posed to Him, and the second which addresses the Sadducee’s heretical doctrine. The first part of the answer raises the question of what exactly Jesus meant when He said that they did not know the Scriptures. It cannot be referring to their rejection of the resurrection as it precedes the περὶ δὲ (“but concerning”) at the beginning of verse 31 with which Jesus turns to this matter. It seems at first glance, therefore, like Jesus is saying that what He goes on to explain about the nature of the resurrection state is explicitly found in the Old Testament Scriptures. If, however, this is what He meant, where are those Old Testament Scriptures that say that in the resurrection “they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven”?

The answer, of course, is that nowhere in the Old Testament does it say any such thing about the state of the resurrected. Jesus own words are the first revelation we have on this subject. What then was He talking about when He said that they did not know the Scriptures?

Sadly, few evangelicals will know the answer. This is because most of them have never read the book to which the Sadducees were alluding when they posed their question to Jesus. No, they did not just make it up to suit their purposes. The story of the woman who had seven husbands comes from the Book of Tobit, which is set in Ninevah, after the Assyrians had conquered the Northern Kingdom in 720 BC. The book concludes with the destruction of Ninevah in 612 BC, as prophesied in the book of Nahum, but this takes place long after the main narrative has concluded. The title character is a faithful Israelite of the tribe of Naphtali who, like Antigone in Sophocles’ play, gets in trouble with the civil authorities for performing burials that they have forbidden. Blinded by birds after sleeping in the street one night, he sends his son Tobias to a man in Media to collect money the latter owes him. Raphael, “one of the seven holy Angels, which present the prayers of the Saints, and which go in and out before the glory of the Holy one” (11:15) accompanies Tobias and helps him both to accomplish his task, to heal his father’s blindness, and to marry Sara, daughter of their kinsman Raguel. Sara has previously been given in marriage to seven men, but each had been killed on the wedding night by Asmodeus, demon of lust, before the marriage could be consummated. Raphael shows Tobias how to drive the demon away, and so to safely marry Sara.

The Sadducees, in alluding to this story, add the detail that the seven husbands were brothers acting in accordance to the Levirate instructions in Deuteronomy 25, which, although it can be reasonably inferred is not present in Tobit, and, more importantly leave out the more important detail that she was given in marriage an eight time, and this time the marriage was completed. Of these, only the eighth, Tobias, was ever truly her husband in the fullest sense of the term. Thus, “not knowing the scriptures”, they presented a mangled and distorted version of the story. Note that the reason the Sadducees did not know this book very well is the same reason that they did not believe in either the resurrection or angels. They accepted only the Torah (the Pentateuch, the first five books) as canon.

Many Calvinists today deny that this passage in the Gospel of Matthew – which is also found in Luke and Mark – alludes to the Book of Tobit, but in support of this denial, they can only point to the differences between the Tobit account of the woman with seven husbands and the Sadducees version when, as we have seen, these differences are precisely what Jesus was calling attention to in rebuking them for not knowing the Scriptures. The real problem Calvinists have with seeing the allusion to Tobit here is that they, like the Sadducees, do not regard the book of Tobit as Scripture. In this they disagree with the vast majority of Christians throughout history and, if the text does indeed allude to Tobit, with the Lord Jesus Christ Himself.

The book of Tobit belongs to those books which in Martin Luther’s German Bible of 1534 and in the Authorized English Version of 1611 were printed in a separate section between the Old and New Testament and dubbed, “The Apocrypha”. This is a misnomer, as the books which can be found in these sections are not the Gnostic, heretical, and pseudepigraphal writings to which the early church first applied this term. In the Bibles of the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches as well as the ancient Churches of the Near East these are found within the Old Testament itself. They are not printed at all in most bibles that evangelicals use, such as the popular New International Version. It is a widespread notion among evangelicals that the Bible consists of sixty-six books and that the books contained in the so-called “Apocryhpa” were added by the Roman Catholics at the Council of Trent. This is a distortion of history, and it does not represent the viewpoint of the Protestant Reformers.

When Martin Luther moved these books, in his translation of the Bible, from the Old Testament into the “Apocrypha”, he defined “Apocrypha” as meaning “books which are not considered equal to the Holy Scriptures, but are useful and good to read.” This does not mean that he considered them as being down on the level of his own writings, or even those of the Church Fathers. It meant that he considered them unequal to the books which he left in the Old and New Testaments, but still worthy of being set higher than all other Christian literature by being printed in the Bible itself. This was the same position taken by the Church of England in the Sixth of its Thirty-Nine Articles, which is why the Book of Common Prayer includes readings from them in its lectionary (the readings for the weeks of the Sixth Sunday after Epiphany, the Twenty-Third through Twenty-Sixth Sundays after Trinity, and the Last Sunday before Advent) and why it was included in King James’ Authorized Bible in the same position as in Luther’s Bible. Although the evangelical/fundamentalist idea that these books don’t belong in the Bible at all and perhaps should be avoided as being “popish” came, as we shall see, out of the Calvinist tradition, it does not represent John Calvin’s own views. Calvin, on this as on many other matters, was much closer to Martin Luther and the English Reformers than he was to those who would call themselves “Calvinists.”

Those who argue for the “Calvinist” position on the canon – that I and II Esdras (III and IV Esdras in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles which count Ezra and Nehemiah as I and II Esdras), Tobit, Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, the Prayer of Manasseh, I and II Maccabees, and the LXX versions of Esther, Jeremiah (including Baruch and the Epistle of Jeremiah), Daniel (including the Song of the Three Children, Susanna and the Elders, and Bel and the Dragon) – are no part of the Bible and should be regarded with suspicion as popish additions will often maintain that neither Jesus nor His Apostles cited these books in the New Testament and that the earliest non-canonical Christian writings did not do so either. Neither of these claim is true.

The allusion to Sara and her seven husbands in Matthew 24 is not the only reference to Tobit in the New Testament. The Book of Revelation reads like a written tapestry in which threads of imagery are plucked from throughout the Old Testament and woven together. In the eights chapter St. John writes that “I saw the seven Angels which stand before God, and to them were given seven trumpets. And another Angel came and stood at the altar, having a golden censer, and there was given unto him much incense, that he should offer it with the prayers of all Saints upon the golden altar which was before the throne.” (vv. 2-3). The seven angels who stand before God and offer up the prayers of the saints comes from the fifteenth verse of the eleventh chapter of Tobit (quoted above). John Calvin saw a reference to the fourth chapter of Baruch in the tenth chapter of St. Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians where both speak of sacrifices to idols as being made to devils. Later in the same epistle, his reasoning in the verse which speaks of those “who are baptized for the dead” is identical to that used in II Maccabees 12:43-45 to explain Judas Maccabeus’ actions in sending two thousand drachmas of silver to Jerusalem to offer a sin offering on behalf of his slain comrades. Indeed, there are multiple references to the Maccabees throughout the New Testament. In the Olivet Discourse Jesus references the book of Daniel when He speaks about the “Abomination of Desolation” but it would be difficult, if not impossible, for “whoso readeth” to “understand” what Daniel was talking about without the illumination provided by the books of Maccabees. In the tenth chapter of John’s Gospel Jesus goes to Jerusalem to participate in a festival established, not in the Torah, but in the Maccabees. The author of Hebrews includes a reference to II Maccabees chapter seven in his list of heroes of faith in chapter 11 (verse 35).

Calvinist theologian Wayne Grudem, citing F. F. Bruce and Roger Beckwith as authorities, states that “In fact, the earliest Christian evidence is decidedly against viewing the Apocrypha as Scripture, but the use of the Apocrypha gradually increased in some parts of the church until the time of the Reformation.” (1) John Piper makes similar statements. This is utterly fantastical nonsense, however. Apart from the New Testament itself, of which vide supra, you do not find earlier “Christian evidence” that St. Clement of Rome’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, The Epistle of Barnabas, (2) the Didache, and St. Polycarp of Smyrna’s Epistle to the Philippians. In these Wisdom, Sirach, and Tobit are all cited authoritatively like any other Scripture.

The fact of the matter is that the books that in Luther’s Bible and the KJV are called “The Apocrypha” were part of the Septuagint or LXX. This was a Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, that was said to have had been made by seventy-two Jewish scholars for the Macedonian King of Egypt, Ptolemy II, who wanted copies of all the world’s books of wisdom for the library in Alexandria. (3) According to legend each was required to translate the whole of the Hebrew sacred writings independently of the others and miraculously they all agreed. Whatever truth there may or may not be to that story, it was the LXX and not the Hebrew Masoretic Text that became the Old Testament of the early Church. The books that were in the LXX, but not the Masoretic Text, were accepted as Scriptures – not without dissent, but by a broad consensus – by the Christian Church, from its earliest days, and long before the Council of Trent. N.B. they are included in the canons of the Eastern Churches that broke with Rome in 1056 AD, a good five hundred years before the Council of Trent, and by the Near Eastern Churches that broke with the Greek and Latin Churches almost five hundred years before that.

The dissenting voices to the broad consensus wherewith the LXX, including the books not found in the Masoretic Text, was accepted as Old Testament Scriptures represent a minority, regional, tradition. It was primarily followers of Origen of Alexandria, such as Pamphilus and Eusebius of Caesarea, who argued against the LXX. This was a school of thought that, while highly regarded for its scholarship was not known for its orthodoxy. Origen, notoriously, fell into a sort of proto-Arianism of which Eusebius was also later accused. On the other hand, St. Athanasius of Alexandria, the champion of Trinitarian orthodoxy and Eusebius’ chief opponent, also took Origen’s position on the Old Testament canon, arguing that the canon should be limited to the books of the Masoretic Text, minus the book of Esther, but that a second category of “ecclesiastical books” needed to be recognized, consisting of writings approved by the Fathers for edification and instruction. In this category he placed Esther, the LXX books, and certain early non-canonical Christian writings like the Didache and the Shepherd of Hermas. (4) St. Jerome was of the same opinion, although he included the LXX books in his Latin translation of the Old Testament. Apart from St. Athanasius and St. Jerome, there were very few others among the unquestionably orthodox Fathers who did not fully accept the canonicity of the LXX.

In arguing against the canonicity of the books found in the LXX but not the Masoretic Text these men used the lack of Hebrew originals and the fact that the Jews did not accept the books in their own canon as reasons for excluding them from the Christian canon. The first of these reasons is partially out-of-date as Hebrew copies of some of these books have since been discovered – portions of Sirach and Tobit in Hebrew, for example, were discovered among the scrolls in the caves of Qumran in the twentieth century. The second reason is not a valid reason for excluding these books from the Christian canon. No matter how it is parsed, what it is ultimately reduces to is the idea that a religion that rejects Jesus Christ as the Messiah is a more trustworthy authority as to what books belong in the Bible than the broad consensus of the Christian Church from the earliest days. (5)

Martin Luther, John Calvin, and the English Reformers, while they accepted the arguments of Sts. Athanasius and Jerome, did not remove the “ecclesiastical books” from the Bible altogether, but rather set them apart, between the Testaments, in a section that they unfortunately and inaccurately dubbed “The Apocrypha.” The position of these Reformers was that of the Church of England in its Thirty-Nine Articles declared of these books “And the other Books (as Hierome saith) the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine.” (6) Note that this is identical to the distinction Martin Luther drew between the literal interpretation of the Scriptures and the other three interpretations of the traditional quadriga (allegorical, moral, and anagogical). The latter interpretations are only to be considered valid if established elsewhere in the Scriptures literally, and doctrines can be supported from the deuterocanonical books if established in the protocanonical books. Luther frequently quoted the deuterocanonical books in this way and while Calvin was less liberal in his use of the deuterocanonical writings, he did often appeal to Baruch and the Wisdom of Solomon.

So why do evangelicals dissent, not only from the vast majority of Christian Churches (Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and ancient Near Eastern Churches all accepting the full canonicity of the “ecclesiastical” or “deuterocanonical” books) but the Protestant Reformers (who kept the books in the Bible, as in Luther’s translation and the KJV, but in a subordinate position, appealed to for instruction, edification, and support, but not establishment of doctrine), and take the unhistorical position that these are “popish” books, added by the Roman Catholic Church at the Council of Trent?

Today’s evangelicals are basically liberal fundamentalists, that is to say individuals who have a mostly fundamentalist theology with considerably less rigidness and strictness – often on things that they ought to be rigid and strict about. Fundamentalism was a late-nineteenth to early-twentieth century movement, based primarily in North America, and descended theologically from the Puritanism of the late sixteenth to seventeenth centuries, in England and her North American colonies. Puritanism was the radicalized form of Calvinism, brought back to England from Switzerland after the reign of Bloody Mary. In addition to being the ancestor of fundamentalism and through fundamentalism modern evangelicalism it was also the ancestor of political liberalism (of which the “conservative” republicanism of the country to our south is a variety).

The Puritans were religious and political extremists. By contrast with Luther and the English Reformers, who reformed Church practices in accordance with the Normative Principle (established church customs that are not forbidden in the Scriptures are allowed to be retained) they followed Calvin’s Regulative Principle (whatever is not authorized by the Scriptures is forbidden) and took this much further than Calvin himself. This principle is enshrined in the Westminster Confession of Faith (Chapter XXI, paragraph 1) (7), which is the first Confession to go further than the Reformers on the deuterocanonical writings and take the hard position that “The books commonly called Apocrypha, not being of divine inspiration, are no part of the canon of the Scripture, and therefore are of no authority in the Church of God, nor to be any otherwise approved, or made use of, than other human writings” (Chapter I, paragraph 3). The men who wrote the Westminster Confession of Faith were rebels, revolutionaries, seditionists, and terrorists, waging war against their king and the established Church, who three years after writing their Confession, illegally put their king to death, and established the tyrannical junta that would be the prototype of subsequent, secular, totalitarian states such as the first French Republic, and those of the Communists and Nazis. In placing the LXX books outside the Bible altogether, as the earlier Reformers were careful not to do, not wanting to be guilty of subtracting from the Scriptures, they chose to believe that the religion that rejects Jesus Christ as Messiah is right about the Old Testament canon and that the broad consensus among those who have confessed Jesus Christ is wrong, and were guilty of countless other counts of Judaizing as well. (8)

Today’s evangelicals would do well to reject this heritage, and return to that of the earlier, saner, evangelicalism of Luther and the English Reformers.


(1) Wayne A. Grudem, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994)
(2) Not to be confused with the heretical Gospel of Barnabas.
(3) The title of the translation refers to the number of translators, rounded down to the nearest ten.
(4) St. Athanasius of Alexandria, Festal Epistle for 367 AD.
(5) This argument against the exclusion of these books from the Christian canon is all the stronger if, as has long been believed, Judaism did not come to a decisive decision as to its own canon until after the destruction of the Second Temple. The theory, based upon a passage in the Mishnah portion of the Talmud, that this took place at a Council held in Yahvneh or Jamnia in the late first century AD, has gone out of vogue among scholars, but the evidence does suggest that until the destruction of the Second Temple (70 AD) necessitated the translation of Jewish identity out of the terms of the nation Israel and into those of the religion Judaism, there was no consensus among the sects of the first century Jews as to the canon of their Scriptures. As noted in the text of this essay, the sect of the Sadducees had an extremely limited canon, and while the sect of the Pharisees may very well have accepted a canon closer to that of present day Judaism, the first century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus speaks of twenty-two books that were divinely inspired and authoritative (the canon of the Tanakh currently recognized by Judaism contains twenty-four books, Ezra and Nehemiah being considered one book, as are the twelve minor prophets), other Jewish groups, such as the one in Alexandria to which the philosopher Philo belonged, used the Septuagint, the Dead Sea Scrolls provide evidence that Hebrew originals of the LXX books not found in the Masoretic Text were used by the Essenes, and, ironically, all branches of Judaism continue to celebrate as a major festival each year, Hanukkah, which was established in the Maccabean books.
(6) For a fuller look at the original Protestant position on the canon see D. H. Graham’s article “The Protestant Bible: A Touchstone of Orthodoxy,” which can be found in Anglican Tradition, Volume I, (2012-2015), pp.25-52.
(7) Ironically the chapter previous to this is the one on “Christian Liberty, and Liberty of Conscience.”
(8) See Eliane Glazer, Judaism Without Jews: Philosemitism and Christian Polemic in Early Modern England, (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), pp. 30-63 and Norman Podhoretz, Why are the Jews Liberal?, (New York: Doubleday, 2009), pp, 73-80.