Apocrypha, The

J. McCabe, Rationalists Encyclopaedia

The. After the Babylonian Captivity, when the Hebrew literature was very drastically "redacted" (and falsified) by the priests, the practice of putting old or forged names (Solomon, David, Daniel, etc.) to new writings spread. The orthodox Jewish leaders, having accomplished all the forging they needed, closed the canon [see], and the sects (Essenes, etc.) had a large number of uncanonical or apocryphal (literally, "hidden") books. The canon was, in fact, not the same for the Palestinian and for the more liberal Alexandrian Jews, and many books (I and II Esdras, Tobit, Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, and the Maccabees) which are not found in the Protestant Old Testament are included in the Catholic version, while some are not admitted by either Church. when the Christian period began, or in the last part of the first century and during the second, many lives of Jesus and apostolic epistles were compiled by pious fictionists, and in the fourth or fifth century [see Canon] the Roman Church selected the four Gospels and twenty-one Epistles of the New Testament and condemned the others, many of which are infantile in their absurdity, as apocryphal. An excellent translation of these is published by the Clarendon Press (The Apocryphal New Testament, 2 ed., 1926), and there is a volume of them in the Ante-Nicene Library (1870, Vol. XVI). The best edition of the Old Testament apocrypha is that of R. H. Charles (The Apocrypha and the Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, 2 vols., 1913). The story, reproduced (not seriously) in Haeckel's Riddle of the Universe, of the four Gospels leaping on to the altar at the Council of Nicaea is a very late piece of fiction. The Council of Nicaea did not settle the canon.

 

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