Quote:
Originally Posted by crich70
And King James came into it because he was trying to keep peace in his kingdom and a standardized text that people could read would help that. Hard to read a text when it's written in latin and you don't understand latin. Even a lot of church men had that problem. I understand the Apocrypha is somewhat historic or tradition of what happened or something which might be one reason why they felt it wasn't canon. I've never read it myself so I don't know much about it. It is more accepted than some of the 'alleged' gospels like Thomas and Judas though I think.
|
Actually, there already was a
standardized text in English that was very popular at the time, but too antiestablishment for the political tastes of King James. Thus he commissioned the "Authorized Version" as opposed to the several "unauthorized" versions in use at the time.
The Apocrypha are books that exist in the Greek Septuagint, but not in the Masoretic Hebrew text. The Orthodox tradition (which the Roman Catholic Church inherited) is that the Greek Septuagint is not merely a human translation, but is itself divinely inspired (much like KJV-only Protestants now), thus all of the included books are Scripture. During the Middle Ages, the Jewish Masoretes compiled a canonical set of Hebrew texts and rejected the Apocryphal books. Since that time, Hebrew originals of the books have been lost (or perhaps some never existed in the first place; there's a bit of scholarly debate), so most of the Apocrypha only exists in Greek.
When Martin Luther translated the Bible into German in the 1500s, he used the Masoretic Hebrew text as his basis. He translated the rejected books from the Greek, but declared that they weren't scriptural and later Protestants followed suit. They were printed with Protestant Bibles, but separated from the canonical Old Testament. Eventually, mostly for cost reasons, the Apocrypha were omitted from most Protestant Bibles.
As far as whether or not the Apocryphal books are worth reading, I'd just point out that whether or not you consider them to be Scripture, the earliest Christians very likely did. Unless you're extremely comfortable with the English of the King James Bible, though, I'd recommend a more modern translation.