When Evangelicals tore books out of the Bible
The story of the “Apocrypha”
When you grow up Evangelical, you vaguely know about some “bad” books that Catholics and Orthodox and Eastern believers put in their Bible.
As the story goes, we were the good Christians, and only read whatever came straight from God. Now I’m looking up facts about some texts called the ‘Apocrypha’ that are typically dismissed by Protestants.
Even the name is misleading.
‘Apocrypha’ is from the Latin word for ‘hidden’ — which these texts have never been. Deeply rooted in Christian history, they are found in many early Christian copies of the Bible (Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, Alexandrinus, etc.).
How did later Christians realize they were ‘bad’? It’s not a story anyone will tell you in church. As the scholar Matthew J. Korpman puts it in a recent study: “There has remained for a long time now a presumed narrative about these books, one that is repeated with little contention.”
What you’d hear is that the great leaders of Protestantism—starting with Martin Luther—started getting messages from God that a few Bible books that Catholics had included were…suspicious.
