ACTS BIBLE
Bonus section
Fourteen books, written mostly between 200 BC and the first century, that sit in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles and not in Protestant ones. They were in the King James of 1611. Luther translated them. The argument was never whether to read them. It was whether a church may settle a question by them. 1 Enoch is here as well, received by the Ethiopian church alone and by no other, which is a different question and is answered separately below.
This section does not ask you to take anybody's word for the canon any more than for anything else. Every claim below names a document you can go and read, and the strongest ones are not Protestant documents.
That the Reformers removed books that had been Scripture, and that the Catholic Bible is the older and fuller one.
The books are genuinely ancient. The Greek Bible the apostles quote from carried them. Every great codex that survives, Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, Alexandrinus, has them mixed in among the others with nothing to mark them off. The 1611 King James printed them. Luther translated them and Coverdale printed them. Church history shows Protestants have had these in their Bibles.
Read in a church is not the same act as received as the rule of faith, and the distinction is not a modern invention. Jerome, who made the Latin Bible Rome used until the Reformation, wrote in his own preface that the church reads these for the building up of the people and not to establish doctrine. Athanasius drew the same distinction in 367, between books received as canonical and books read for instruction, though his own division of the two is not identical to Jerome's. Melito left them off the oldest surviving Christian list. Earlier councils had listed these books, at Hippo in 393, at Carthage in 397 and at Florence in 1442, so 1546 was not the first ruling. What Trent added was the anathema, and it attached it against a distinction that had been held inside the Roman church, by Jerome among others, for a thousand years. The 1611 edition set these books apart in their own section between the Testaments rather than among the prophets, which is the same distinction drawn in a printer's layout.
That Jude quoting Enoch makes Enoch Scripture.
Jude does quote it, and not vaguely. Jude 14 names Enoch, calls him the seventh from Adam, and says he prophesied. Verse 15 tracks 1 Enoch 1:9, which reads: and behold, he cometh with ten thousands of his holy ones to execute judgement upon all. The book is older than the New Testament, and copies of it in Aramaic were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church receives 1 Enoch as Scripture. No other communion does. It is not in the Roman canon fixed at Trent in 1546, not in the 1611 King James, which printed fourteen other books outside the canon, and not in any Protestant or Eastern Orthodox canon. Quotation was never the test. Paul quotes a Cretan poet in Titus 1 and Athenian poets at the Areopagus, and nobody has proposed adding them. Jude cites words he treats as true. He does not introduce the book with it is written, which is how the New Testament marks Scripture several hundred times.
That because the New Testament quotes the Septuagint, the apostles received whatever the Septuagint contained.
The first half is simply true. The New Testament quotes the Greek Old Testament constantly, sometimes where it differs from the Hebrew, and Hebrews 11 appears to be reaching for the martyrdoms in 2 Maccabees 7 when it speaks of women receiving their dead by resurrection and of others tortured and refusing release. An honest reader has to grant that these books were in the apostles' hands and in their memory.
Being in their hands is not the same as being cited as God's word, and the New Testament writers are careful about the difference. They introduce the Old Testament with it is written and the Scripture says several hundred times, across almost every book in the Hebrew canon. They never once do it for any of these. Jude, meanwhile, quotes 1 Enoch by name, a book no Western church has ever received, so quotation plainly was not what settled the matter for anybody. Paul also quotes a Cretan poet and an Athenian one. The apostles read widely and cited what was useful, and they marked out what was Scripture by how they introduced it.
That the canon question is a scholar's argument with no consequence in the pew.
For most of these books it really is close to no consequence. Tobit is a good story. Sirach is proverbs, often shrewd ones. Nothing in the Christian faith stands or falls on Judith. If the argument stopped there it would be a matter of shelf space and not worth the hour.
It does not stop there, and two texts are why. 2 Maccabees 12 has Judas Maccabeus collect money and send it to Jerusalem for a sin offering on behalf of soldiers who died in their sin, which the writer calls a holy and pious thought, and adds that he did it so they might be delivered. It is the clearest passage in any Bible where the living improve the standing of the dead, and the one most often cited for purgatory. Rome does not rest the doctrine on it alone. 1 Corinthians 3:15, where a man is saved yet so as by fire, and Matthew 12:32, where a sin is forgiven neither in this world nor in the world to come, are argued alongside it. Tobit 12 says almsgiving delivers from death and purges away sin, which is a sentence about how sin is dealt with. Trent received the books in 1546 and defined purgatory in the same council. Take those two passages out and the clearest scriptural support goes with them. The doctrine does not fall on that alone, because Rome grounds it in tradition and in the councils that defined it, at Lyons in 1274 and Florence in 1439 before Trent.
That a book kept out of the canon should be kept off the shelf.
The instinct is protective and it is not stupid. A book bound into a Bible carries the authority of the binding, whatever a preface says, and most people never read the preface. Tobit teaches that almsgiving purges sin and 2 Maccabees teaches that money sent to the temple helps the dead, and a reader who holds that sin is dealt with by Christ's death alone will find those two passages saying something else, in a book he was told is holy, and handing them over without comment leaves the collision unmentioned. The Bible Society in 1826 was not being narrow. It had watched three centuries of people drawing exactly the conclusion the placement invited.
The Protestant confessions do not say burn them, they say do not settle doctrine by them, and that is a different instruction. 1 Maccabees is the best surviving account of the four hundred years between Malachi and Matthew. Without it there is no way to explain how a defiled temple came to be standing and functioning when Luke chapter 1 opens, or what feast Jesus is walking through in John 10:22, because the Feast of Dedication is Hanukkah and Hanukkah is in 1 Maccabees 4. Anyone who urges reading the primary sources has no consistent ground for refusing this one.
Rome uses the word deuterocanonical, meaning second canon, for the first group. Orthodox churches receive a longer list again. So there is no single Apocrypha to be for or against.
The Roman canon was fixed in 1546. The position it condemned had been the ordinary opinion of Jerome, who translated the Vulgate that Rome used until the Reformation.