12 NEW TESTAMENT REFERENCES TO THE APOCRYPHA
12 NEW TESTAMENT REFERENCES TO THE APOCRYPHA
So far: (1) the Jewish Study Bible asserts (and the early Christian lists evidence) that the Jewish canon was not settled until well after the time of Christ, (2) many early Church Fathers claimed the Jewish Scriptures had become incomplete by their time, and (3) the New Testament gives us some Biblical evidence suggesting that the more Jewish the audience and the better taught the Jewish Christian writer was, the more the Evangelists focused on Apocrypha and tied them into their writings.[1]
But item (3) was a data analysis and not a discussion of the references themselves, so let’s move on to that. Just what kind of references are they? They were a mixed bag, of course, just like references to the “other” Old Testament Books. There are a few that are very strong and many that are weaker but which have a cumulative effect. We start with the few.
Our standard for the canonical Old Testament has to extend to the Apocrypha: otherwise, the sorts of things we do not accept for the Apocrypha will not stand as ‘proof’ in the case for Christianity. Thus, we start with some baselining from Don Stewart of the Blue Letter Bible:[2]
…while Ezra/Nehemiah, Esther, Song of Solomon, and Ecclesiastes are not directly cited in the New Testament, this does not mean that they were not part of Scripture.
So as a preliminary matter, an authoritative citation in the New Testament is really just a “one-way” gate: it puts things in the canon but does not exclude things that are not cited.[3] The exclusion, to folks like Stewart, comes from the Hebrew canon: if it is not on the Hebrew list, then it is not on the Christian list, and nothing else matters.[4]
The number of [Jewish canon] books had been long-fixed before the time of Christ.
Note he says the number of books, not the list of books by name. Note further his claim that it “had been long-fixed before the time of Christ” comes with neither a claim of exactly when that was done, nor a citation to a source ‘proving’ it—perhaps because Josephus (the source, I say) was not even born until several years after Christ was crucified, died, buried, rose again, and ascended into Heaven.[5]
This list included these four works.
Note that he does not actually give us a quote showing us that the list included these four works, perhaps because there is no such list. Josephus provided a number of books, 22, which (as the Jewish Study Bible noted) might match the modern canon or might not, and does not mention what it includes or rejects.
Indeed, at the time of Ben Sirach, two centuries before Christ, these works were cited as Holy Scripture.
With the phrase “at the time of Ben Sirach,” he presumably means that this is cited in the Book of Sirach but, apparently, he does not want to mention the name of an Apocrypha that claims that it itself is Scripture, and which was canon for some Rabbis, etc. Be that as it may, let us consider what Sirach actually said.[6] I cannot just quote it all for you because it is a long list of people, books, and deeds taking up many chapters, but in summary:
The Book of Sirach provides evidence of a collection of sacred scriptures similar to portions of the Hebrew Bible. … a list of names of biblical figures in the same order as is found in the Torah (Law) and the Nevi’im (Prophets), and which includes the names of some men mentioned in the Ketuvim (Writings). Based on this list of names, some scholars have conjectured that the author, Yeshua ben Sira, had access to, and considered authoritative, the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Job, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Twelve Minor Prophets.[7]
Notably not mentioned in that list: the four books we were told were cited! Ezra/Nehemiah, Esther, Song of Solomon, and Ecclesiastes. Per the footnotes on Wikipedia, Esther and Ecclesiastes are simply not included in Sirach’s canon, Song of Solomon might be alluded to (or might not) by a single mention of “songs,” and Nehemiah the person (but not the Books Ezra/Nehemiah) is mentioned by a variant of his name in Sirach 49:13.
I bring all this up for two reasons. First, the relevant sections of Sirach are also evidence that Baruch was Jewish Scripture. The Greek translation of the Book of Jeremiah and of Baruch 1:1-3:8 show that they were translated from Hebrew into Greek by the same person. Since Sirach refers to the Law and the Prophets as a well-known and accepted collection in the Greek-speaking community of Alexandria, the Greek version of Jeremiah with Baruch must have been completed by then and part of that collection.[8]
Second, the whole reason for all this talk about Josephus and Sirach is basically a timing problem. The allegedly certain and limited canon of the Jews was not actually alleged, even in concept, until Josephus (and then only as the number of 22 books)—and he was writing no less than 61 years after the Crucifixion. It is at least 30 years after Matthew, Mark, Peter, Paul, James, and Jude were all martyred, and thus, at least 30 years after all their Gospels and Epistles were written (if, like me, you accept those attributions). John (if we use the 90’s AD date) would be writing contemporaneously with the very earliest date for Josephus, but possibly well beforehand if the later dates for Josephus are correct. Polycarp (discussed below) enters the Church before Josephus writes (Justin Martyr might have, as well), and various non-Biblical works (such as 1 Clement, Clement’s Epistle to the Corinthians) are also thought to have been written before Josephus was writing.
I like to think of years in modern terms. As I write this in 2025, 61 years ago was 1964. That was the year the Beatles first toured America and started the British Invasion. The Palestine Liberation Organization was founded, and the Viet Nam war began. Cassius Clay beat Sonny Liston to become World Champion, before he changed his name to Muhammad Ali. For the first time, smoking cigarettes was declared hazardous to one’s health. It would be 27 years before the Soviet Union collapsed, and that was 34 years ago.
To put it mildly, 61 years is not a minor timing problem. Josephus is writing a long time after Christ, and he is the first to ever make this claim that the Jewish canon is actually limited to 22 Books. Whether any Jew agreed with him, let alone whether everyone did, is simply absent from the record. Not one scrap of paper agrees with Josephus until at least a century later (if the very earliest date of the range Gallagher and Meade discuss for the Talmud is the correct one, and obviously the range exists because many disagree with the early dating). In fact, many lists and much contrary evidence will be produced in the following centuries that counter Josephus’ claim: lists with 24 books, 27 books, lists without Esther, some where Wisdom, Baruch, and Susanna are included or the Maccabees mentioned, Talmudic citations and debates over Sirach, etc.
But more importantly for us, much if not all of the Divinely-inspired Scripture of the New Testament was also produced in those 61 years. So let’s look at what the New Testament references may be; they are part of the evidence about everything, including whether the Jewish canon was really as fixed and settled as Stewart believes it to have been.
[1] The evidence operates on many levels: did the people interacting with Jesus see the Apocrypha as Scripture, did the Evangelist writing a Gospel/Epistle see it as such, did the Evangelist’s audience see it as such, etc. And, of course, there is the overarching question of did Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, and the Father see it as such. Every single Biblical example has to be considered on all those levels, but I will not always mention every level.
[2] www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/stewart_don/faq/right-books-in-old-testament/question17-new-testament-quote-old-testament.cfm. First thing that came up on Google. Stewart gives us a good online summary of what the Protestant canon has going for it, which is why I am using it as my baseline here. The page I use from Stewart is part (question 17 of 21) of a much longer work on the Old Testament canon, which starts at: www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/stewart_don/faq/right-books-in-old-testament/introduction-right-books-in-old-testament.cfm
[3] Putting aside 1 Enoch, possibly cited in the Letter of Jude. It is considered noncanonical by Catholics and nearly all Protestants, while being accepted by the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox. So, a full quotation is (arguably) not a perfect “one-way” gate.
[4] Literally, nothing else matters—Stewart tells us that Books with nothing going for them New Testament-wise are still canon because they are on the Hebrew list, and (in this particular essay) Stewart does not concern himself with whatever the “Apocrypha” have going for them.
[5] Dates for when Josephus wrote the relevant book (Against Apion) range from 94-117 AD, 61-84 years after Christ. In the entire history of Judaism, not one single person had ever written this idea down until Josephus used it to argue that the Jews were right and the Greeks were wrong—the exact polemic use that raises the most suspicion that someone is making something up.
[6] It begins at chapter 44: www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Ecclesiasticus-Chapter-44/
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_the_Hebrew_Bible_canon
[8] Cribbed from the New Interpreter’s Bible, Introduction to Baruch, p. 931, with minor changes. The NIB’s reference to the comments in Sirach is to the prologue, written by the grandson of the author of the rest of Sirach, who was translating the grandfather’s Hebrew text into Greek.
