DeathScytheDuo

I have two questions for the bible scholar-like folks: Who wrote the Apocrypha and why were they rejected? I was reading through "Secrets of Enoch," where it mentions the fall of "Satanail" from heaven. Seems like we get some of our knowledge from these Apocrypha yet they are not in modern versions of the bible.

Chris Weimer

The first question is far too large to answer by itself, but the second question is merely because Judaism around the time of Christian canonisation exluded the documents.

spin

The apocrypha -- and I take it you are not referring to christian testament apocrypha -- is a group of texts from different circumstances, guaranteeing many writers and one would have to discuss the context for each of them, if it could be reconstructed, to deal with the authorship. But, by mentioning Enoch, you are not interested in those texts one calls the Apocrypha, as Enochic works were not included among them. There is another term which is often used, Pseudepigrapha, but then much of the Hebrew bible is pseudepigraphic: not many scholars would accept that Daniel was written by a person called Daniel, nor that much if any of the book of Isaiah was written by Isaiah, etc. One might call them non-canonical Jewish works.

As there are books, there are probably just as many reasons. Most of the apocryphal books were preserved because of christianity. They were included in early collections by christians. Some simply didn't survive into post 2nd Temple Jewish religious tradition. Some were carted off to Egypt, such as Ben Sira and the source for 2 Maccabees, though Ben Sira was not perceived by Jews as a holy book, but as a book of wisdom. The rest, because they weren't perceived as coming from ancient tradition, were not seen as being of cultic significance. Debates took place over certain books, such as Esther, but it is clear that many just weren't considered. This is partly because the Pharisees and their heirs were the dominant religious force in the fragmented Jewish society and they were unacquainted with late temple literary activities. Texts produced in such activity didn't have time to develop any status as holy through lack of acquaintance. So they were rejected out of hand. When during the Hellenistic crisis in the 160s BCE a group of Jews centred around the high priestly family migrated to Egypt, they took with them all the writings they could that were available at that time. Ben Sira, the scribe, probably went with them, as did the work of Jason of Cyrene who was responsible for 2 Maccabees. Other texts also went with them, though how many made it into the Apocrypha, there is no way to tell, yet Egypt is the source for the earliest collections of christian works which contained the Apocrypha.

The fall from heaven is tradition also found in 1 Enoch. There is a bowdlerized form of it hidden away in Gen 6:1-4, but, whereas Gen 6 is almost unintelligible, 1 Enoch tells you some of what the writer of Gen 6 knew and didn't include. The fall is partially traceable to a misreading of Isaiah 14:12ff, which is the text which refers to the planet Venus as the "bright one" which precedes the day, and in Latin the day star is Lucifer. Isaiah is talking about a nasty king who gets his just deserts...


spin