A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

traditions. Some of these books were actually added to the Tanakh by Jews in Greek-speaking settings such as Alexandria (see p. 69), and hence the early Christians, also Greek-speaking, regarded them as having the full status of God’s word. During the fourth century CE doubts began to be expressed by some Christian commentators, who gave them the description ‘apocrypha’ (‘hidden things’). In the sixteenth-century Reformation of the Western Church, Protestants made a definite decision to exclude them from what Christians term the ‘canon’ of recognized scripture.42 For Protestants, this had the useful effect of undercutting various doctrines held by that part of the Western Church still loyal to the pope, doctrines which could find biblical warrant only within books of the Apocrypha. Martin Luther duly fished these extra books out of the general assemblage of scripture, yet he kept them in an appendix to his German Bible of 1534, and the Church of England allowed some samples of them to be read in public worship; other Protestants dropped them altogether.