A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Already Martin Luther had moved the boundaries of the biblical texts by creating the category of Apocrypha, which he had cordoned off from the Old Testament, even though Jews and the pre-Reformation Christian Church had made no such distinction. Now Quakers noted scholars’ increasing rediscovery of manuscripts containing inter-testamental literature or Christian apocrypha, much of which looked remarkably like the Bible. The gifted Hebrew scholar and Quaker Samuel Fisher, who may have used the young Spinoza to translate tracts into Hebrew, and who certainly got to know the Amsterdam synagogues in his efforts to convert Dutch Jews, gleefully pointed out in 1660 that Paul’s Epistle to the Laodiceans (which Paul had demanded be read in community worship, and so should be considered canonical), appeared to have gone missing altogether – or rather did exist, in a text extant but not acknowledged by the Church. He also drew attention to Jesus Christ’s supposed correspondence with King Abgar of Edessa (see pp. 180–81) – why were these texts outside the Bible, when a trivial letter of Paul’s to Philemon was in?30