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| Septuagint: Greek Old Testament. Public Domain. |
Since I mentioned 1 Maccabees in the Old Testament post, I decided to briefly address the apocrypha in a post.
The most important thing to remember about these books are that they are JEWISH, not Catholic.
They were written BEFORE Jesus' birth by Jews in the period between the Old and New Testament time (approximately 400 year timeframe).
Here they are:
TobitJudith
1 Maccabees
2 Maccabees
Book of Wisdom
Sirach
Baruch
Letter of Jeremiah
Additions to Daniel
Additions to Esther
Judith is brilliant in an Esther meets Éowyn sort of way.
Tobit is weird, but very interesting to see how Jews were beginning to understand how the supernatural (demonic) realm worked. A married couple pray all night long after leaving out smelly fish and when the demon haunting the wife is successfully exorcised from the house, they believe it was due to the fish odor. (They seriously don't realize it's because they prayed all night?!?!?)
1 Maccabees is my favorite, and likely near-historically accurate. Some details differ from Josephus, but it's hard to say which is the more accurate account. Both are extremely similar.
2 Maccabees records accounts of the Seleucid persecutions. Possibly (hopefully!) exaggerated, but none the less likely, they have a strong basis in fact.
Book of Wisdom—several allusions made to this book in the NT.
Sirach—several near-quotes from this book in the NT, namely by Jesus.
An addition to Daniel that I've read has the priests of Bel (a Babylonian god) hide the food given to Bel's idol to "prove" the god eats it during the night, and Daniel proves that it is trickery.
I haven't read the rest so can't really comment on them.
BUT . . . all these Jewish books were in the Septuagint—the Greek version of the Old Testament for Jewish and Gentile believers living in the Roman Empire outside of Israel. In general, only believers who lived in Israel were taught Hebrew. The Septuagint was the Bible of all the Jews living across the Roman empire as well as the Bible of all the Gentile (non-Jewish) believers. In fact, the Septuagint was the Bible that the Bereans searched to see if what Paul was preaching was true (Acts 17:11).
Neither the Jews nor the early Church believed these books to be inspired, but both did consider them historical and edifying. The Jews did not add them to the Hebrew version of their scriptures, but Christians (who were mostly Greek-speaking) naturally kept them. When Jerome translated the Bible into Latin (for Western, Latin-speaking Christians), a version called the Catholic Vulgate, he marked these books as not inspired but felt that 1) they had historical and edifying value and 2) it was not his place to remove them since it was the Bible of the early church.
Some of these books were criticized by early Protestants since they were not considered inspired but were being used to create doctrines. The Catholic church then declared that they were inspired. Meanwhile, Protestants continued viewing them the same as Jerome, and like Jerome, did not delete them. Protestant Bibles (including the King James) placed these books in between the Old and New Testaments.
Then, in the 1800's, when Bible printing became more common, one Protestant printing company (accidently?) published copies without the apocrypha. When no one complained, they realized how much cheaper it was to print Bibles without those books. Other Protestant printing presses soon followed suit.
So, if you don't have a Catholic Bible (or Greek Orthodox or an original Protestant Bible), you have less books in your Bible than the Bereans.
If you only ever get around to reading just one of these books, I highly recommend 1 Maccabees. Its inherent historical value is priceless. However, you could also just read Josephus, and you'd also get all the historical events that occurred both before and after 1 Maccabees, thus an even greater understanding of the history between the testaments.
Paul Maier has a very easy to understand version of Josephus called Josephus: The Essential Works which I highly recommend.
The NLT (one of the easiest to understand translations) has a Catholic edition with these books.