Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha, sepha?ri?m genu?zi?m, sepha?ri?m hi?tso?ni?m
Words in two different languages. Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha are English words from an Greek source, sepha?ri?m genu?zi?m and sepha?ri?m hitso?ni?m are phonetically Latin transliteration of four Hebrew words. The common denominator is the Bible, the Hebrew Bible (commonly known as the Old Testament) and the Christian Bible (commonly known as the New Testament) – in both cases the signification is one – those words represent a number of literary works “stored away”.
Definition
The word Apocrypha, as usually understood, denotes the collection of religious writings which the Septuagint [1] and Vulgate [2] (with trivial differences) contain in addition to the writings constituting the Jewish and Protestant canon. This is not the original or the correct sense of the word, as will be shown, but it is that which it bears almost exclusively in modern speech. In critical works of the present day it is customary to speak of the collection of writings now in view as “the Old Testament Apocrypha,” because many of the books at least were written in Hebrew, the language of the Old Testament, and because all of them are much more closely allied to the Old Testament than to the New Testament. But there is a “New” as well as an “Old” Testament Apocrypha consisting of gospels, epistles, etc. Moreover the adjective “Apocryphal” is also often applied in modern times to what are now generally called “Pseudepigraphical writings,” so designated because ascribed in the titles to authors who did not and could not have written them (e.g. Enoch, Abraham, Moses, etc.). The persons thus connected with these books are among the most distinguished in the traditions and history of Israel, and there can be no doubt that the object for which such names have been thus used is to add weight and authority to these writings.
[1] Septuagint (LXX) – The oldest Greek version of the Old Testament; said to have been translated from the Hebrew by Jewish scholars at the request of Ptolemy II
[2] Vulgate – The Latin edition of the Bible translated from Hebrew and Greek mainly by St. Jerome at the end of the 4th century; as revised in 1592 it was adopted as the official text for the Roman Catholic Church
Apocrypha in Christian Theology
The investigation which follows will show that when the word “Apocryphal” was first used in ecclesiastical writings it bore a sense virtually identical with “esoteric”: so that “apocryphal writings” were such as appealed to an inner circle and could not be understood by outsiders. The present connotation of the term did not get fixed until the Protestant Reformation had set in, limiting the Biblical canon to its present dimensions among Protestant churches.
- Classical utilization - The Greek adjective, apo?kruphos, denotes strictly “hidden,” “concealed,” of a material object (Euripides in his play Hercules Furious). Then it came to signify what is obscure, recondite, hard to understand (Xenophanes Memories). But it never has in classical Greek any other sense.
- Hellenistic utilization – In Hellenistic Greek as represented by the Septuagint and the New Testament there is no essential departure from classical usage. In the Septuagint (or rather Theodotion’s version) of Daniel 11:43 it stands for “hidden” as applied to gold and silver stores. But the word has also in the same text the meaning “what is hidden away from human knowledge and understanding.” So Daniel 2:20 where the apokrupha or hidden things are the meanings of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream revealed to Daniel though “hidden” from the wise men of Babylon. The word has the same sense in Sirach 14:21; 39:3, 7; 42:19; 48:25; 43:32.
- In the New Testament – In the New Testament the word occurs but thrice, namely, Mark 4:22 and the parallel Luke 8:17; Colossians 2:3. In the last passage Bishop Lightfoot thought we have in the word apokruphoi (treasures of Christ hidden) an allusion to the vaunted esoteric knowledge of the false teachers, as if Paul meant to say that it is in Christ alone we have true wisdom and knowledge and not in the secret books of these teachers. Assuming this, we have in this verse the first example of apokruphos in the sense “esoteric.” But the evidence is against so early a use of the term in this – soon to be its prevailing – sense. Nor does exegesis demand such a meaning here, for no writings of any kind seem intended.
- Patristic [3] – In patristic writings of an early period the adjective apokruphos came to be applied to Jewish and Christian writings containing secret knowledge about the future, etc., intelligible only to the small number of disciples who read them and for whom they were believed to be specially provided. To this class of writings belong in particular those designated Apocalyptic, and it will be seen as thus employed that apokruphos has virtually the meaning of the Greek esoterikos.
[3] Patristic – Church Fathers – any of about 70 theologians in the period from the 2nd to the 7th century whose writing established and confirmed official church doctrine; in the Roman Catholic Church some were later declared saints and became Doctor of the Church.
Hebrew Definitions for “Apocrypha”
Is it quite certain that there is no Hebrew word or expression corresponding exactly to the word “apocrypha” as first used by Christian writers, i.e. in the sense “esoteric”? One may answer this by a decisive negative as regards the Old Testament and the Talmud. But in the Middle Ages Kabbalah (literally, “tradition”) came to have ‘a closely allied meaning. Is there in Hebrew a word or expression denoting “non-canonical,” i.e. having the secondary sense acquired by “apocrypha”? This question does not allow of so decided an answer, and as matter of fact it has been answered in different ways.
The great nineteen century Hebraists – Zahn, Schürer, Porter and others maintain that the Greek word “Apocrypha ?Biblia” is a translation of the Hebrew sepharim genuzim literally, “books stored away.” If this view is the correct one it follows that the distinction of canonical and non-canonical books originated among the Jews, and that the Fathers in using the word apocrypha in this sense were simply copying the Jews substituting Greek words for the Hebrew equivalent. But there are decisive reasons for rejecting this view. The verb ganaz of which the passive part. occurs in the above phrase means “to storeaway,” “to remove from view” – of things in themselves sacred or precious. It never means to exclude as from the canon. The Hebrew phrase in question does not once occur in either the Babylonian or the Jerusalem Talmud, but only in rabbinical writings of a much later date. The Greek apocrypha cannot therefore be a rendering of the Hebrew expression. The Hebrew for books definitely excluded from the canon is sefarim hitsonim= “outside” or “extraneous books.” The Mishna (the text of the Gemara, both making up what we call the Talmud) or oral law with its additions came to be divided analogously into (1) The Mishna proper; (2) the external Mishna: in Aramaic called Barita (Baraiytha)
Definition and Classification Criteria for non-Biblical Corpus (OT. Apocrypha)
We believe that a large literary corpus composed or compiled in a period of about 300-400 years between 250 BC to 150 CE is valuable for us, socially and culturally as much as the Bible is. We accept the Divine insight of the Bible, but beside the Torah (Pentateuch) the others books of the Bible are collection of writings made by man, smart and maybe holy peoples – but human beings. Our basic assumption is that Judaism developed out of the religion and culture of an ancient commonwealth of Hebrews tribes, through one or two national states during the Iron Age, crystallized in a Babylonian exile and a Persian Satrapy period Judea. The collection now known as the Hebrew Bible was composed and redacted into various forms (in Judea, Babylon and Egyptian Diaspora), some surviving today, during this same period. If we want to know how to identify ancient Jewish literature, the logical first step is to identify verifiably ancient Jewish manuscripts, manuscripts that survived from the second temple and Hellenistic periods.
There are some very obvious criteria that can establish with virtual certainty that a given ancient work is Jewish: if a work with clear Jewish themes and content (i.e., pervasive knowledge of and interest in material and themes in the Hebrew Bible) survives in manuscripts copied in the pre-Christian era; if a work survives from the pre-Christian era or even the Hellenistic/Roman periods in Hebrew, the language of the Jewish scriptures; or if a copy of the work is preserved in a physical context that is undoubtedly Jewish (the Qumran library is the obvious example). Let see what are our basic tools:
- Ancient text from 2nd Temple Judea:
- The Dead Sea Scrolls recovered from caves near the Wadi Qumran and other Dead Sea Wadis (Se’eilim, Hever and Mur’baat)
- The texts recovered from Masada
- The texts of the Bar Kochba era recovered from caves in the Judean Desert
- Samaritan documents written in Hebrew.
- Jewish inscriptions in Judea and the Jewish Diaspora. - Texts preserved in highly fragmentary manuscripts (in the sites mentioned above ). In Qumran we find many fragments from Enoch (Book of the Watchers; the Heavenly Luminaries, Book; the Dream Vision Book, and the Epistle of Enoch) as well as Jubilees, Tobit, Ben Sira/Ecclesiasticus, and the Epistle of Jeremiah.
- Late Rabbinical material – Citations, approval (or disapproval) of works as Jewish in a certainly Jewish text, or transmission of a work in second temple or post-biblical Jewish circles, supports its genuineness as an originally Jewish text. This criterion is potentially useful as collateral evidence but is not in itself decisive. Jewish writers sometimes quote with approval or make use of non-Jewish works.
- Quotations in several works of Jewish thinkers as Philo of Alexandria and Josephus (i.e. Enoch, 1 Maccabees, etc.,).
