(Why) should we read the Apocrypha?

The latest Grove Biblical booklet is a fascinating study of the Apocrypha past Stephen Wright of Spurgeon's College in London, which makes a powerful example for why Christians ought to read it and exist familiar with its contents.

The booklet starts in an intriguing style:

Where in the Bible will you discover the story of a man who lost his sight considering of sparrow-debris and regained it through the awarding of fish-gall? Or of another who gave his life for his people past stabbing an elephant from beneath?

In some Bibles, you will not find them. That is because they occur in the Apocrypha, that rather mysterious drove of books that is spring into the center of some editions, just left out of many more than. Equally a kid growing up in a household that possessed a number of Bibles, I remember being intrigued by the fact that some independent more books than others.

Stephen explores the historical reasons why these books are omitted from most Protestant Bibles, then looks at what is actually in the Apocrypha. He and then addresses crucial questions of the key themes of the counterfeit texts, and how they relate to the rest of the canon of Scripture, finding points of both continuity and difference.

The most significant theological upshot occurs in the exploration of wrath and judgement, and how we empathise New Testament language about Jesus 'dying for the people' (John xi.fifty) as a 'sacrifice of atonement' (Romans 3.25). After outlining the employ of judgement language in 1–4 Maccabees, Stephen offers this exposition (pp 20–21):

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What is notable in all these passages is that wrath, or penalization, whether or not information technology is specifically ascribed to God, is non conceived only as an mental attitude in God's mind, just as concrete terror, pain and national trauma. The sacrifice of the martyrs, similarly, is seen every bit achieving not an unseen change of mind in God, simply the actual amelioration of suffering and reversal of fortunes. That and then becomes a sign of the mercy of God and the disciplinary potential of the suffering.

All this, together with the martyrs' hope of resurrection, sheds light on how early Christians and mayhap Jesus himself understood his death (2 Maccabees vii.9, 11, 14). The martyr-theology is ane strand of development of the 'suffering servant' concept from Isaiah fifty and 53. Jesus grows up amongst his suffering people and is willing to face the nigh excruciating torture and death for their sake. This will issue not in a just abstract transaction between God and them, but in a cardinal turning-point in their fortunes. Their sufferings, past, present and futurity, all the same the extent to which they brought them on themselves, can henceforth be interpreted as disciplinary rather than condemnatory.

This groundwork is especially instructive for understanding Paul's thinking in Romans. Most striking is that the word translated 'sacrifice of amende' in Rom three.25, hilast?rion, appears besides in 4 Maccabees 17.22: 'And through the blood of those devout ones and their death equally an atoning sacrifice, divine providence preserved Israel that previously had been mistreated. What and then might Paul mean when he says that God prepare along Jesus equally a 'sacrifice of atonement' (Rom iii.25)?

There has been intense debate over whether this give-and-take denotes 'propitiation' (appeasing God'south wrath) or 'expiation' (cleansing). My hunch is that since Paul has explicitly discussed the wrath of God in Rom 1.eighteen–32, and was surely enlightened of the theme of wrath and atonement in the Maccabean literature, he has 'propitiation' in mind here, simply in a sense that is coloured by the Maccabean narratives. He can be read equally hinting that Jesus, through his courageous obedience even to death as a sacrifice of atonement, was fulfilling the pattern of which the Maccabean martyrs were merely a stake foreshadowing.

In this lite, Paul is not saying Jesus was being punished by God, but courageously begetting the extremities of wrath, understood as the brutal outworking of the powers of evil crushing his people and all people. This wrath-begetting, as in the case of the Maccabees but far more so, was a cathartic and liberating historical forcefulness, non merely either a good example or an inward alter in God or humans. All this is indeed held within the sovereignty of God, who 'set him forth' as this 'sacrifice of atonement,' simply who—as the Apocryphal writers' theological struggling attests—was not to be held responsible for the torments of evil themselves.

This background is not the only or even the most important for the NT understanding of Jesus' death. In Romans, for example, the allusions to the exodus (for example the word 'redemption,' 3.24) are more pervasive and obvious. Simply it is practiced to note this network of ideas almost martyrdom precisely because it is neglected.

Jesus' achievement, of course, was far greater than that of the Maccabean martyrs. His non-violent way of life assorted sharply with their violent resistance, and that is why the declaration of his resurrection, after being led like a lamb to a shameful slaughter, was so startling and such a twist in the story of God and his people. The liberation he ushered in was indeed inwards and transformative of the whole person, as well every bit outward and historical. And he enabled not just Jewish people, but believers from all nations, to empathise their suffering as disciplinary, not punitive, and never able to negate the truth of God's love (Rom 8.eighteen–39).

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It is a actually readable booklet, well worth getting concur of. You can society post-free from the Grove Books website.

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