A [b]second reason[/b] why the books of the Apocrypha cannot be regarded as canonical is that the Jews, the divinely appointed guardians of the Old Testament Scriptures, never esteemed them such. This fact is freely admitted by contemporary scholars. According to Torrey, the Jews not only rejected the Apocrypha, but after the overthrow of Jerusalem in 70 A.D., they went so far as to "destroy, systematically and thoroughly, the Semitic originals of all extra-canonical literature," including the Apocryphal, "The feeling of the leaders at that time," Torrey tells us, "is echoed in a later Palestinian writing (Midrash Qoheleth, 12,12): 'Whosoever brings together in his house more than twenty-four books (the canonical scriptures) brings confusion.'" And additional evidence that the Jews did not recognize the Apocrypha as canonical is supplied by the Talmudic tract Baba Bathra (2nd century) and by the famous Jewish historian Josephus (c. 93 A.D.) in his treatise 'Against Apion.' Neither of these sources make any mention of the Apocrypha in the lists which they give of the Old Testament books. For, as Torrey observes, the Jews had but one standard, acknowledged everywhere. Only such books as were believed to have been composed in either Hebrew or Aramaic before the end of the Persian period were received into the Old Testament canon.
There is reason to believe, however, that the Greek-speaking Jews of Alexandria were not so strict as the Palestinian rabbis about the duty of shunning apocryphal books. Although these Alexandrian Jews did not recognize the Apocrypha as Scripture in the highest sense, nevertheless they read these books in Greek translation and included them in their Septuagint. And it was in this expanded form that the Septuagint was transmitted to the early gentile Christians. It is not surprising therefore that those early Church Fathers especially who were ignorant of Hebrew would be misled into placing these apocryphal books on the same plane with the other books of the Septuagint, regarding them all as Scripture. Schuerer (1908) mentions Irenaeus, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, Cyprian, and others as having made this mistake. And later bibical investigators, such as Torrey, Metzger, and Brockington, have pointed out another factor which may have led numerous Christians into this error of regarding the Apocrypha as part of the Old Testament. This was the practice which Christians had, and are believed to have initiated, of writing their literature in codex (book) form rather than on rolls. A codex of the Septuagint would contain the Apocrypha bound together indiscriminately with the canonical Old Testament books, and this would induce many gentile Christians to put them all on the same level. Such at least appears to have been the popular tendency in the early and medieval Church.
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