Canonical and Apocryphal

Many times we hear about apocryphal texts. Often on the television news o in the press there are news, discoveries of scoops about the world of the Apocrypha. There is a particular curiosity on the part of many about this seemingly strange reality, almost kept hidden by fear. We always keep in mind, in our conversations and readings, the canonical texts of the Holy Scriptures.

We are going to dedicate some episodes to books that are not part of the biblical Christian canon but that are in the environment in which the Bible was born and was lived by the Christian community, precisely to clarify these literary realities which in an extremely generic way are called apocryphal.

Let's start then from this term. Apocryphal as opposed to canonical; these are two Greek terms that we have not translated and therefore, inevitably, we do not understand well; we assign them particular and technical meanings. Let's get started. ‘Canonical' derives from 'canon'. In Greek canon is the measure; it is the same word with which we indicate the ruler as a unit of measure. A text is defined canonically as one that falls within the measures established by an authority. Thus we speak of the Old Testament canon, established by the Hebrew tradition; we have two of them: that of the Palestinian Jewish tradition and that of the Hellenistic Jewish tradition.

The Jews of Jerusalem considered as part of the scriptures and therefore, defined as canonical, some books that were written in Hebrew and that they considered inspired by God. The same texts translated into Greek were considered equally inspired by the Greek-speaking Jewish community living in Alexandria, Egypt, but this community added some other books. The religious authorities of Jerusalem and Alexandria, both of Jewish religion, established these two lists of books, the second a little larger than the first.

The Christian community, being mainly Greek-speaking, using the Bible of the 70's, that is, the one that was translated into Greek a few centuries before Christ, adopted the list of books of the Hellenistic tradition and thus the Old Testament Christian canon was created. But, at the same time, in the Church born from the preaching of Jesus, new books were created; they are the books of the New Testament and these also were collected in a canon.

The canon, properly speaking, was fixed only in the fourth century, at the time of the Council of Nicaea in 325, during the empire of Constantine, when Christianity was recognized as a legal religion and, therefore, Christian authorities had the possibility of organizing themselves. Naturally, in previous centuries, there had been a control of all this literature and when the choice was made of the canonical books and the lists of the books that were to be considered the word of God were fixed, inspired by the work of the Holy Spirit, some characteristics were taken as criteria.

The Fathers of the Council decided to adopt as inspired books those that had been by 'all', 'always', 'everywhere', 'read in the liturgy'. This is a very important criterion, that is, the universality of the presence of the texts and the universal acceptance, in all those times of the first three centuries in which there had been a Christian life, mostly secret, because they were in the time of persecution. They found that, for example, in Alexandria in Egypt as in Antioch in Syria or Ephesus in Asia or Corinth in Greece or Rome in Italy, Lyon in France, Carthage in Africa, all these churches, large communities living in large cities, knew the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. In all these great cities, these four texts were used, not one more, not one less. In 'all' these places, 'since always' these groups of texts had been read. The same is true for Paul's letters, Catholic Letters, and Revelation.

In some texts, there was some uncertainty because they were not completely available in some churches. For example, the book of Revelation in the Syriac world did not look good and therefore there was discussion whether it could be considered canonical or not. Only a few minor books of the New Testament had discussions. Therefore, it was not a matter of eliminating the others, but of choosing those that were common to all and this communion was explained precisely by the fact that they were apostolic works, born in the Christian community governed by the apostles and controlled by the authentic tradition of the eyewitnesses. These books, which were positively evaluated by all, were based on apostolic witness.

The concept of apocryphal is born by contrast; all the books that do not enter the canon, in the approved list and established by authority are considered apocryphal, but the term is ambiguous and strange. Apocryphal means hidden. It was born, at least apparently, as the title of a Gnostic book composed in Egypt which took the name of 'Apocryphal of John'; the writer who wrote it called it 'John's secret book'.

Apocryphal means precisely a secret, hidden text, that is, it belongs to an esoteric movement. It is a closed group within a small circle of initiates, a book not intended for the public, but must be kept secret, reserved for that group of followers who know the secret theories. They are religious philosophical sects that develop thoughts of reflection, religious visions in some way related to the Christian world, to the revelation of Jesus Christ, to the biblical tradition, but then they had taken a particular path with often very strange philosophical developments, but the aim was to reserve this knowledge for the small group of initiates. This is why the text is defined as 'apocryphal.' This term gradually spread and became of general use; it began meaning esoteric book, hidden, reserved for a few and ended up being understood as heretical, that is, a book that contains erroneous doctrines, contrary to the official teaching of the Church.

In the common language of the patristic world of the first centuries, to call a text apocryphal meant that it was incorrect, that it contained falsehoods, unadoptable, dangerous to read; in any case, secondary and marginal that should not be taken as an inspired text. Therefore, no category of apocryphal was created by decision, as if someone had had on a table a series of books and would have separated some considering them as canonical and others considered apocryphal. This scheme is quite widespread in people's minds, but it is not correct.

The canon is the result of an election linked to the use of all communities; what was not used was generically called apocryphal. You can imagine that, in an ancient society, where communications were not at all easy, where the text had to be re-copied by hand each time, to share a book to all parts of the Roman Empire and make it accepted by all the communities to the extent that they read it during the official prayers, was not something easy, it was something very difficult.

The fact that the 27 books of the New Testament were, instead, known to everyone, everywhere and always used in liturgies is a guarantee that there was indeed a wide diffusion of the texts considered apostolic, guaranteed, credible sources of the teaching of Jesus and his first disciples. In contrast, all other writings that occurred later, were restricted, that is, linked to a group, a movement, a church, perhaps, but limited to a sector, an area, a geographical region. These texts, for example, were disseminated in Egypt, but they never reached Syria, Greece, Italy, France. They remained in the area of Egypt. From Greek, they were translated into Coptic and remained the heritage of a small community that gradually became extinct and lost because they met only in a small environment and they did not have a literary history of diffusion.

This is what has happened with an infinite number of texts. There are some 19th century novels that we continue to study in school and are published continuously, chosen and translated into other languages and, instead, there are many others that have been printed once and never reprinted and are found only in some bookstores and specialized libraries, and are not known. Then, we could also say that the books that enter our English, French, Italian... literature are canonical, and all the others that have been written and are some still available, are apocryphal; they are hidden not because someone wants to hide them but because they have not had the strength to impose themselves, they were not famous texts, have not been recognized as texts worthy of being chosen, of being proposed to the new generations as training elements.

Before facing the reading or presentation of the apocryphal texts of the New Testament I would like to say a few things about the apocryphal texts of the Old Testament and note a significant change in terminology. In the Protestant world, ‘apocryphal’ are called what we Catholics call ‘deuterocanonical.’ In the Old Testament, as I said at the beginning, we Catholics, have taken the books of the alexandrine canon. The Book of Wisdom, the Book of Sirach, the stories of Tobias and Judith, the two books of the Maccabees, the book of Baruch are texts that Protestants do not consider canonical but often publish in their Bibles; thus, one can find an edition of the Old Testament Bible with the title Old Testament with Apocrypha. One buys the book and, in the catalogue of the apocrypha, one finds the books of Wisdom, Sirach, Tobias, Judith... these are those books that are usually found in our Bibles.

In fact, in the Protestant environment, especially English and American, what we call apocryphal, they call 'pseudo-epigraphs,' that is, books that have a false title; they are attributed to someone without actually having been written by that character. These two volumes, for example, are the English edition of the collection of related pseudo-epigraphic books related to the Old Testament; we would call them in English 'Apocrypha of the Old Testament.’ These (that you see) are only three of the five volumes that Paolo Sacchi has published (and are translated into English) gathering the apocrypha of the Old Testament. It is a modern terminology.

By 'Apocrypha of the Old Testament' we mean books of the Jewish tradition, written during the Old Testament time. Thus, in general, pre-Christians or first century AD. They are texts from the Jewish tradition, belonging to the world of ancient Judaism because not everything the Jews wrote has become the Bible. The Old Testament collection contains some books, but many more were written. In general, all these texts that are not included in the canon, were lost or remained in marginal language translations.

I would like to mention the most important case concerning Enoch. The so-called First Book of Enoch is a huge volume containing in fact 5 books, which we could call 'Enochian Pentateuch'. These five books are from different periods; the first is called the 'Book of Watchmen;' it is the oldest, dating back to the fourth century before Christ. It was written in Aramaic, it was translated into Greek, had a great diffusion. The ones who evangelized Ethiopia brought, in addition to the books of the Old and New Testament, also the books of Enoch and were translated into the classical Ethiopian language called Ge'ez (ግዕዝ), that was the language spoken until the 10th-12th centuries and is still used as the language of literature and liturgy in the Ethiopian Church and is taught in church schools. The Christian Church in Ethiopia considers the book of Enoch to be canonical which includes five booklets: the Book of Watchmen, the Book of Parables, the Book of Astronomy, the Book of Dreams and the Epistle of Enoch.

This text was always known, but in Ethiopian. The Greek texts were not reproduced, disappeared; and the Aramaic texts disappeared as well. The Jewish World and the Christian World in antiquity, in the Middle Ages and in modern times did not consider these texts. They remained part of the Ethiopian heritage and only in modern times, in 1700s, did they come into contact with the Ethiopian world through colonialism; a bible in Ethiopian was brought to England, was translated into English and it was discovered that it had a few more books; and the Anglo-Saxon cultural world in the 19th century discovered the book of Enoch, but it remained a heritage reserved for few.

I think Tolkien, the author of Lord of the Rings, and other important books of the genre we call 'fantasy,' had the opportunity to read these texts in Oxford and took the example precisely of these images of the struggles of the good and bad angels to build his huge fantasy story of the world. Things became much more interesting when in Qumram, in the middle of the last century, were found in the caves excerpts in Greek and Aramaic from the books of Enoch. So it was understood that in reality these texts were circulating in the Jewish environment.

What did these texts say? What do they say? Because we have them at our disposal. We can read them, they are available, translated into English with extensive comments. They talk about angelic contamination. The basic idea is that evil in the world was spread by rebellious angels; a group of angels rebelled against God and joined the women, giving birth to giants who polluted nature, creating a situation of cosmic dirt, so that the ruin of the earth is caused by these angelic forces. It is not possible for man to get out of it. The only possibility of salvation is an intervention by God.

These books that we call apocalyptic, would be better to call them 'enoic' because they are attached to a Jewish movement we know as Enochism; they were awaiting God's judgment. Enoch is a character which precedes the Flood, is the seventh descendant of Adam. A group of Jewish priests in the fifth or fourth century before Christ, separated from the Sadducees who wrote the Pentateuch of Moses, and they took this patriarch Enoch as their patron saint and attributed to him all the visions of the world, especially from the angelic world and in these texts they gathered many esoteric, strange, mystical teachings that were preserved for centuries.

And they had other works that were born in the second and first century before Christ and on the first century after Christ; a collection of all this is available. If you read the Letter of Jude, one of the Catholic texts of the New Testament, in verse 14, the prophet Enoch is mentioned and an explicit quotation is made from the introduction from Enoch's first book. We do not find it anywhere else, except in the collection of the Apocrypha of the Old Testament. These books are very useful to understand the Jewish world because they are another documentation of the way of thinking of the Jews who lived at that time and in that environment. We don't just have the biblical text, we also have other books, but tradition has taught us that these should be considered inspired as God's revelation, the others are the fruit of lucubration, thought, reasoning of intelligent people, perhaps great philosophers, but they should not be taken as a revelation of God.