Can Protestants Be Edified by the Apocrypha?
“What is First Maccabees?”
This question—posed to me by a second-year theology graduate student—reminded me of a gap in knowledge often found among Protestants about the so-called Apocrypha.
Though the original King James Version included the Apocrypha in a separate section, essentially all Protestant Bibles after the late-1600s have excluded these books. We now face a strange situation: The Bibles of almost 60 percent of global Christianity (i.e., Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy) include these writings as “Deuterocanon,” while many Protestants either don’t know they exist—or…
