Wednesday, January 14, 2009

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. had nice things to say about biblical Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, according to an odd press release by one Don Boys. The article excoriates King, basically for not being a conservative Christian, using unpublished papers he wrote in Seminary.
He clearly asserted that the book of Jeremiah was not infallible. He also espoused the heretical view that the non-canonical books were as good as or better than the Old Testament books! “To my mind, many of the works of this period were infinitely more valuable than those that received canonicity. The materials to justify such statements are found mainly in the Apocrypha and the Pseudepigrapha. These works, although presented pseudonymously, are of lasting significance to the Biblical student.”
I don't think it's a matter of which is more valuable in principle, which would be a very subjective judgment and would depend on the criteria applied. I would say that the stories in the Hebrew Bible are generally of a higher literary quality than their retellings in later Rewritten Scripture. There are also some very good stories in the Apocrypha/Deuteroncanonica. But literary considerations aside, all of these books are of considerable historical value, although not necessarily because the stories they tell have any useful historical data about the events they narrate. Very often they don't. But the books themselves, when one reads them carefully and asks them the right questions, provide an enormous amount of historical information about the writers who produced them and, by extension, about the circumstances and social worlds of those writers.