Great question, Cindy. Thanks. The Apocrypha is a name given by some to the seven books that have been removed from Protestant Bibles. Catholics do not call these books the Apocrypha because they are part of our Bible. The books are: Sirach, Tobit, Wisdom, Judith, 1 and 2 Maccabees, and Baruch, as well as longer versions of Daniel and Esther
To put it in the simplest terms I can, Luther and many after him rejected these books based on the fact that they were not part of the Hebrew Canon at the time of the Reformation. Most Protestant Bibles do not contain these seven books or have them in section in the back known to them as The Apocrypha.
The Catholic Bible accepts the books for two reasons. Firstly, the Jewish Canon was not fixed in Jesus’ time. Therefore, we cannot be completely sure which books were included. But more importantly, the first Christians, including Paul, used the Septuagint to preach to the Greek-speaking world. This contained these seven books. Jesus Himself actually quoted Scripture from the Septuagint. When the Catholic Church developed its canon it used the Greek translation of the Septuagint that the Apostles and early Church Fathers used which included these books.
If you’d like to learn more about this, I recommend the following article: http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/apologetics/ap0120.html
Oh and one more thing that bugs Ask Ellen….If you throw out Maccabees, how do you explain Hanukkah? It seriously perplexes me.
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