The Apocrypha and the Earliest Christian Movement

Abstract

Studying the Apocrypha can help Christians understand writings that were available to Jesus and his earliest generations of followers, including those followers who wrote the texts that constitute the New Testament. Jesus, Paul, James, and other New Testament voices exhibit rich rootedness in their contemporary Jewish ethical and theological discourse. Reading these ancient texts can help interpreters today understand Jesus and his early followers within the context of the Second-Temple Judaism of their time, as these texts significantly had an impact on the emerging theology, ethos, and practice of the Christian church in its most formative centuries. The value of these texts has been affirmed by the majority of the world’s Christians across centuries, not only for their historical value but also as devotional literature. These reasons confirm the Reformers’ own opinion that the Apocrypha “are good and useful to read.”