And the consensus today hasn't gotten much better, do you believe Christ started His church off without any scriptural tradition or that the Apostles left not instructions as to what and what is not Scripture?
I honestly can't even ponder the possibility that the LXX came by happenstance, but you may see things differently, based on facts right? Based on facts that no objection in the first few centuries were made against traditional books, the fact that all of those who quoted from NON SCRIPTURE were full blown heretics (according to Rufinus) which made up more than half of the early Christian records?!
The fact that Origen had the mind to say that the 7 seven who were tortured according to Paul in Hebrews WAS indefinitely straight out of Maccabees?
Yeah some so called Christians today accept Mormon as Scripture, some so called Christians back then accepted Simon Magus as Scripture, but does that mean that 2 thousand years from now Christians should pick and choose because the assumed majority of unknown Christians PROBABLY didn't accept certain books, let it be known to you that fewer Christians in the world today adhere to protestant canon as including all of inspired Scripture alone. The East, South and West orthodox are still in the lead of having more Holy Scripture in their books than the protestants.
Clearly the early church writers praise the books that IF they weren't Scripture, would not have ever been praised to begin with.
If the majority of early Christians opposed these book/scrolls/stories well where is the evidence? They made it into the Holy Bible did they not? HOW did these uninspired books not only creep into the Church but remained in circulation among Christians LOOONG before Jerome and Loooooong after?
Believe what you will, believe that so many of the ante nicine fathers were cavemen who failed to learn how to discern Scripture, believe that so many christian cavemen died only for a later canon but not the LXX and the books known to them and obviously accepted by them in their own time.
Believe the unbelievers and believe your baseless facts that support some mysterious silent majority of Christians who rejected everything outside the future protestant canon.
The fact that there were so many of those in the early church who accepted the “apocryphal” books as scripture, this to me is very strong evidence that Jesus’ disciples, and Paul, are the ones who told the early churches that it’s scripture. And that of course is very strong evidence that the Jews who lived before the time of Christ accepted these books. And when we find evidence of Hebrew copies of Tobit among the Dead Sea Scrolls, well, that’s even further evidence that the Jews probably accepted it before Christ.
Of course, though, you’ve always got those early Christians who rejected those books. And yet we find that those Christians who rejected them were almost always the ones who were compromising with the unbelieving Jews. So it fits with the pattern.
What pattern is that?
Well, the pattern of Jesus and the disciples quoting the Old Testament, and siding with the Septuagint over the Hebrew Masoretic. The pattern I see is that the Septuagint often preserves things that were in the original Hebrew, which the modern Hebrew omits. This is something that was observed by many early church leaders, such as Justin Martyr, Eusebius, and countless others.
But one has to suspect, that if the Jews removed words and phrases, and even removed numbers from the genealogies, then what if they also removed whole entire chapters from Daniel, Esther, and Ezra? For that matter, what if they removed whole entire books? What if they had a motive to draw a line in the sand, and say “no scripture beyond this point in time” in their attempt to discredit the New Testament, and in the process they end up discrediting some of their own books, forcing them to take them out?
I think any honest person ought to take these things seriously. Any Christian who loves the Lord with all his heart ought to want the fullness of the Word of God, which God has prepared for him. And if God has set something on my plate, expecting me to eat it, then who am I to push it away and refuse it? If God says it’s healthy, who am I to say it’s unhealthy?
There are so many Christian leaders today, especially in America with so many Protestant leaders, who are so confident that these books don’t belong in the Bible. But when these issues are actually investigated thoroughly, there’s much more evidence in favor of their inclusion than in favor of their exclusion.
But the issue is ultimately linked with the issues surrounding the Greek Septuagint, and the Jewish conspiracy to remove things from the Bible in an attempt to discredit Jesus as the Jewish Messiah.
The issue of the Septuagint and the issue of the Apocrypha go hand in hand. And the church fathers in favor of the Septuagint were usually also in favor of the apocrypha as well. The church fathers against the Septuagint, were usually against the Apocrypha as well. And that right there speaks volumes as to who is on the right side.
