the apocrypha-- then and now...

Excerpts from an oldie but goodie in my files-- Tim Stafford's article in Christianity Today on the Apocrypha called "Violent Night, Holy Night".

A friend of mine asked me about the Apocrypha today and I sent this to her. We also use this as a supplemental reading in the first semester of our Discipleship Curriculum, DC.

A recent writing assignment for the Catholic edition of The Student Bible required my studying books of the pre-Christian Apocrypha (from the Greek for "hidden" or "obscure"), which Catholics include in their Bible. As a Protestant I grew up only marginally aware of these books. They made me a little nervous, to tell the truth. Somewhat to my surprise, I found they helped me understand the kind of world Jesus was born into.

I happily affirm the Reformers' decision to leave these books of the Apocrypha out of the canon of the Holy Scripture. These writings don't rise to the level of divine inspiration.

Nevertheless, as popular Jewish literature of the two centuries before Christ's birth, they are the closest thing we have to a rack of paperback books preserved from the streets of Jerusalem....From these books, we learn a lot about Jewish minds in Jesus' day....

It was a world suffering from great political and religious stress, a world more like modern Afghanistan or Iraq—or Israel—than anything I picked up in my Sunday school lessons. For nearly six centuries, ever since the Babylonian exile, the Jews had been a scattered people, and a series of powerful foreign empires ruled Israel. The godless were no longer somewhere over the border. They lived inside the Holy Land, and cheek-by-jowl with Jews throughout the Diaspora. God's people had to cope with the world's might and mindset every day, without refuge.

The threat to Israel's faith can be read all through these writings. It came as a two-headed dragon. One head was personal and individual: the seductive, numbing force of a polytheistic culture....And with some reason: Greek art, philosophy and literature stand out as marvels even today. How could Jews believe themselves to be God's chosen when other people had more knowledge, wealth, and power? Why should Jews maintain their separation from a culture that offered so much? Jews were clearly tempted to assimilate, to fit in to the Empire.

The dragon's second head was more violent, coercive rather than seductive. Emperor Antiochus Epiphanes determined to unite his vast realm religiously and culturally....Believing that political unity required religious uniformity, he offered Israel the choice of assimilation or death....

Such is the backdrop for most of the Apocrypha. Sometimes with serene confidence, sometimes with anxious triumphalism, these books instruct Israel on how to maintain its faith in the face of polytheistic, syncretistic temptation....

The tone changes dramatically in First and Second Maccabees. These books tell how Antiochus Epiphanes sought to unify his empire by imposing Greek religion. Seduction is not in question. Violence is.

Antiochus desecrated the Temple, slaughtering a pig on its altar before turning it into a temple of Zeus. He executed people for practicing circumcision or for keeping food purity laws. In reaction, the priest Mattathias and his sons led a bloody guerrilla uprising against Antiochus and his successors. They mainly succeeded, winning a modicum of independence for the Jewish state. The festival of Hanukkah began with their liberation and purification of the Temple....

Given the reiterated expectation in 1 Maccabees that a prophet would someday appear to interpret God's will for Israel, it is easy to see why John the Baptist and then Jesus attracted vast crowds. Might this be the prophet? Might this be another liberating Judas [Maccabeus]?

Almost immediately, however, Jesus did and said things to put off almost everybody. Jesus was anti-Maccabean. When someone strikes you, he said, turn the other cheek. When someone forces you to carry a load for a mile, give him another mile. Love your enemies....

[And] Jesus rejected the way of the Essenes by mixing with and ministering to society. He horrified the Pharisees in his apparent disregard of ceremonial purity. Nor, evidently, were Jerusalem and its Temple central to his vision of true Judaism, as they were to the Sadducees.

In short, he set his own ministry apart from and above the qualities of Judaism that set Jews apart from the seductive culture of Rome and Athens. Rather, he emphasized demands that were equally challenging to both Gentile and Jew, and every faction of Jews: the obligation to love with your whole heart, and with the same quality that you love yourself.

Thus against the backdrop of the Apocrypha, we see Jesus changing the terms of Israel's faith within an alien and idolatrous empire. The natural tendency is to accentuate our differences with our enemies, to draw clear lines and to assault the foe head on. Those are the tendencies that show throughout the Apocrypha. Jesus, however, won't heed the lines. He finds the principal enemy within his own camp, even within his fellow Jews' most pious behavior. Jesus suggests that the truly evil empire is not headquartered in Rome. Rather, evil may be found in the dry, spiritual heat of Satan's heart, with outposts in all of ours.

Though our day is very different, U.S. Christians find ourselves cheek-by-jowl with a powerful and seductive paganism. Usually the conflict is a quiet one, for this cultural empire tolerates our distinctive faith. Occasionally there is serious talk of "culture wars," but the seduction is still profound.

Somewhat like Jews in the intertestamental period, our natural tendency is to accentuate our differences—to clarify who among us remains true, and to attack the enemy. Understanding Jesus and his world ought to make us pause. He gives no encouragement to those who believe that evil is mainly "out there," somewhere in the camp of paganism. Rather, he locates evil in every heart. He shows a new way of salvation when he says, "Follow me."