Forgive me, but your response seems typically Protestant!

You seem to use the word as it it were a bad thing?

I actually tried to step outside the Catholic and Protestant trenches to get an independent view of the debate. That is why looked at the Jewish encyclopedia. It should be an unbiased view of what first century Jewish Christians would have seen as their heritage from the Old Covenant.

Strange considering the Septugaint (pre-Christian era) included them, and the current Hebrew OT was not agreed upon till the late 1st century.

How can you say the Septuagint included these books if the OT canon wasn’t was not agreed upon till the end of the 1st century?

I am not even sure what ‘included in the Septuagint’ actually means. Are you reading the fourth century Codex Vaticanus back into the first century Palestine? It was all scrolls back then. Yes most of the apocrypha existed then but were they ‘included in the Septuagint’ whatever that means? Did any Greek speaking Jews consider them scripture? You would need a lot of evidence to support that, especially when Jewish historians insist they never accepted the apocrypha. Josephus believed the bible was limited to just 22 books (with the minor prophets in one book), the writer of the Esdras book you referred to had a similar view.

Even Jesus comment on ‘the blood of all the prophets from … Abel to …Zechariah’ Matt 23:35 & Luke 11:50,51 only works if Jesus was quoting from the Hebrew Tanakh, the traditional Jewish OT which was arranged with the prophets in the middle and Chronicles at the very end. Abel and Zechariah were the first and the last martyrs listed (Gen 4 & 2Chron 24:20). The order in the Septuagint is much nearer our modern bibles. The reference would not work if Jesus had been using the Septuagint.

It is understandable that it was only after he fall of Jerusalem that the Rabbis got together to define their bible canon. With the centre of their religion destroyed, and people being scattered, they needed the clear definition. But all they were doing was writing down what had been their practice for generations. And the apocrypha were not part of the bible any of them grew up with. I do not see how Jesus, the twelve apostles and Paul would have believed any differently.

Why also are there quotes lifted from apocryphal books within te NT? Jesus’ own lament over Jerusalem is mirrored in 2 Esdras,

I had a look at 2 Esdras and as you said it looks similar to Jesus’ lament as you say, though the idea of sheltering under God’s wings is a theme that runs through the OT . Then I had a look in the Catholic Encyclopedia which says 2 Esdras was probably written between 97 and 286 AD, so I am not sure who is quoting who.

both Peter and Jude cite the apocryphal Book of Enoch.

I quite like the book of Enoch. Perhaps we could both join the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, they seem to be the only church that recognizes its true value. That is the problem. We get quotations from books like Enoch that aren’t listed among the Catholic Church’s deuterocanonical books, but none apparently from the ones the Catholic Church considers authoritative. Go figure.

Of course if we included every book quoted in the NT we would have to include pagan poets like Epimenides and Menander in our bible too, Paul throws in a few of those for us. But just citing a book does not mean you take it as holy writ. You need to quote it in a way that shows you consider it authoritative. You get that with most of the OT books. But I haven’t seen any direct quotations from the apocrypha in the NT, let alone any where the apocrypha (other than Enoch) are given scriptural authority.

So the Jewish writers wouldn’t be ‘gullible’ enough to view the deuterocanon as on a par with the rest of scripture, unlike misguided Gentiles appears to be your point.

I never said the were ‘gullible’, just mistaken. And that was because of the tragic rift that cut them off from their Jewish heritage. It is worth pointing out that the greatest Catholic bible scholar in that era, Jerome, who actually studied the Hebrew texts and had contact with Jewish Rabbis seems to have had real problems with the apocrypha. The Catholic encyclopedia explains it:

In appreciating his attitude we must remember that Jerome lived long in Palestine, in an environment where everything outside the Jewish Canon was suspect, and that, moreover, he had an excessive veneration for the Hebrew text, the Hebraica veritas as he called it.

But this is a bit pointless. If you want to talk to ‘Protestants’ about Mary, you should use texts they actually believe were inspired. If devotion to Mary is part of biblical Christianity we should be able to find it in the pages of New Testament.

Deacon