The Apocrypha in early modern England – part four

IV. A patchwork of human invention

 Within the wider context of the rise of Elizabethan Puritanism, the Apocrypha became a renewed source of religious controversy from the early 1570s.  Partly this was an aspect of Calvinist responses to the Council of Trent, partly a feature of growing opposition within Presbyterian circles to the Book of Common Prayer.  The orthodox Calvinist position was that the primitive Church had been pure.  Built on the foundation of the prophets and apostles it had subsequently become corrupted over the generations by intermeddling popes and councils.  Among the godly, canonical scripture was sufficient for establishing rules of faith and virtuous conduct in daily life.  Knowledge of extra-canonical texts – including the Apocrypha – was deemed unnecessary for attaining salvation, while certain unwritten traditions were judged contrary to God’s immaculate word.  Although some traditions were, as the Calvinist theologian William Perkins conceded, ‘true and profitable’, Protestants consistently objected against their use by the Catholic church to supplement scripture.  As with the Apocrypha, these ‘unwritten verities’ were superfluous for confirming doctrine.  To quote a preacher fulminating against post-Tridentine apologetics:

Traditions are gathered of an evil egg: dig the Papists never so deep, they shall not find the mine nor spring of them in the Primitive Church.

 Meanwhile ‘popish abuses’ embedded within the prayer book, including lessons taken from the Apocrypha, had proved a flashpoint in the major controversy between John Whitgift, future Archbishop of Canterbury, and Thomas Cartwright, ‘true progenitor of English Presbyterianism’.  The religious separatist Henry Barrow was yet more extreme, denouncing the Book of Common Prayer as a pregnant idol full of abominations and bitter fruit.  Fuming against the Apocrypha’s customary presence in church worship (a relic of Popery), he demanded if it were ever read, reverenced and received as God’s sacred word?  For these writings, Barrow insisted, swarmed with ‘unsufferable forgeries, lies and errors’.  He was not alone.  Indeed, at the Hampton Court conference, John Rainolds voiced the concern of puritan delegates that by subscribing to the Thirty-nine Articles they would be endorsing the prayer book, and with it the lectionary and its chapters drawn from the Apocrypha – some of which, such as Sirach 48:10, contained ‘manifest errors, directly repugnant to the scripture’.  King James somewhat agreed with this position observing, in an unwitting endorsement of the Geneva Bible’s marginalia, that although the books of Maccabees’ account of Jewish persecution was instructive their teaching on praying for the dead and seeking death in battle was mistaken.  Accordingly, a revised edition of the prayer book was issued (1604) to accommodate puritan sensibilities.  This measure, however, failed to stifle criticism and despite the amendments dissenters protested that the Book of Common Prayer still gave ‘too much honour’ to the Apocrypha: about 104 of 172 chapters continued to be read publicly in church compared with only 592 of 779 canonical chapters of the Old Testament.

 Rainolds himself had from the late 1580s frequently lectured at Oxford on the Apocrypha, directing his ire at the Jesuit Robert Bellarmine.  These 250 lectures were published posthumously as Censura librorum Apocryphorum veteris Testamenti (Oppenheim, 1611), a monumental work of erudition whose central arguments influenced various shades of Protestant thinking on the subject throughout the seventeenth century.  Other contemporaries repeated Rainolds’s complaint that these books sometimes contradicted both Scripture and each other.  Their grievances, moreover, were reminiscent of Jerome and Luther.  1 & 2 Esdras were dismissed as creditless works ‘stuffed full of vain fables, fitter to feed curious ears, then tending to edification’.  The History of Susanna was a ‘lying story’, Bel and the Dragon a fable, while the presence of Tobias’s dog together with the exorcism of the evil spirit Asmodeus by means of burning a fish’s heart and liver made Tobit an outlandish tale.  Indeed, in the words of the separatist John Canne, these ‘false, wicked, and abominable’ books contained a number of ‘shameful lies, horrible blasphemies, vain vanities, plain contradictions, ridiculous fooleries’, impieties and fables that made them fitter for pagans than God’s people.  Furthermore, since divinely inspired prophecy was believed to be absent from the Apocrypha there was nothing in them – with the crucial exception of 2 Esdras – that might be interpreted as prophesying Christ’s coming and his kingdom.  To quote John Rogers (c.1570–1636), renowned puritan preacher of Dedham, Essex, ‘we find no Testimony of our Saviour Christ, Evangelist or Apostle, cited out of them’.

 It was the pseudonymous puritan pamphleteer Martin Marprelate, suspected to be either Job Throckmorton or his accomplice John Penry, who in 1589 appears to have first demanded that the Apocrypha be removed from the rest of the Bible.  Despite Archbishop Whitgift’s retort calling for such ‘giddy heads’ to be bridled (Penry was executed), a 1599 edition of the Geneva Bible was bound without the Apocrypha between the Old and New Testaments.  Then in December 1608, it was reported that some puritan bookbinders in Fetter Lane, London were leaving the Apocrypha out of the Bible.  The practice must have spread for in October 1615 Archbishop George Abbot threatened any stationer caught excising the Apocrypha from a published Bible with a year’s imprisonment.  Yet the risk was taken.  Between 1616 and 1633 several editions of the King James Bible were printed lacking the Apocrypha, probably due to the growing demand for inexpensive, less cumbersome bibles.  And in December 1634 an apprentice London stationer denied, when questioned by ecclesiastical commissioners, that he had sold editions of the bible without the Apocrypha.

 Henry Burton (1578–c.1648) would doubtless have welcomed these developments.  An Independent minister famously persecuted by the Laudian church (his ears were cut off for libel and sedition), Burton likened the binding of the Apocrypha between the two Testaments to a blackamoor ‘placed between two pure unspotted Virgins’.  For the Hebraist John Lightfoot (1602–1675), inserting the Apocrypha between Malachi and Matthew placed an earthly barrier between two cherubim, whose wings – unlike those inside the innermost room of the Jerusalem Temple (1 Kings 6:27) – were prevented from touching.  Preaching a fast sermon before the House of Commons in March 1643 Lightfoot expressed his wish to see the Old and New Testaments joined ‘sweetly and nearly’ together.  Thus ‘divinely would they kiss each other’, but ‘the wretched Apocrypha doth thrust in between’.  Not for him typical contemporary recognition that these books, while ranking below the indisputable messianic truths of the Old Testament, still had edificatory value.  Rather, Lightfoot insisted that this ‘patchery of humane invention’ was a direct precursor to the superstitious fables found in the Talmud (hitherto frequently burned at the behest of Popes and Inquisitions), written before an unsuspecting world became better acquainted with the vanity of Jewish learning and its impieties.  Similarly, in a tract provocatively entitled Unholsome Henbane between two Fragrant Roses (1645) John Vicars marvelled at the ‘ill misplacing’ of the most vile, vicious, erroneous, and unholy apocryphal writings in English bibles.  Comparing them to the noxious weed darnel infesting a wheat-field, he urged the Westminster Assembly of Divines to expunge this ‘uncomely and corrupt’ piece of ‘patcherie’ from the Bible.  More moderate in tone if not puritan sentiment Edward Leigh (1603–1671), biblical exegete and MP for Stafford, also hoped in a work dedicated to Parliament and licensed June 1646 that the Apocrypha would be expurgated from the Bible and no longer read in church; an appeal shortly answered.

 In 1640 a Geneva Bible had been printed at Amsterdam, probably for members of the English Reformed church there, which deliberately omitted the section dedicated to the Apocrypha (the Prayer of Manasses, however, was retained since it was appended to 2 Chronicles).  It contained after Malachi an admonition ‘to the Christian reader’ explaining that these were neither divinely inspired books nor accepted as such by Jews and hence uncanonical.  This justification was translated from an introduction to the Apocrypha in a recently published Dutch Bible (Amsterdam, 1637), a preamble itself sanctioned by proceedings at the ninth and tenth sessions of the Synod of Dort (November 1618).  Such a bold step would have been hazardous in England during the Laudian ascendancy.  Yet with the Parliamentary dissolution of the ecclesiastical Court of High Commission (July 1641) and then the abolition of episcopacy (October 1646), the Westminster Assembly, which had been initially commissioned by Parliament in June 1643 to revise doctrine, liturgy and church government, confronted the issue.  Their Confession of Faith was drafted by committee, debated, amended and approved, presented to the House of Commons (September 1646), discussed there, and the Assembly’s advice then licensed for publication (December 1646).  A final version incorporating scriptural proofs in the margins was eventually authorised by both Houses of Parliament (21 June 1648).  Replacing the Thirty-nine Articles with Thirty-one Articles of Christian Religion, the first chapter concerning ‘Holy Scripture’ resolved that:

The Books commonly called Apocrypha, not being of Divine inspiration, are no part of the Canon of the Scripture; and therefore are of no authority in the Church of God, nor to be any otherwise approved, or made use of, than other humane Writings.

 Another of the Westminster Assembly’s significant outputs was a Directory for Public Worship, which replaced the Book of Common Prayer in January 1645.  First proposed, like the Confession of Faith, by the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, the Directory decreed that the Apocrypha was not to be read publicly.  At a stroke the smouldering resentment puritan ministers had felt at being obliged to deliver what they considered a number of unscriptural daily lessons to their congregations was extinguished.  But with the restoration of the monarchy came in its wake a restored prayer book.  Following the Savoy Conference a revised Book of Common Prayer was issued in 1662. This added more readings from the Apocrypha to the lectionary, spanning from 28 September to 24 November.  Many nonconformist ministers baulked at this prospect, objecting especially to the stories of Tobias’s dog, Bel and the dragon, Judith and Baruch, ‘which they found the most celebrated bishops and doctors of the church owning to be false and fictitious’.  All the same, in a spirit of accommodation Richard Baxter suggested that while it was not ordinarily lawful to read lessons from the Apocrypha, it was still permissible – with certain provisos – to draw upon these manifestly untruthful and fabulous books publicly.  After the accession of William III, revisions to the prayer book were mooted as one of the means of reconciling Protestant dissenters to the new regime.  These would have included substituting the apocryphal lessons with chapters chiefly from Proverbs and Ecclesiastes.  But nothing came of this proposal and substantial alterations were not undertaken until 1867, when the number of apocryphal daily lessons was drastically reduced.