In my continuing series of honest questions to Christians, I present you with question number seven.
Why are the lost books of the bible and the forgotten books of eden not taken into account by most Christians? Are they not also the word of God?
Personally I found the forgotten books of eden to be very interesting.
They are not lost and they all have the own story about what they are and where they came from. Some of them were written hundreds of years after the fact. Or they very valid histories but but make no claims to being anything else. Some of them are highly regarded. I have not read the books of eden so I can not tell you about those
@trunthepaige – The Eden books are great. I like them much more then the bland reading of the rest of the apocrypha. They are definitely the most interesting of all the books of the bible, with only one exception, The book of Wisdom. Which seems to be missing from most bibles for some reason.
I’m going to read the books of Eden. I’ve read some of the “lost books,” like the Book of Judas, and they’re just… really funny. Some of them are obviously not legitimate.
Good and faithful people through history have submitted to the Spirit in seeking out which writings concerning G-D belong under the name “scripture.” I don’t know all the dates and councils off the top of my head (sorry, I’m bad with history unfortunately) but certain councils decided those books simply don’t fit into the canon due to authorship, date written, and many others reasons. The Roman Catholic church still includes the Apocrypha (I like it and have it). Protestants typically view the Apocrypha as really good books connected to the Bible but not necessarily holy. Why? Well, at this point, for most of us, it is due to ignorance and tradition.
My youth pastor spoke from one of the books in the Apocrypha once during a Wednesday night and kind of made fun of it by saying something to the degree of “Can you believe this? How ridiculous!” and I always thought that was uncouth to present the apocrypha in such a disrespectful manner. We weren’t educated on it, we were taught to scoff at it. It didn’t work on me. It made me want to read it. I’ll admit I haven’t read it all. I do like the Book of Wisdom though. A lot of scholars I like reading reference it. It is the most highly regarded of the Apocrypha books I’d say.
Books like The Book of Enoch don’t match up with scripture though. There are a lot of writings that people tried to make scriptures but simply weren’t compatible with the truths of scripture. Even some of Paul’s letters and his apprentices letters never made it into scripture (usually because of date and authorship debate). Some books are simply lost (3Corinthians).
In short: People under the the influence of the Spirit by prayer and fasting came to agreements on the scriptures at different times through history.
Hmmmm I’ve never read any of the lost books….where do you find them?
@noree_n – You can find the apocrypha here: http://www.sacred-texts.com/bib/apo/index.htm
And the rest of the apocrypha here: http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/apo/index.htm
The apocrpha, and the gnostic books, were excluded because of doubts of authenticity. Some of them are lovely books (Daniel and the Dragon, and Tobit are a couple of my favorites), but most people at the time did not believe they written by who they said they were, or at the time they said they were- especially the Eden books, for quite a few reasons.
With modern scholarship suggesting that most of our books were not written when or by whom they say they were, this seems like no big deal. I think modern scholarship goes a bit too far in some of those discussions, but either way, it really comes down to the fact that other people decided what was Scripture, we trust that God had His way in those decisions, and we are not particularly interested in second-guessing him. It’s one of those faith things.