PREFACE
THE APOCRYPHA FORMED AN INTEGRAL part of the King James Version of 1611, as they had of all the preceding English versions from their beginning in 1382. But they are seldom printed as part of it any longer, still more seldom as part of the English Revised Version, and were not included in the American Revision.
This is partly because the Puritans disapproved of them; they had already begun to drop them from printings of their Geneva Bible by 1600, and began to demand copies of the King James Version omitting them, as early as 1629. And it is partly because we modems discredit them because they did not form part of the Hebrew Bible and most of them have never been found in any Hebrew forms at all.
But they were part of the Bible of the early church, for it used the Greek version of the Jewish Bible, which we call the Septuagint and these books were all in that version. They passed from it into Latin and the great Latin Bible edited by St. Jerome about A.D. 400, the Vulgate, which became the Authorized Bible of western Europe and England and remained so for a thousand years. But Jerome found that they were not in the Hebrew Bible, and so he called them the Apocrypha, the hidden or secret books.
It must not be supposed, however, that Jerome gathered them into a group and put them at the end of his Old Testament version. On the contrary, they are scattered here and there through the Vulgate, just as they are through the Greek Bible. They are also scattered through the versions made from the Vulgate - the Wyclif-Purvey English translations and the old German Bible, both products of the fourteenth century. It remained for Luther to take the hint Jerome had dropped eleven hundred years before, and to separate them in his German Bible of 1534 from the rest of the Old Testament, and put them after it. This course was followed the next year by Coverdale, in the first printed English Bible, of 1535; and the English Authorized Bibles, the Great Bible, the Bishops' and the King James, all followed the same course. The Catholic English Old Testament of 1610, however, followed the Vulgate arrangement and left them scattered among the books which we include in our Old Testament. It still contains them, but on the Protestant side both British and American Bible Societies more than a hundred years ago (1827) took a definite stand against their publication, and they have since almost disappeared.
Great values reside in the Apocrypha: the Prayer of Manasseh is a notable piece of liturgy; I Maccabees is of great historical value for its story of Judaism in the second century before Christ, the heroic days of Judas Maccabeus and his brothers, when Pharisaism had its rise. The additions to Esther impart a religious color to that romantic story; Judith, Susanna, and Tobit while fascinating pieces of fiction, were meant by their writers to teach important lessons to their contemporaries. Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus are among the masterpieces of the Jewish sages.
But to us this appendix of the Old Testament is important as forming a very necessary link between the Old Testament and the New; and if we had no Old Testament at all, the Apocrypha would still be indispensable to the student of the New Testament, of which it forms the prelude and background. This is why I have prepared an American translation of the Apocrypha, to complete our American translation of the Bible, and to make its various books more intelligibly accessible to college and university students and to the general reader. The strong contrast they present in sheer moral values to the New Testament is most instructive. And they form an indespensable part of the historic Christian Bible, as it was known in the ancient Greek and Latin churches, in the Reformation and the Renaissance, and in all Authorized English Bibles, Catholic and Protestant.
The excellent critical Greek text of the Septuagint recently published at Stuttgart by Alfred Rahlf has in general been followed in this translation, supplemented, of course, by other studies on the Apocrypha, especially the volumes edited by R. H. Charles at Oxford in 1913. For II Esdras, for which only a Latin text buttressed by oriental versions survives, I have made use of the critical labors of Bensly, James, Box, and Violet. The Revised Version and the translations of individual books by some of the contributors to Charles's volumes (Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha) and others have greatly helped the translator. In the vexed matter of the numbering of the verses the King James Bible of 1611 has been followed. The bracketed verse-numbers in II Esdras 7:[36-105] mark the missing portion discovered by Bensly at Amiens and published in 1875. My brother, Charles T. B. Goodspeed, has very kindly read the translation through in proof.
On the whole, the translation of the Apocrypha has been surprisingly neglected. The translators of the Septuagint, Thomson in 1808 and Brenton in 1844, studiously omitted the apocryphal books they encountered in it, and not all of Charles's associates in his impressive volumes made new translations. Single books have here and there been translated from the Greek by individual scholars, but, while Bissell ably revised the King James Apocrypha in 1880, I cannot find that the Apocrypha as a whole have been translated into English since Coverdale in 1535 and Gregory Martin in 1582 translated them from the Latin Vulgate (Martin's version remained unpublished until 1610); or that the Greek Apocrypha as a whole, that is, all the books except II Esdras, have ever before been directly translated from Greek into English.
Coverdale's translation of the Apocrypha in his Bible of 1535 was made from the Latin Vulgate, with the aid of Pagninus' Latin and of recent German translations, especially Luther's. Coverdale's Bible became the basis of successive revisions - Matthew, the Great Bible, the Bishops', and the King James. The Geneva revisers of 1560, however, knew Greek, and contributed re-translations from the Greek of two of the books, along with revisions of the others. Revision of the translation in the light of the Greek continued to some degree in the Bishops' and the King James Bibles; in the English Revised Version of 1895 six more books appear virtually re-translated from the Greek, and the rest revised. But even in it, five books remain revisions, however faithful, of Coverdale's translation of the Vulgate, so that our standard versions of the Apocrypha (and aside from Bissell's revision there are no others), though three or four times revised, stiff to a substantial degree rest ultimately upon the Latin Vulgate.
In contrast with them, the translation here presented is, except for the Latin II Esdras, based directly upon the Greek text.
EDGAR J. GOODSPEED
CONTENTS
THE FIRST BOOK OF ESDRAS 1
THE SECOND BOOK OF ESDRAS 39
THE BOOK OF TOBIT 107
THE BOOK OF JUDITH 131
THE ADDITIONS TO THE BOOK OF ESTHER 165
THE WISDOM OF SOLOMON 177
ECCLESIASTICUS OR THE WISDOM OF SIRACH 221
THE BOOK OF BARUCH 329
THE STORY OF SUSANNA 347
THE SONG OF THE THREE CHILDREN 355
THE STORY OF BEL AND THE DRAGON 363
THE PRAYER OF MANASSEH 369
THE FIRST BOOK OF MACCABEES 373
THE SECOND BOOK OF MACCABEES 443
INTRODUCTION
1. An Age of Fusion
The period of which the books in this volume are a significant monument, roughly the last two centuries B.C., is of central importance for the cultural history of Europe, for it was then that elements from disparate sources combined to determine the directions and the contours our civilization would take. Separately the major elements are known to us with reasonable fullness for a millennium before the period, and they and others which have entered the composition after its character was determined may still be identified and are still operative severally; but whereas an effort of the imagination is required to enter into the spiritual and intellectual climate of classical Greece or of the Old Testament, there is no such strangeness in the Hellenistic and Roman world. The premises of conduct, of relations between man and man, man and external authority, the canons of taste, the goals of aspiration, are all familiar.
The catalyst for the new compound was Alexander the Great. His conquests had broken down the insulation which separated peoples and had enormously enlarged intellectual as well as geographical horizons. Deprived of the political entities which had absorbed their loyalties and had sheltered them from the outer world, men were forced to turn in upon themselves and to devise new attitudes for asserting themselves in a world grown overwhelmingly large. On the Greek side, where the evidence is more plentiful, the changes are palpable, in literature, in philosophy, in art. In all, the movement is from the heroic, the ideal, the general to the bourgeois, the actual, the individual. Literature deals not with huge personages who die gloriously but with ordinary men who wish to live happy ever after. Philosophy seeks to redress the imbalance between tiny man and the colossal world either by making man part of the divine (as the Stoics did) or by depriving the world of divinity (as the Epicureans did). Sculptors no longer glazed over individual idiosyncrasies, as their classical precursors had done, but emphasize crooked features and wrinkles and anguished expressions.
The people on the eastern periphery of the Greek world were similarly stripped of insulation and constrained to find new attitudes to confront a changed world. Hellenism's penetration of the east was rapid and pervasive. The influence of the east upon the west came somewhat later in time and initially affected the lower classes, from which it gradually forced its way upward. Greek influence in the east affected the upper classes at once. Greek was the language of government, of business, and of fashion, and Greek ways offered a fuller and more stimulating life. Upper-class natives so far identified themselves with the Greek outlook that they spoke of themselves as barbarians, and even when they emphasized the worth of their native traditions they did so to show that they were respectable by Greek standards. Individuals or groups who refused to participate in the new ways would have proven themselves barbarians indeed and have been left stagnant in a backwater of civilization.
Because the Jews represent the major non-Greek element in the eventual fusion it is important to observe that their reaction to Hellenism was initially no different from that of other non-Greek peoples. Even in Jerusalem, as we see from the opening chapters of I Maccabees, the high-priesthood was contested by rivals each of whom bore a Greek name and was apparently very ready to adopt Greek ways. The Maccabean uprising, at least in its initial stages, was not against Hellenism but for national independence. And when independence, real or nominal, was secured, the object of the Maccabean principality was to hold its head up among other principalities that had arisen out of the ruins of the Seleucid Empire; there was nothing like an anti-Greek program.
It was only after the rise of Christianity and the fall of Jerusalem (A.D. 70), when exclusive loyalty to religion was the only means of preserving the identity of the group, that the barrier against alien influence was erected. But the way of life which the barrier was designed to protect had already assimilated significant quantities of Hellenistic influence, and so thoroughly that they were no longer felt to be alien. This influence is obvious in archaeological remains and in Jewish books written in Greek, but it is present also in books written in Hebrew, and in some included in the Old Testament. It is likely to be most significant where it is least obvious. It is very likely, for example, that the organization and discipline of the Essene-like community of Qumran near the Dead Sea were influenced by Pythagorean patterns; and the path from the Essenes to Christianity is straight and smooth by some accounts.
New forms, whether in political organization, artifacts, or literature must inevitably influence content. If Canticles, Chronicles, Ecclesiastes, Job, and Jonah do indeed follow the forms of Hellenistic love poetry, historiography, diatribe, tragedy, and aretalogy, as it is quite likely they do, then consciously or otherwise their outlook must also have been affected. But when a new language is adopted, even a literal translation from the old must import new connotations. It is natural for a Greek translator to render the Hebrew word for soul by psyche, but by so doing he adds whole layers of meaning which had been attached to psyche by the Greek philosophers. The interesting thing is that these new meanings now inhere in the notion of "soul" even for Hebrew writers. There are numerous similar cases, where the innovation may have been inadvertent. Sometimes it appears to be intentional. At
Exodus 3.14 the puzzling phrase ehyeh asher ehyeh, commonly translated "I am that I am," is rendered in the Greek Bible by ho ơn, "I am being," which must be an intentional Platonism.
By collecting and arranging instances of fusion in forms and words and ideas it is possible to trace the process from its tentative beginnings to its consummation. The best field for studying the union of Greek and Hebrew strands into a single skein is the religious literature of the inter-testamentary period, of which the Apocrypha constitutes a clearly defined group. We must now see how it is defined, first by external criteria and then by character.
2. Apocryphal and Apocrypha
In current usage the adjectives Apocryphal and apocryphal have separate meanings. Written with a the word means "of dubious authority," "spurious," often with a hint of "esoteric"; written with A it refers to the collection of books printed in this volume, with no pejorative connotation. The process by which the distinction arose will clarify the nature and standing of the books in question.
Apocryphon (of which apocrypha is the plural) is a Greek adjective meaning "hidden," and, as applied to writings, originally designated such as contained "secret" doctrine, Phoenician, Zoroastrian, or other. In early ecclesiastical usage the term came to be applied to writings regarded as inspired by various heretical sects, whether or not they were "secret." Presently apocrypha was used to designate not heretical books but books of religious interest which lacked the inspiration and hence the authority of books actually included in the Bible. The criterion is the canon of the Bible; books not contained in an authoritative Bible are apocrypha.
But the contents of the Hebrew and the Greek Bibles are not identical. The men who made the Greek translation of the Old Testament called the Septuagint included in their work a number of books (specifically, those in our present collection) which bear a general resemblance to analogous works in the Hebrew Old Testament and which for the most part were written in Hebrew (or Aramaic) but which am not in fact present in the Hebrew Old Testament. If the Hebrew Old Testament is the criterion, these books are apocrypha. But the Bible of the early Church was not the Hebrew but the Greek, and its contents are reproduced in Jerome's Latin version called the Vulgate, which is the Bible of the Roman Catholic Church. In the usage of the Catholic Church, therefore, the books here called Apocrypha are canonical, and the word Apocrypha is applied to a group of books which are in neither the Greek nor the Hebrew Old Testament.
But Jerome himself (though he is the only early writer to do so) speaks of the books found in the Greek but not in the Hebrew Old Testament as apocrypha. It was on Jerome's authority that the Wycliffe Bible (1382) included only such Old Testament books as were found in the Hebrew. Coverdale's "Great Bible" (1539) did include the extra works, but introduced an innovation in arrangement. Previously they had been placed where they seemed to belong, logically, or chronologically, among the Hebrew books; now they were put together by themselves. At the Reformation the decisive step of denying inspiration to these books was taken. Protestants accept as canonical only those books found in the Hebrew Old Testament; those found only in the Greek Bible are the Apocrypha. The Council of Trent (1546) reaffirmed the Catholic position that these books are canonical. To the books which the Catholic Church called apocrypha, Protestants applied the term pseudepigrapha.
The distinctions suggested by this terminology are, however, inexact and hinder rather than help appreciation of the books concerned. The term pseudepigrapha, which means "writings of falsely ascribed authorship," is appropriate enough as a designation for Enoch, The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, The Letter of Aristeas, and the like, but it is equally appropriate for a number of writings in the Apocrypha: Jeremiah, Baruch, Manasseh, and Solomon cannot have written the works ascribed to them. In the books labeled pseudepigrapha we recognize that the false ascriptions are not a deception but a literary device to enhance the dignity of an imaginative work. But the books of the Apocrypha (with the exception of Maccabees) are similarly imaginative works, artistically superior, indeed, and therefore following accepted literary forms more faithfully. Hellenistic literature gave a respected place, for example, to historical romance calculated to foster political or religious loyalty; audiences were not deceived because they knew what kinds of truth the romance was intended to communicate. If, by reason of its association with Old Testament history, we read Judith or Tobit as a chronicle of actual events, we must either resort to most implausible interpretation or dismiss the chronicler as an ignorant bungler; but if we realize that such books were intended as edifying romances for the purpose of inculcating and strengthening loyalties under trying conditions, we can appreciate them as honest and effective pieces of literary art.
3. Between Canon and Pseudepigrapha
In the total body of Jewish religious writing surviving from the last centuries B.C., then, the Apocrypha occupies a place below the later books of the Old Testament and above the pseudepigrapha. There is enough common ground between them to give the three groups a certain unity, not only in date and place but even in religious outlook and literary merit, but there are perceptible gradations. Enoch, the most influential of the group, and similar apocalypses, may have been too vivid in their eschatology and too chaotic in form to be acceptable. Jubilees and The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs may have dealt with the patriarchs too imaginatively. IV Maccabees, which is the most elegant book of the group and most attractive to the modern reader, may have been excluded by reason of its late date or possibly Antiochene provenience. These books would all be anomalous if they were included in the Bible.
But this is not true of the books of the Apocrypha, and it is difficult to see why some of them were not in fact included. Those who argued for their retention in the canon could maintain that the Wisdom of Solomon and Baruch are at least as useful for religious instruction as Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs, that if Esther is worthy of inclusion so is Judith also, that the Books of Maccabees are as deserving as Chronicles and Ecclesiasticus as Proverbs. If Wisdom was not actually written by Solomon, neither were Ecclesiastes or the Song, which make the same claim. The Maccabees and Ecclesiasticus, it is true, admit to dates in the second century B.C., and this may have been sufficient reason for excluding them; but modern scholars are quite certain that Ecclesiastes and the Song of Solomon and Daniel and Esther are as late or later. The history of the establishment of the Old Testament canon, which is to say, the decision on whether or not a given book was inspired, is full of uncertainties. About the inclusion of the first two divisions, the Law of the Prophets, there could be no question. The third category, called Writings, is not so firmly defined, for the Jews attributed a lower authority to it; the rationale for accepting or rejecting books for this category is not always clear. All that can be said is that a modern panel of religious teachers might well question the inclusion of certain books now found in the Hebrew Bible and advocate the inclusion of others found only in the Greek Bible.
4. Theme and Variety
Like the Old Testament itself the Apocrypha is rather a library than a single book. As in the older library so in the later the unifying theme is the relations between God and Israel. The actual working out of the theme in politics and war is described in the historical books, in our case Esdras and Maccabees. Instruction and encouragement in the proper attitude to the relationship is provided in the Wisdom of Solomon and in the additions and annexes to Esther, Daniel, and Jeremiah. Edifying examples of the proper relationship are offered in Judith and Tobit, and Ecclesiasticus shows how awareness of the relationship can ensure a reasonable practical life.
Except for Maccabees and Ecclesiasticus, where the actual historical situation is plainly indicated, the materials are retrojected to a fictive date in the remote past - as are some books in the Old Testament also. Wisdom is ascribed to Solomon, but its author has plainly learned from, and polemicizes against, current philosophic doctrine. The annexes to Jeremiah are naturally placed in Jeremiah's own time. Tobit, Judith, and the additions to Esther and Daniel are referred to the period of the Babylonian exile or earlier; actually the books of Daniel and Esther were themselves written not earlier than about 164 B.C. There is evidently purposeful conformity to the literary forms and doctrines of the Old Testament, but the characteristics of a later age are apparent nevertheless. Judith shows the influence of Hellenistic romance as plainly as Maccabees shows the influence of Hellenistic historiography. Wisdom is influenced by the form of the Cynic-Stoic diatribe, which may itself have been an eastern invention. Moreover Wisdom is the first Jewish (not Greek) writing to promise not merely national survival but a personal immortality. The phraseology of Wisdom, incidentally, shows striking parallels with that of the New Testament. This need not imply direct influence, but it does indicate a common climate of theologic discourse.
5. The Essential Link
But interesting as the connections of the Apocrypha with its Old Testament antecedents may be, its connections with the New Testament are more instructive. Between the Old Testament conceived of as a totality and the New Testament, there is as wide a gap as that which separates Homer and tragedy from the literature of Rome. Both later literatures presuppose the earlier to the degree that they are completely intelligible only in the light of the earlier; but just as the literature of Alexandria supplies the essential link between the classical literatures, so the Apocrypha does for the Testaments. Scholarly commentaries on individual books of the New Testament as of the Apocrypha point to specific echoes of phrases and images and ideas from books of the Apocrypha in books of the New Testament; what is more illuminating is that the Apocrypha reflects the social and intellectual climate, the religious premises and the literary forms, of the area and the culture out of which the New Testament grew.
6. The Individual Books
In the sense that they derive from a single culture and a single conjuncture of history the books of the Apocrypha have a certain homogeneity, greater, it may be, than the homogeneity of the Old Testament, and for the reader of a translation this homogeneity is enhanced, as in the case of canonical books, by the circumstance that all are translated by a single hand or in a uniform style. But the character of the group can better be apprehended by considering the books severally, and an inventory may incidentally be serviceable to readers who may not wish to start at the beginning and read through to the end. The order, which is that in which the books are regularly printed, has no relation to genre and but little to date, except that the books associated with Ezra are put first and those on the Maccabees last. Fuller treatments will be found in the Prefaces to the individual books.
A. I Esdras is an uninspired chronicle of the exile to Babylonia and the return to Jerusalem, largely identical with the narrative in Ezra and Nehemiah. The most attractive section is the story of the three young guardsmen (3.1-5.6) for which there is no extant analogue. The date may be late third century B.C.
B. II Esdras is an apocalypse. Its mature reflections on the continuing problems of human life and God's justice make it an important document in the history of religious thought. It was written after the death of Nero (A.D. 68); chapters 1, 2, 15, and 16 are Christian additions, and it may be that other parts are influenced by Christian teaching.
C. Tobit combines pre-existing novella motifs into an edifying romance. Characterization and plot construction are effective, and the piety genuine and moving. The emergence of individuality and of personal religion and the fusion of elements from disparate sources are characteristic phenomena of the Hellenistic age. The date of Tobit is probably early second century B.C.
D . Judith, of similar date, is another romance based on identifiable Hellenistic patterns. The story of the virtuous heroine who saved her people by decapitating the enemy general whose lust she had aroused is probably the most familiar in the Apocrypha.
E. The Additions to the Book of Esther comprise six separate fragments inserted at appropriate junctures in the canonical book of Esther. The passages may have been added to correct the secular tone of that book, or, less probably, they may represent a fuller early recension of the story. A likely date is the early first century B.C.
F. The Wisdom of Solomon, perhaps of the same date, is important for the development of theology. It is the first Jewish book specifically to promise individual retribution after death. It is also a good example of the fusion of Greek and Hebrew ideas. The book is a composite, with the break at chapter 11. The first part is probably a translation from Hebrew, and the second a Greek continuation by the translator of the first.
G. Ecclesiasticus, otherwise called The Wisdom of Jeshua the Son of Sirach, is the longest and most attractive book in the Apocrypha. The author is concerned for religious truth but his emphasis is on worldly wisdom that comes from experience. Ecclesiasticus was written about 180 B.C.
H. The Book of Baruch is the closest approach in the Apocrypha to the style and spirit of Old Testament prophecy. The themes are confession of sin, encouragement to pursue Wisdom, and comfort for affliction. &hoes of Daniel indicate a date later than 164 B.C. The appended Letter of Jeremiah, which can hardly be earlier than the first century B.C., is mainly an admonition against idolatry.
I. The Additions to Daniel comprise three separate pieces whose date must be later than 164 B.C.:
1. The story of Susanna, who rejected the solicitations of two lustful elders who surprised her at her bath, was accused by them of adultery, and vindicated by the youthful Daniel, as she was being led to execution.
2. The Song of the Three Children, which comprises a long prayer of Azariah (the Hebrew name of Abednego), and a formal hymn purportedly recited by the three prospective martyrs in the fiery furnace.
3. The story of Bel and the Dragon, which ridicules the worship first of Bel and then of a sacred serpent.
J. The Prayer of Manasseh purports to be the prayer which Manasseh is reported (in II Chronicles 33.18) to have recited while he was captive in Babylonia.
K. I Maccabees is a concise and competent account probably by an eyewitness and a devoted partisan of the Maccabees, of the course of events during the years 167-134 B.C. The book was written in Hebrew but exhibits the characteristics of Hellenistic historiography.
L. II Maccabees is not a continuation but a parallel account, covering the years 175-160 B.C. Its author describes it as an abridgment of a five-book work by Jason of Cyrene. It too rests ultimately on eyewitness accounts, but it is more emotional, more rhetorical, and more avowedly propagandistic than I Maccabees.
7. Apocrypha in Literature and Art*
Tobit, Judith, Susanna, Maccabees evoke memories even for readers who have never encountered the books in which their stories are told. The limbo into which these have been relegated has estranged ordinary readers, but poets and painters and composers of earlier centuries could assume that their audiences were familiar with the Apocrypha. For artists Judith has understandably been the great favorite. Her story has been painted by Baldassare, Botticelli, Cranach, Giorgione, Michelangelo, Tintoretto, Van Dyck, Veronese, and a dozen other masters. Pictures suggested by the story of Susanna are almost as numerous, and there are a good number drawn from Tobit. Of the numerous echoes of the Apocrypha in literature perhaps the most interesting is the tenth-century English (West Saxon) epic on Judith. The Monke's Tale in Chaucer tells the story in brief And Shakespeare could count on his audience catching the allusion to the Susanna story when he has Shylock speak of Portia as "A Daniel come to judgment." In music, aside from frequent allusions in hymnody, mention ought be made of Handel's stately oratorios on Susanna and on Judas Maccabaeus.
* For "The Pervasive Influence of the Apocrypha" see the admirable chapter so entitled in Bruce M. Metzger, An Introduction to the Apocrypha (New York, 1957), 205-238.
8. Translations and Introductions
Even after the Reformation excluded the Apocrypha from the canon, it continued to be recommended as "useful for instruction" and selections were read in public worship. But as early as the time of Elizabeth, Puritans objected to the public reading of these "inferior" writings, and complaints became more vocal during the eighteenth century. But the ordinary editions of the English Bible included the Apocrypha. The British and Foreign Bible Society, founded in 1804, included the Apocrypha in the English and foreignlanguage Bibles it subventioned, but the practice was vigorously protested, especially by the Edinburgh branch of the Society. The protesters had their way, and in 1826 a rule was formally adopted: "The Principles of the Society exclude the circulation of those Books, or parts of Books, which are usually termed Apocryphal." The action of the London society confirmed the American Bible Society (founded at New York in 1816) in its own practice, and commercial publishers naturally followed the same practice. In consequence general familiarity with the books of the Apocrypha declined, though they were included in small editions of the Authorized Version issued by the Oxford and Cambridge presses and also in separate printings. But in their work on the Apocrypha the King James translators were careless and perfunctory, so that it is inferior to the rest of their work in both accuracy and style. To remedy these defects and to make the Apocrypha more generally accessible Professor Edgar J. Goodspeed published his "American translation" in 1938. More recently (1957) a Revised Standard Version Apocrypha has been prepared by a committee of American scholars. But the freshness and directness of Professor Goodspeed's version and its closer approach to a dignified vernacular make it more desirable for the general reader, and it has therefore been chosen for presentation in the present volume.
A welcome by-product of the nineteenth-century debate on the worth of the Apocrypha was a spurt of scholarly activity on text and interpretation. A precipitate of this activity, still highly useful, is available in R. H. Charles, Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, in two quarto volumes (Oxford, 1913). The handiest modern Greek text is Alfred Rahlfs' Septuaginta (Stuttgart, 1935, and reprints). Series of translations of individual books with commentaries are published by Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish organizations. The three most useful introductions to Apocryphal literature are by American scholars. The most technical is C. C. Torrey, The Apocryphal Literature (Yale University Press, 1945); the most devout is Bruce M. Metzger, An Introduction to the Apocrypha (Oxford University Press, 1957). Far the fullest, with due account taken of other scholarly opinion, is R. H. Pfeiffer, History of New Testament Times with an Introduction to the Apocrypha (Harper's, 1949).
[This document is excerpted from The Apocrypha : An American Translation, by Edgar J. Goodspeed, ©1959 Random House, Inc.]
Further information on the Apocrypha may be found here.
