The New Testament Apocrypha – Introduction
The New Testament consists of twenty-seven separate documents that God divinely inspired and gave to the human race. They are the only sacred writings that were composed during this period of human history. However, a number of other writings also appeared, which were not part of the New Testament, that claimed some sort of authority.
After the New Testament period, various written works appeared that claimed to have been composed by a New Testament character. Other writings emerged that claimed to give authoritative information about leading characters of the New Testament. These include gospels, letters, Acts and apocalypses; the same type of writings that are found in the New Testament.
Some of these writings were received as authoritative for a short period of time by a small number of believers. Eventually, they were rejected by everyone. In this section of the book, we will look at certain of these written works; the New Testament Apocrypha.
A study of the New Testament Apocrypha will make it clear that they have no such claim whatsoever to divine authority. The contrast between these works and the written New Testament will be obvious.
We will conclude this section of our book by noting why we can be assured that we do have the correct books in the Bible. All of the evidence indicates that no books have been incorrectly added to Scripture and no divinely inspired books have been left out.
The Blue Letter Bible ministry and the BLB Institute hold to the historical, conservative Christian faith, which includes a firm belief in the inerrancy of Scripture. Since the text and audio content provided by BLB represent a range of evangelical traditions, all of the ideas and principles conveyed in the resource materials are not necessarily affirmed, in total, by this ministry.
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