ABSTRACT
In his introduction to the Apocrypha in his German edition of the Bible, Martin Luther (1483-1546) defined the Apocrypha as “books, not equal to the Sacred Scriptures, but useful and good for reading.”1 Kierkegaard was a Lutheran and thus was raised and educated with this ambiguous endorsement before him. On the one hand, the books were and are still sacred to many Christians, and had been sacred scripture for all Christians for over a thousand years. On the other hand, they were not in the Hebrew Bible, although they were in the Greek Septuagint and in the Latin Vulgate. Moreover, the apocryphal books did not obviously point to Christ and the good news of salvation, not even in a typological manner, which was a glaring deficit because some sort of Christological reference was Luther’s most important theological criterion of canonicity. Consequently, Luther put them in a separate category in his 1534 German edition of the Bible, separated from the Old Testament books by two blank pages. Most of the translation of these apocryphal books had not even been done by Luther himself but by his colleagues, Philipp Melanchthon (1497-1560), Caspar Cruciger (1504-48), and Justus Jonas (1493-1555). So this is where Kierkegaard found the apocryphal books: in the Bible but not quite “biblical,” more than myth or philosophy but less than sacred. How does Kierkegaard use the writings of the Apocrypha, and what does his usage reveal about his attitude towards it? How does it compare to his usage of “Sacred Scriptures,” or of unsacred wisdom in, say, Socrates?
