“And the dog came out with him and went along with him” (Tobit 6:1). That’s a line from the story of Tobias and the angel Raphael. You probably don’t know it unless you were raised Roman Catholic or Orthodox because it’s in a part of the Bible that most Protestants leave out of the Scriptures or put in a section labeled “Apocrypha” (from the Greek word for “obscure”).

The history of these books begins centuries before Christianity arose. The Apocrypha are included in a second century B.C. Greek translation of the Jewish Scriptures, but don’t appear in the first century A.D. Hebrew Jewish Scriptures. Since most Christians understood Greek, but not Hebrew, they tended to read the Greek translation with more books.

That was the way things stood until Luther translated the Bible into German. He decided that the Old Testament should only include the books in the Hebrew Scriptures. He put the additional books in a section entitled “Apocrypha.” The translators of the King James Version did something similar in 1611 although later editions often omit the Apocrypha.

Sometimes Lutherans treat the Apocrypha as if they were evil books, but Luther himself wrote that they are “books which are not equal to holy scriptures, but which are good and useful to read.”

In Luther’s spirit, I read parts of the Apocrypha like Tobit with  the tale of Tobias and Raphael and the dog that follows them on their journey.

The Apocrypha is worth exploring for what its writing can teach us.

Read Sirach 14:20-27 (Apocrypha) and remember: God loves YOU unconditionally.

Wayne