Should apocryphal books have been included in our Old Testament?

This text is from a letter written by David Gooding.

Thank you very much for the interesting excerpt from The Economist.¹ It is amazing what the new technology can do, and it will be very interesting to see the evidence of early editors and scribes in this important manuscript.

As to the question it raises—namely how many books should be included in the canon of the Old Testament?—this is not a new discovery, of course. It has been known for centuries that the big, formal manuscripts of the Bible, namely Vaticanus B, the Sinaiticus and the Alexandrinus, contain a number of apocryphal books.

The fact is that they do not all have exactly the same list of apocryphal books; and, secondly, some of them contain apocryphal books that are not even in the formal so-called Apocrypha.

But there is an ever-increasing movement in the scholarly world to argue that the ancient Greek translations of the Old Testament, i.e. the Septuagint, and not the Hebrew Old Testament, should be the Bible of the church. That is a movement to be resisted at all costs; but alas it begins to infect the work of even conservative and sometimes evangelical scholars.

Yours sincerely in Christ,

¹ The Economist, ‘And the word was made flash: Digitised scripture lessons’, March 26th, 2005 edition