Is the Apocrypha useful in shedding light on certain things in the Old Testament? For example, the added Letter of Jeremiah and Baruch, Jeremiah’s secretary’s book, in the Apocrypha?

This text is from a transcript of a talk by David Gooding, entitled ‘Where Did the Old Testament Come From?’ (2006).

Well, I would use the word 'useful.' The extra books are a mixed bag, as we have seen. Some of them are very useful, as is many a book that's not in the canon at all and not in the Apocrypha at all. They're very useful in the sense that they do depict the attitude of the people who wrote them at that time. To know how much of Baruch is reliable as a witness to Jeremiah, you would first have to ask what its own essential authority is. I mean, does it go back to the man who was Jeremiah's scribe, or to somebody who was purporting to write as though he were Jeremiah's scribe? Just to illustrate the point, you have a similar problem, for instance, in The Gospel of Nicodemus, one of the New Testament Apocryphal Writings. If this were a book written by Nicodemus it would be exceedingly interesting, even though it wasn't inspired, to know what he himself thought. But it is highly doubtful whether the Gospel of Nicodemus was written by the Nicodemus we know from Scripture. It's more like a historical novel under the name of Nicodemus.

Baruch might be a very different thing. It might seriously be the record of Jeremiah's scribe and therefore worth reading. The question of its authority, however, would be foundational and would come at all lines of the story. Jeremiah had a second scribe, you may remember; the book of Jeremiah tells you so. There has been a lot made of what is called the intertestamental literature in modern scholarship of the New Testament. It seems to me that very often it goes too far, because presently from using it as an interesting insight into some of the thinkers of the day, the distinction between it and Scripture tends to get obliterated.

But as an interesting comment on your question, in Beckwith's book¹ talking about many of the apocryphal books, he points out that you can tell by reading them what source they came from—whether they come from Pharisees, or whether they come from Sadducees, or from Essenes and such like people. For instance, you could tell that a book which talked about angels and the resurrection didn't come from Sadducees, because they didn't believe in either. So they are very interesting from that point of view.

¹ Roger T. Beckwith, The Old Testament Canon of the New Testament Church: And Its Background in Early Judaism, [1985] repr., Eugene, Ore.: Wipf & Stock, 2008.