Apocrypha???

When I bought the KJV Bible from the MSU bookstore and opened it up, I was surprised to see books that I had never heard of. Wisdom? Sirach? Susanna? In my church background, I have never see these books. I soon discovered these books are part of the Apocrypha, the non-Canonical texts. After reading Susanna, I decided to do some research on the Canon of Scripture. Why do most churches today disregard the Apocrypha? I couldn't find anything unbiblical in the story of Susanna. What I found was that this is a debate that exists even today, but I think I now have a basic understanding of why the books we call the Old Testament are regarded as sacred while the Apocrypha is not. It is safe to assume that the Old Testament that we have now is the same as the Hebrew Bible. These are the sacred texts of the Israelites. The confusion began after Jesus went back to Heaven and the Jews began to spread the gospel to the Gentiles. The Gentiles didn't understand Hebrew, so they began to use the Septuagint, which was a translation that had been made for Greek-speaking Alexandrian Jews. This meant that the first Latin manuscript came from the Septuagint instead of the original Hebrew, and thus began the confusion.

I'll write more about the Canon later as I research more, but one other interesting thing I read had to do with the chronological arrangement of the Old Testament. It has a definite symmetrical shape. The three sections (Law, Prophets, and Writings) each has a narrative and literary part. The narrative part always follows chronological order while the literary part is arranged in descending order by their size. The diagram shows the shape of the Old Testament.