Why the Seven Deuterocanonical Books Deserve a Place in the Mar Thoma Bible?.

A Reformed Church with an Apostolic Memory

Why the Seven Deuterocanonical Books Deserve a Place in the Mar Thoma Bible

The Mar Thoma Syrian Church occupies a remarkable place in the history of Christianity. It sees itself as both apostolic and reformed—rooted in the ancient StThomas Christian tradition of India while embracing a reform that sought to bring the life and teaching of the Church more firmly under the authority of Scripture.
These two identities need not compete with one another.

In fact, there is a strong argument that the Mar Thoma Church could acknowledge andinc lude the seven books traditionally known as the Deuterocanonical books—Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, 1 Maccabees and 2 Maccabees—without compromising its Reformed character.

Their inclusion would not require the Church to adopt Roman Catholic doctrine. Rather, it would give Mar Thoma Christians a broader window into the biblical and Jewish world from which the New Testament emerged.

An apostolic church that did not begin with the Reformation

According to the ancient tradition of the St Thomas Christians, the Apostle Thomas arrived in India around AD 52. Whatever details of that tradition may be debated historically, the antiquity of Christianity in India is undeniable.

The important point is that the ancestors of the Mar Thoma Church were Christians more than fifteen centuries before the Protestant Reformation.

They did not inherit a Protestant Bible.

They belonged to the ancient Syriac Christian world, particularly the East Syriac tradition. Their worship, theology and Scriptures came through the Syriac churches of the East rather than through the later Western Reformation.

This is important because the modern Protestant Old Testament of 39 books was not simply the Bible that St Thomas brought to India.

The St Thomas Christians inherited a Syriac biblical tradition, particularly associated with the Peshitta. That tradition itself had a complicated history of canon formation and did not correspond exactly to either the modern Protestant or Catholic Bible.

Therefore, when Abraham Malpan began his nineteenth-century reform, adopting the Protestant biblical canon was part of the Reformation context in which that reform took place. It was not a canon handed down unchanged from St Thomas.

That distinction matters.

The seven books were not invented by the Catholic Church

The Deuterocanonical books are sometimes described as though they were medieval Catholic additions to the Bible.

Historically, that is too simplistic.

These books belong to the literature of Second Temple Judaism, the period immediately preceding and overlapping the earthly ministry of Jesus. They were preserved particularly in the Greek-speaking Jewish world and became part of the scriptural and theological environment inherited by early Christianity.

They include:
• Tobit
• Judith
• Wisdom
• Sirach
• Baruch
• 1 Maccabees
• 2 Maccabees

The early Church knew these writings, read them and drew theological ideas from the world they represent. The question of whether every early Christian community regarded every one of them as equally canonical is a separate question. The historical evidence shows that the boundaries of the biblical canon developed over time and were not identical everywhere.

That is precisely why the Mar Thoma Church should be able to reconsider them without feeling that it is abandoning its Reformation heritage.

John mentions a feast whose history is found in Maccabees

One of the clearest examples of the value of these books is found in John’s Gospel.
John 10:22 says:

“Then came the Feast of Dedication at Jerusalem.”
The feast is Hanukkah, the Jewish Feast of Dedication.

But the Old Testament books normally used by Protestants do not explain where this feast came from.
The historical account is found in 1 and 2 Maccabees.

1 Maccabees 4 describes Judas Maccabeus cleansing and rededicating the Temple after its desecration under Antiochus IV Epiphanes and establishing an annual celebration of the event.

John does not stop to explain this history. His readers apparently already knew what the Feast of Dedication was. This does not by itself prove that Maccabees belongs in the Christian canon.

But it demonstrates something extremely important:

Maccabees provides historical and theological context for something explicitly
mentioned in the New Testament. And that is exactly the kind of context the seven books can provide throughout the New Testament.

Wisdom provides a bridge into New Testament Christology

The Book of Wisdom is particularly remarkable.

Wisdom 7 describes divine Wisdom as an emanation of God’s glory, a reflection of eternal light and an image of God’s goodness.

Now compare this conceptual world with the New Testament:

“He is the image of the invisible God.” — Colossians 1:15
and:
“He reflects the glory of God and bears the very stamp of his nature.” — Hebrews 1:3

John’s Gospel develops the idea even further in its presentation of the divine Word who comes into the world and becomes flesh.

The point is not that Paul or John simply copied Wisdom.

Rather, the New Testament’s language about divine Wisdom, God’s Word, divine revelation and Christ’s identity becomes easier to understand when we know the Jewish Wisdom tradition that existed before Christianity.

Wisdom is therefore not merely an “extra book.”

It is part of the intellectual and theological landscape in which the New Testament was born.
The suffering righteous man

There is another extraordinary example in Wisdom 2.

The chapter describes wicked people plotting against a righteous man because his life exposes their wrongdoing. They mock him, test him and condemn him to a shameful death.

The parallels with the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ Passion are striking.

Matthew 27, Mark 15 and Luke 23 all describe Jesus being mocked and challenged to prove that God will save him. Again, Wisdom does not have to be considered a direct prophecy of Christ for it to be valuable.
It shows that the idea of the righteous sufferer being rejected and persecuted was already deeply embedded in Jewish religious thought before Jesus.

That gives us important context for understanding the Passion narratives.

Tobit, Sirach and the moral world of the New Testament
Tobit and Sirach likewise illuminate the moral vocabulary of the period.

Tobit places extraordinary emphasis on charity, mercy and righteous living. Sirach contains extensive teaching about forgiveness, humility, generosity, wisdom and care for the poor.

These themes resonate throughout the teaching of Jesus and the apostles.

For example, Jesus says in Luke 11:41:

“Give alms of what you have; and behold, everything is clean for you.”

Sirach repeatedly connects generosity, mercy and righteousness.

The purpose of recognizing these parallels is not to establish that every statement in Tobit or Sirach is a command for Christians.

It is to understand the religious world in which Jesus taught.

What about praying for the dead?

This is one area where the Deuterocanonical books can raise theological questions for a Reformed church.
2 Maccabees 12 describes prayer and atonement being offered on behalf of the dead.

Tobit and Sirach likewise contain statements connecting almsgiving with deliverance
from sin.
A Protestant or Mar Thoma Christian does not have to conclude from this that these practices are binding on Christians.
The fundamental Christian conviction is that Christ fulfils the Old Covenant.
Jesus says:
“I have not come to abolish them but to fulfil them.” — Matthew 5:17
The Letter to the Hebrews develops this principle extensively. The sacrifices, priesthood and rituals of the Old Covenant find their fulfilment in Christ.
Therefore, the fact that a Jewish practice is described in a Deuterocanonical book does not automatically make it a Christian obligation.
This distinction is crucial.
Including a book does not mean accepting every practice described in it as a continuing Christian command.
The same principle applies to many things in the Old Testament itself.
Christians read about animal sacrifice without sacrificing animals. We read about circumcision without requiring Gentile Christians to be circumcised. We read about Temple rituals without reproducing them.
The same hermeneutical principle can be applied to the Deuterocanonical books.
Their value is not limited to providing rules for Christian practice.
They provide history, theology, wisdom, cultural context and the development of ideas that lead toward the New Testament.
The ancient Syriac inheritance makes this especially relevant to Mar Thoma
The question becomes even more compelling when we remember the Church’s Syriac heritage.
The St Thomas Christians did not historically receive Christianity through Rome or Wittenberg. Their ecclesiastical and biblical inheritance came through the Syriac Christian world.
The ancient Syriac biblical tradition itself had a complicated history concerning the canon. Some Deuterocanonical books were known, translated and copied in Syriac, while others occupied a different status from the core books.
The classical Peshitta New Testament itself originally did not contain all 27 books found in modern Bibles. The traditional Peshitta lacked 2 Peter, 2 John, 3 John, Jude and Revelation, although these were incorporated into later Syriac traditions.
This demonstrates something very important:
There was no single universally fixed Christian Bible in the earliest centuries that corresponded perfectly to today’s Protestant or Catholic table of contents.
The Church’s understanding of the canon developed historically.
That makes it entirely legitimate for an ancient apostolic church such as Mar Thoma to examine its own biblical inheritance rather than assuming that the Protestant canon is automatically intrinsic to its apostolic identity.
The trauma of Diamper (Udayamperoor).
The history of the St Thomas Christians also complicates the documentary evidence.
The Synod of Diamper in 1599 sought to bring the St Thomas Christians into conformity with the Latin Catholic Church.
The Portuguese authorities examined, corrected and in some cases destroyed Syriac theological and liturgical manuscripts that they considered objectionable.
Some manuscripts were burned or mutilated. Others survived, sometimes because they were hidden or preserved elsewhere.
This means that reconstructing precisely what the pre-Portuguese St Thomas Christians possessed is difficult.
We should therefore be cautious about making absolute statements such as:
“The St Thomas Christians definitely used the Catholic 73-book Bible.”
There is insufficient evidence for such a claim.
But the opposite claim—
“The Protestant 66-book Bible is the Bible inherited from St Thomas”—is equally difficult to defend historically.
The reality is more complicated.
The St Thomas Christians inherited an ancient Syriac biblical tradition, and that tradition deserves to be studied on its own terms.
Abraham Malpan and the Reformation
Abraham Malpan’s reform should therefore not be understood as a rejection of the apostolic heritage of the St Thomas Christians.
His objective was reform.
He sought to remove practices and teachings that he believed had accumulated over centuries and to bring the Church closer to Scripture and the early Christian faith.
The result was something quite distinctive:
an ancient apostolic Indian Church with a Reformed theological identity.

That identity should be preserved.

But being Reformed does not require being historically dependent on a particular Protestant canon.
The central principle of the Reformation was not:

“Whatever books are printed in a Protestant Bible are automatically true, and everything outside them is false.”
The deeper principle was the authority of Scripture and the need to reform the Church according to God’s Word.

If the seven Deuterocanonical books help us understand the historical, cultural and theological world of Scripture, their inclusion does not undermine that principle.

Indeed, it may strengthen it.
Inclusion does not mean adopting Catholic theology
This distinction deserves emphasis.
A Mar Thoma Bible could include the seven books while retaining the Church’s
Reformed understanding of salvation.
Including 2 Maccabees would not require belief in purgatory.
Including Tobit would not require believing that almsgiving earns salvation.
Including Sirach would not require treating every statement about sin and atonement as a New Covenant doctrine.

Including Judith would not require adopting Catholic Marian theology.

Including Wisdom would not require accepting Catholic sacramental theology.
A book can be Scripture, or valuable biblical literature, without every historical practice described in it becoming a binding command for Christians today.

The same interpretive principle already applies throughout the Old Testament.

Perhaps the greatest benefit is context
The strongest argument for inclusion may therefore be neither Catholic nor Protestant.
It is simply biblical.
The seven books illuminate the four centuries between much of the Old Testament and
the coming of Christ.
They help explain:
• the rise of Antiochus IV and the persecution of the Jews;

• the Maccabean revolt;
• the rededication of the Temple;
• the origin of Hanukkah;
• Jewish martyrdom;
• developing belief in resurrection;
• Jewish thinking about angels;
• the development of Wisdom theology;
• ideas about divine revelation;
• Jewish concepts of righteousness and suffering;
• the religious environment in which Jesus and the apostles lived.
Without these writings, there is a substantial gap between the last historical events recorded in the Old Testament and the world of the New Testament.
With them, the transition becomes much clearer.
A possible way forward for Mar Thoma

The Mar Thoma Church does not need to choose between being Reformed and being Apostolic.
It can be both.
Indeed, acknowledging the Deuterocanonical books could be understood not as moving toward Roman Catholicism but as deepening the Church’s own historical consciousness.
The Church could retain its Reformed doctrines of salvation by grace through faith, the sufficiency of Christ’s sacrifice, the fulfilment of the Old Covenant and the supreme authority of Scripture, while also making the seven books available to its members as part of the broader biblical inheritance.
There could even be a useful distinction between:
Canonical authority
and
Ecclesiastical and historical value.
If the Church ultimately decided that it could not place all seven on precisely the same canonical level as Genesis, Isaiah or the Gospels, it could nevertheless restore them to the Bible used by its members, rather than relegating them to obscurity.
The objective would be to allow Mar Thoma Christians to read the New Testament with more of the world of the New Testament in view.
An apostolic church should not be afraid of its whole history
The Mar Thoma identity is unusual and precious.
It does not need to choose between Thomas and Luther.
It can remember Thomas, honour the ancient Syriac inheritance, appreciate Abraham
Malpan’s reform, and remain firmly centred on Jesus Christ and the authority of
Scripture.

The seven Deuterocanonical books do not need to be viewed as competitors to the
Reformation.
They can instead be viewed as historical and theological bridges between the Old
Testament and the New Testament.
John’s simple reference to the Feast of Dedication gives us a beautiful illustration.
Jesus stood in the Temple during Hanukkah.
John tells us that He did.
Maccabees tells us why that feast existed.
Knowing that history does not make our faith less Christian.
It makes our reading of the Gospel richer.

Perhaps that is ultimately the strongest case for Mar Thoma Christians to reconsider these seven books:
not to become more Catholic, and not to become less Reformed, but to become better informed readers of the Bible.

An apostolic church with roots reaching back to the first century should be willing to recover every part of its ancient biblical and theological inheritance that helps it understand the Scriptures more fully.
And doing so need not diminish the Reformation.

It may actually fulfil its spirit: continually returning to the sources, examining the inherited tradition, and seeking to understand the Word of God more faithfully.


Rajiv Varghese & ChatGPT.
A Curious Believer