The Apocrypha: Does it belong in the Bible? Catholics and Orthodox religions would contend that yes, it does. But do we need to take their claims seriously?
To the Jews, the answer was no. The most commonly cited evidence for this is a rather lengthy quote from Josephus: "For we have not an innumerable multitude of books among us, disagreeing from and contradicting one another, [as the Greeks have,] but only twenty-two books, which contain the records of all the past times; which are justly believed to be divine; and of them five belong to Moses, which contain his laws and the traditions of the origin of mankind till his death. This interval of time was little short of three thousand years; but as to the time from the death of Moses till the reign of Artaxerxes king of Persia, who reigned after Xerxes, the prophets, who were after Moses, wrote down what was done in their times in thirteen books. The remaining four books contain hymns to God, and precepts for the conduct of human life."
Josephus, then, clearly considered only 22 books to be inspired by God. He was well aware of the Apocrypha, but believed it was not inspired. The first thing people usually pick up on here is that if Josephus recognised only 22 books, that suggests the 39 books in our modern Bibles are still too many. However, this is due to how we separate the books rather than their canonicity. You may notice, for example, that Kings, Chronicles and Samuel are all separated into 2 books in modern Bibles. That was not how the Jews divided the books.
At any rate, Josephus, who sought to educate the Greeks on Judaism, did not consider the Apocrypha canon. The Apocrypha is conspicuously absent from the Hebrew canon. The Jews simply never considered it as anything more than a useful collection of books of historic note that may even be useful for devotional purposes. The highest honor any Jew ever ascribed to the Apocrypha is that it is "lesser inspired".
But some might argue "we don't get our canon from the Jews, we get it from the Church." There are two facts to point out to such people. The first is that of all the disputes Jesus had with the Jewish leaders, He never disputed with them over canon. Quite the opposite, He took it for granted. He repeatedly appealed to "the Scriptures", He never added "which you have removed the Apocrypha from". He repeatedly asserted "it is written", but not once did He appeal to an Apocryphal book. Jesus simply never took issue with the Jewish view of the Old Testament canon. He was more annoyed that they weren't obeying it.
But aside from the implicit words of Jesus, we have the explicit words of Paul: The oracles of God were committed to the Jews (Romans 3:2). He even cites this as the profit of being a Jew! In the previous chapter of Romans, Paul had basically pointed out that circumcision is fruitless because if an uncircumcised man keeps the law, that is as good as circumcision, whereas a circumcised man who doesn't keep the law is just a circumcised man. In other words, there's no difference between a Jew and a Gentile. But then he basically comes back with "oh, by the way, God gave us His word while the Gentiles were still polytheists, so that's cool."
All of this tells us that whatever the Jewish opinion of Scripture was, that should be our opinion of the Old Testament. No Jew would have dared play with the law of Moses. The Prophets were always seen as sacred. The Psalms, the Proverbs, these were essential to the Jewish canon. And yet, the Apocrypha was never seen as canon, and many Jews even worried it might be heretical (which is not surprising given that at least some of it contains some rather serious doctrinal error). In general, the Apocryphal books were treated very differently from actual canon.
So, actually, yes, the Jewish canon is rather authoritative, and at any rate no one can claim it was given to us by any Church. The Apocrypha cannot be considered canon purely on the grounds that the Jews never considered it canon. There are more reasons it cannot be canon, but for today's article, that's more than enough.