“A friend of mine said that Jesus quoted from an apocryphal book (Sirach 37:2). How do I answer his insistence that this means the apocrypha belongs in the Bible?”

In your letter you don’t mention where the Lord is supposed to have quoted this verse, but it doesn’t matter. Even if He did, that wouldn’t prove that God wanted that book included in the canon of Scripture. The Bible mentions a lot of books that aren’t included in God’s Word.

For instance, in the Old Testament it mentions “the book of the wars of the Lord” (Num. 21:14). In the New Testament, Paul talked about an epistle that he wrote before the Book of 1 Corinthians (5:9). And there are many other examples of this (Josh. 10:13; 2 Chron. 9:29; 12:15; 13:22; 1 Kings 11:41; Col. 4:16; Jude 1:14; etc.).

The bottom line is, if God wanted those books included in His Book, they’d be in His Book. The fact that they are not indicates that they may have contained trustworthy and quotable information, but they were not “given by inspiration of God” as “all Scripture” is (2 Tim. 3:16).

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