Many of the books in our Apocrypha were already
considered sacred by some people at the time of Jesus. For example, the book of
Sirach, or Ecclesiasticus, in the Apocrypha was originally written by Yeshua’’
son of Eleazar son of Sira, in Hebrew, in the early second century BCE. He is
generally known as Jesus son of Sirach, after the Greek form of his name,
because the version of this book in the Apocrypha is a translation of the Greek
translation made by his grandson. Some fragments of the original Hebrew have
survived from Qumran and Masada, and substantial parts from a Cairo Genizah
(where worn out manuscripts of sacred texts were stored rather than being
destroyed), so that some 60 per cent of the original Hebrew now survives. This
shows that the original Hebrew was a sacred text, and the Dead Sea fragments
show that it was already so by the time of Jesus. (Maurice Casey, Jesus of
Nazareth: An Independent Historian’s Account of His Life and Teaching [London:
T&T Clark International, 2010], 124)
