The books of the Apocrypha would
continue to be mined by the early church for the ethical value of the instructions
included therein, perhaps in part because its leaders recognized the consonance
of these instructions with the ethical teachings of Jesus, James, and other
voices preserved in the emerging texts that would later be incorporated within
the New Testament canon. Indeed, the New Testament texts could be seen to endorse
a good deal of material found in the books of the Apocrypha but not explicitly
present in the books of the Hebrew Bible. This might be help to account for the
elevation of the value of the former alongside the latter in early Christian
communities (who were clearly open to affirming the value and even authority of
texts outside of the emerging Jewish canon, given the very fact of a New
Testament).
The promotion of almsgiving, the rationale
for the practice, and the specific advice found in Tobit and Ben Sira, for
example, continue to appear in early Christian exhortations. Thus Polycarp in
the early second century echoes Tobit’s promise that “charity delivers one from
death” (Pol. Phil. 10.2; cf. Tob 4:10). The nearly contemporary church
manual known as the Didache admonishes Christians not to be like “one who
stretches out the hands, repeating Ben Sira to receive but withdraws them when
it comes to giving” (Did. 4.5; see also Barn. 19.9), repeating Ben Sira’s
instructions (Sir 4:31); Didache 1.6 also cites a proverb, “Let your gift sweat
in your hands until you known to whom you give,” which recalls an admonition
from Ben Sira: “If you do good, know to whom you do it, and you will be thanked
for your good deeds” (Sir 12:1 NRSV). The older sage had advised showing
charitable generosity only to the righteous poor; the compilers of the Didache
utilize the proverb to urge being a good steward of charity, taking care to
bestow it on the genuinely needy. Both Ben Sira and Tobit promote almsgiving as
an atonement for sins (Sir 3:30; Tob 12:9), a motivation that also persists in
Christian teaching (Did. 4.6). Gaudentius of Brescia (fl. 395 CE) shows how
well the ethical teaching of Tobit and Jesus might be combined in the early
church, as he affirms the atoning power of almsgiving and connects this with
Jesus’s parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31):
Not out of malice but out of
providence has God made you rich. He intended that through your works of mercy you
would again find medicine to treat the wounds of your sins. “Certainly alms
freely given preserve one from death and purify from every sin.” The rich man
was not tormented because he was rich but because Lazarus suffered hunger while
he feasted. (Sever Voicu, ed. The Apocrypha: Ancient Christian Commentary on
Scripture [Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2010], 27)
Examples of how Ben Sira and Tobit’s
ethical precepts pervaded early Christian discourse could be multiplied
exponentially. (David A. Desilva, “The Use of the Apocrypha in the Early Church,”
in Apocrypha and the Septuagint, ed. Bruce W. Longenecker, Marieke Dhont,
and James K. Aitken [Ancient Literature for New Testament Studies 1; Grand
Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan Academic, 2026], 35)
