Tennesse and the pseudepigrapha

THE RECENT BILL BY THE TENNESEE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES which would make "the Holy Bible" the state book has been getting flack from a lot of people. Joel Hoffman has a HuffPo piece asking What Has Tennessee Done and What Holy Bible Have They Chosen? in which he invokes various deutero- and non-canoncial books related to the Old and New Testaments:

The mysterious Book of Enoch --- and its claim that God's world has gone awry -- is part of the Ethiopian Bible, but everyone else puts it in the category of books that fell to the Old Testament's cutting room floor in antiquity. Technically called the "pseudepigrapha," these books number in the hundreds, and include the second half of the Adam and Eve story, Abraham's early life, and much more.

Then there are the runners up to the New Testament, such as the Gnostic Gospels. Like most of the pseudepigrapha, these aren't in anyone's Bible.

All of this raises the question: What has Tennessee made into its state book? The Jewish Bible? The Catholic one? Greek Orthodox? Protestant? Ethiopian?

Even when we include all the fragments and titles of lost pseudepigrapha, I don't think we are quite up to "hundreds" of them, but I hope future discoveries change that. Beyond that, I'm not getting involved in this discussion, except to say that I'm always pleased to see the apocryphal and pseudepigraphic books get some media attention. As they say, all publicity is good publicity.

Cross-file under Old Testament Apocrypha Watch, New Testament Apocrypha Watch, Old Testament Pseudepigrapha Watch, and Politics.