D&C 91 and Dona Nair's Bible With the Extra Books

In my first area in Santo André there was a widow named Dona Nair who fed us bread and a cup of guaraná every Thursday and would not let us start the lesson until we'd finished both. Her Bible was a thick Catholic one with a cracked spine, and one Thursday she opened it to a book called Tobias and asked if ours had that one. I said I didn't think so. She asked why not. I was nineteen, I had been in the country about three months, and the honest answer was that I had no idea.

I thought of her this week when I got to Doctrine and Covenants 91, which is six verses and takes about forty seconds to read aloud. I've spent a lot more than that on it, mostly because I realized partway through that I'd been carrying a wrong idea about it since sometime in the nineties, and the wrong idea had been working fine for me, which is how those survive.

What does D&C 91 actually say about the Apocrypha?

In Kirtland in March 1833 Joseph was working through the Bible by revelation and came to the books that sit between the two halves of the King James Version of 1611. Martin Luther had already pulled them into a section of their own back in 1534. The answer opens with verse 1, which says the Apocrypha is mostly translated correctly and that much of it is true. Then verse 2 turns:

There are many things contained therein that are not true, which are interpolations by the hands of men.

So you get two claims side by side, and neither one cancels the other. Luther's Bible in 1534 and the King James committee in 1611 both kept these books between the covers and set them apart from the rest, and I find it oddly comforting that a revelation from 1833 lands somewhere in that same middle ground instead of picking a side. I'd always carried a flattened version where the Apocrypha is "the books we don't read," as if the revelation were a fence. Read the text again and there's no fence anywhere in it.

Verse 3 says it's "not needful" for the Apocrypha to be translated, which is a statement about Joseph's workload that I filed for years under my bookshelf, and which is a long way from "forbidden." Nobody is told to put the book down. Verse 4 starts with "Therefore" and hands the reading over to whoever's holding it:

Therefore, whoso readeth it, let him understand, for the Spirit manifesteth truth;

That pattern comes straight out of D&C 9, where you study it out in your mind and then ask, and verse 8 doesn't have you asking first, because you're expected to arrive with your work done. I used to treat the praying half of that as the serious part and the studying half as throat-clearing. Sitting with this section I had it backwards, or at least lopsided. You can't ask the Spirit about a passage you haven't actually read, and a surprising number of my Sunday prayers about scripture were asked over passages I'd skimmed.

Is it really okay for Latter-day Saints to read the Apocrypha?

The revelation itself is the reason it's fine. The same section that says some of it was altered by human hands also promises a benefit, sitting in the middle of the text where nobody asked us to cash it:

And whoso is enlightened by the Spirit shall obtain benefit therefrom;

The Church doesn't put the Apocrypha in its curriculum or its reading plans, and it isn't part of the standard works. Neither fact is a prohibition. A thing can be left off the syllabus and still be allowed on the shelf, and plenty of what's on my shelf is.

I did eventually find out what was in Tobias. It was after I got home, on a Saturday, with a borrowed copy. It's a story about a young man on a long trip with an angel he takes for a hired guide, and a dog that goes along, which I did not expect. I read it twice that evening. Nobody had told me to and nobody had told me not to, and that's about the amount of instruction verse 4 gives.

I couldn't tell you which parts of Tobit are among the "many things" that are true, and I haven't earned an opinion yet. The verse puts that call on me and not on a footnote, and I've been slow to make it.

Dona Nair, for what it's worth, had no idea she was holding anything controversial. Her Bible had a cracked spine, and there was a spot on the lace doily where she set it down every Thursday before she went to get the guaraná. If I'd quoted her a rule from this section that day, I'd have been quoting something it doesn't say.

How should I read the Apocrypha, or anything else with mixed reliability?

I don't have a method from the section beyond the verses, but I do have a habit I've been trying out since Thursday morning at the counter. I buy used paperbacks at Deseret Industries, and the ones with a previous owner's pencil in the margins are better reads than the clean ones, because somebody already argued with the book. So with the Apocrypha I'm reading Sirach with a pencil, putting a small question mark next to anything I can't place and leaving it there for a week before I decide what I think. Chapter 38 has a long stretch near the end about craftsmen, the potter at his wheel and the smith at his anvil, and how they keep the fabric of the world steady even though nobody asks them to speak in the gate. I read that three times on Friday and put no question marks on it at all. Chapter 24 got four. Seeing where my pencil went told me more about my own assumptions than about the book.

It's a slow way to read, and I drop it every time I'm in a hurry, usually on a Sunday afternoon when the lesson is due.

What keeps snagging me is the word "interpolations," which the revelation says came by the hands of men, and that suggests somebody put them there on purpose and not that a tired scribe dropped a line. I can't tell by reading Judith or Sirach where a thumb has been on the scale, and I'm not sure the verse expects me to. That's the one thing here I haven't worked out.

Back when I did 2 Corinthians 13 I didn't see how close it sits to this one. Paul tells the Corinthians to examine themselves, and it's the same muscle. D&C 89 was given about ten days before this section, which makes me wonder what else Joseph was holding in his head that month.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Apocrypha, and why did Joseph Smith receive D&C 91?

The Apocrypha is a set of ancient writings, usually counted as fourteen books, from roughly 200 BC to 100 AD. Tobit, Judith, Sirach and 1 and 2 Maccabees are among them. Joseph reached them while working on his Bible translation and asked what to do, and section 91 is the answer he got in March 1833.

Does D&C 91 forbid reading the Apocrypha?

No. It says the Apocrypha doesn't need to be translated, which is a different thing from saying it shouldn't be read, and verse 5 goes the other way entirely.

How do I know which parts are true?

The revelation puts that on the reader and the Spirit, not on a committee. D&C 9 gives the pattern, which is to study it out in your mind and then ask whether it's right.

Is the Apocrypha part of the standard works?

It isn't. The standard works are the Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price. Section 91 gives permission to read the Apocrypha without raising it to scripture.

Which Christians treat the Apocrypha as scripture?

Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches accept it, and Dona Nair's cracked Bible was the evidence I had on her kitchen table. Most Protestants don't give it doctrinal weight, though Lutheran and Anglican churches read from it for instruction.

Section 92 is next. It's short too, and I'll read it before I pray about it.

— D.