Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The - Stieg Larsson [159]
“I see.”
“All this is basic dogma, so to speak. In general it’s the platform of the church and nothing unusual at all. He was saying quite simply: ‘Read the Bible—it will provide sufficient knowledge and vouches for the true faith.’”
Mikael felt a bit embarrassed.
“Now I have to ask you in what connection this conversation occurred,” she said.
“I was asking him about a person he had met many years ago, someone I’m writing about.”
“A religious seeker?”
“Something along that line.”
“OK. I think I understand the context. You told me that Pastor Falk said two other things—that ‘Josef will certainly exclude them’ and that‘ they were never accepted into the canon.’ Is it possible that you misunderstood and that he said Josefus instead of Josef? It’s actually the same name.”
“That’s possible,” Blomkvist said. “I taped the conversation if you want to listen to it.”
“No, I don’t think that’s necessary. These two sentences establish fairly unequivocally what he was alluding to. Josefus was a Jewish historian, and the sentence ‘they were never accepted into the canon’ may have meant that they were never in the Hebrew canon.”
“And that means?”
She laughed.
“Pastor Falk was saying that this person was enthralled by esoteric sources, specifically the Apocrypha. The Greek word apokryphos means ‘hidden,’ and the Apocrypha are therefore the hidden books which some consider highly controversial and others think should be included in the Old Testament. They are Tobias, Judith, Esther, Baruch, Sirach, the books of the Maccabees, and some others.”
“Forgive my ignorance. I’ve heard about the books of the Apocrypha but have never read them. What’s special about them?”
“There’s really nothing special about them at all, except that they came into existence somewhat later than the rest of the Old Testament. The Apocrypha were deleted from the Hebrew Bible—not because Jewish scholars mistrusted their content but simply because they were written after the time when God’s revelatory work was concluded. On the other hand, the Apocrypha are included in the old Greek translation of the Bible. They’re not considered controversial in, for example, the Roman Catholic Church.”
“I see.”
“However, they are controversial in the Protestant Church. During the Reformation, theologians looked to the old Hebrew Bible. Martin Luther deleted the Apocrypha from the Reformation’s Bible and later Calvin declared that the Apocrypha absolutely must not serve as the basis for convictions in matters of faith. Thus their contents contradict or in some way conflict with claritas scripturae—the clarity of Scripture.”
“In other words, censored books.”
“Quite right. For example, the Apocrypha claim that magic can be practised and that lies in certain cases may be permissible, and such statements, of course, upset dogmatic interpreters of Scripture.”
“So if someone has a passion for religion, it’s not unthinkable that the Apocrypha will pop up on their reading list, or that someone like Pastor Falk would be upset by this.”
“Exactly. Encountering the Apocrypha is almost unavoidable if you’re studying the Bible or the Catholic faith, and it’s equally probable that someone who is interested in esoterica in general might read them.”
“You don’t happen to have a copy of the Apocrypha, do you?”
She laughed again. A bright, friendly laugh.
“Of course I do. The Apocrypha were actually published as a state report from the Bible Commission in the eighties.”
Armansky wondered what was going on when Salander asked to speak to him in private. He shut the door behind her and motioned her to the visitor’s chair. She told