Today's PAYG employed a reading from the apocrypha, something that Roman Catholics and Eastern Christians value, and, shush, don't tell anyone, is the source of many inscriptions on plaques in Victorian Baptist chapels.  Here is what was read, from Wisdom Chapter 2:1-2; 12 - 20

For they reasoned unsoundly, saying to themselves,
‘Short and sorrowful is our life,
and there is no remedy when a life comes to its end,
and no one has been known to return from Hades.

‘Let us lie in wait for the righteous man,
because he is inconvenient to us and opposes our actions;
he reproaches us for sins against the law,
and accuses us of sins against our training.
He professes to have knowledge of God,
and calls himself a child of the Lord.
He became to us a reproof of our thoughts;
the very sight of him is a burden to us,
because his manner of life is unlike that of others,
and his ways are strange.
We are considered by him as something base,
and he avoids our ways as unclean;
he calls the last end of the righteous happy,
and boasts that God is his father.
Let us see if his words are true,
and let us test what will happen at the end of his life;
for if the righteous man is God’s child, he will help him,
and will deliver him from the hand of his adversaries.
Let us test him with insult and torture,
so that we may find out how gentle he is,
and make trial of his forbearance.
Let us condemn him to a shameful death,
for, according to what he says, he will be protected.’

So.  Is this divinely inspired writing?  Should it be in the canon of scripture?  Why?  Why not?

Lots of people do not know how the canon of scripture evolved, how late it was before any of the versions of the Bible were agreed.  Some early Christians wanted to throw out the entire Old Testament, others were dubious about the Gospel of John or the Letter of James.  Most people don't spot the parentheses at the start of John 8 or the three endings offered for the gospel of Mark.  Even less will read the footnotes on large chunks of the OT that point to the absence of complete early manuscripts or the significantly different possible renderings of substantial chunks of text (take a look at footnotes on, for example, Isaiah if you don't believe me).  We just take it as read that this is the stuff God inspired, provided it's in our preferred translation of course, and that's the final word. 

A comment on another blog I read got me thinking though, the writer posed a question along the lines of, if we were to undertake the task now of forming a canon of scripture, what might be 'in' or 'out'?  What would you include or exclude and why?  It's not an easy task, you have to take books as a whole, I'm not giving the option of a paper doily Bible (tearing out the bits you don't like to make it pretty) or a confetti Bible (collecting the bits you do like, tossing them in the air and seeing how they land).  So, if you reject a book, you reject all of it; if you keep a book you keep all of it.  I wonder what you end up with?  What is lost or gained as a result?

Or, as an alternative, keeping the Bible as it stands, what would be your list of deutero-canonical books (an alternative name for the apocrypha), a secondary canon, of lower authority than the Bible, but still important to shaping and informing your faith and discipleship.  Why these books?  What emphases are overlooked or consciously excluded?  Why is that?