Some want to put a great emphasis on the early church fathers to determine what books are inspired. They believe you can test the validity of any particular gospel or epistle by the fact a respected early church father quoted from it. This may be helpful but it is not authoritative and therefore not conclusive.

On the other hand, this works for the New Testament’s endorsement of the Old Testament. Every book of the Old Testament is either quoted or alluded to in the New Testament. There are only six books not explicitly quoted: Ruth, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon. But even these books have things from them that are alluded to in the New Testament.

Some question the Apocrypha, a number of books the Roman Catholic Church canonized as inspired Scripture. Roger Nicole, a preeminent American theologian, wrote an essay about the reliability of the New Testament’s reliance upon the Old Testament. He answers our question about the books of the Apocrypha.

It is to be noted that the whole New Testament contains not even one explicit citation of any of the Old Testament Apocrypha, which are considered as canonical by the Roman Catholic Church. This omission can scarcely be viewed as accidental. 2

2 Roger Nicolle. “New Testament Use of the Old Testament,”
www.bible-researcher.com/nicole.html