The 14 books of the Apocrypha — sometimes called the deuterocanonical books — appear in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles but are absent from most Protestant editions. They include historical narratives, wisdom literature, devotional fiction, and prophetic additions composed during the Second Temple period (roughly 300 BCE to 100 CE). Their presence or absence in a given Bible is itself a chapter in the history of how the Bible was put together — a story of shifting criteria, theological disagreement, and centuries of unresolved debate about what counts as authoritative.
Here are all 14, with the canon-formation story behind them.
The Complete List
The count of 14 comes from Protestant editions that print the Apocrypha as a standalone section between the Old and New Testaments — a tradition established by Martin Luther’s 1534 German Bible. Catholic and Orthodox traditions group some of these texts differently (as additions to existing books rather than standalone works), which is why the number varies depending on who is counting.
Tobit. A narrative about a righteous Israelite in the Assyrian diaspora whose son Tobias, guided by the angel Raphael, undertakes a journey involving a demon, a cure for blindness, and a marriage. Composed in the 2nd century BCE; fragments were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Judith. A Jewish widow saves her besieged town by infiltrating an enemy general’s camp and beheading him. Most scholars regard it as literary fiction with deliberate historical anachronisms — the mixing of Persian, Assyrian, and Babylonian details signals symbolic narrative rather than historical report.
Additions to Esther. Six passages found in the Greek version of Esther but absent from the Hebrew text. They add prayers, letters, and explicit references to God — notable because the canonical Hebrew Esther never mentions God by name.
Wisdom of Solomon. A philosophical meditation on divine wisdom, justice, and the fate of the righteous, composed in Greek (probably in Alexandria) during the 1st century BCE. The author writes as though Solomon is speaking, though the text dates to roughly 800 years after Solomon’s traditional era.
Sirach (Ecclesiasticus). A comprehensive wisdom text composed around 180 BCE by a Jerusalem sage named Ben Sira. It covers ethics, social conduct, and theology, and includes a hymn praising Israel’s ancestors from Enoch to the high priest Simon II. One of the longest books in the Apocrypha.
Baruch. Attributed to Jeremiah’s scribe Baruch, this short text combines a prose prayer of confession with a poetic meditation on wisdom and a prophecy of Jerusalem’s restoration. Most scholars date the final form to the 2nd or 1st century BCE.
Letter of Jeremiah. Sometimes printed as the sixth chapter of Baruch, this is a satirical polemic against idol worship, presented as a letter from the prophet Jeremiah to the Babylonian exiles. Likely composed in the 4th or 3rd century BCE.
Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Young Men. An addition to the book of Daniel, inserted between Daniel 3:23 and 3:24 in the Greek text. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego pray and sing hymns inside the fiery furnace.
Susanna. Another addition to Daniel — a courtroom narrative in which the young Daniel exposes two elders who falsely accuse a virtuous woman. It functions as a detective story and an origin narrative for Daniel’s reputation as a wise judge.
Bel and the Dragon. A third addition to Daniel, containing two episodes: Daniel proves that the idol Bel does not actually consume food offerings, and he kills a dragon worshipped by the Babylonians. Both stories are satirical attacks on idolatry.
1 Maccabees. A detailed historical account of the Maccabean Revolt (167-160 BCE) against the Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes. Composed around 100 BCE, it is among the most important primary sources for this period. The story of Hanukkah comes from this text.
2 Maccabees. Covers some of the same events as 1 Maccabees but from a different theological angle, emphasizing divine intervention, martyrdom, and the resurrection of the dead. It is an abridgment of a now-lost five-volume work by Jason of Cyrene.
1 Esdras. A Greek text that parallels portions of 2 Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah, with one unique section: the story of three bodyguards debating what is strongest in the world. Not considered deuterocanonical by the Catholic Church, but included in many Orthodox canons and in Protestant Apocrypha sections.
2 Esdras. An apocalyptic text featuring visions attributed to Ezra, addressing questions about divine justice, suffering, and the end times. The core (chapters 3-14) was likely composed around 100 CE. The opening and closing chapters are later Christian additions.
Why Some Bibles Include Them and Others Do Not
The story behind these books’ disputed status is a story about how canons form — and it stretches across more than 1,500 years.
These texts were part of the Septuagint, the Greek translation of Jewish texts produced in Alexandria beginning around the 3rd century BCE. When early Christian communities read the Jewish texts, they typically read them in Greek — which meant they read a collection that included Tobit, Judith, Sirach, Wisdom, the Maccabees, and the rest. For the first several centuries of Christianity, these texts circulated alongside the books that would later become the Protestant Old Testament with no clear line drawn between them.
The first major challenge came from Jerome. Translating the Bible into Latin in the late 4th century, Jerome distinguished between texts preserved in Hebrew — what he called the hebraica veritas (“Hebrew truth”) — and texts known primarily in Greek. He considered the Hebrew texts more authoritative. Augustine of Hippo disagreed, arguing that the Septuagint’s broader collection had been used by Christians for centuries and carried the weight of ecclesiastical practice. Lee Martin McDonald has noted that this Jerome-Augustine debate established the fault lines that would persist through the Reformation and beyond.
For more than a thousand years, the question remained unsettled. These texts appeared in Bibles, were read in churches, and were cited by theologians — but their precise canonical status was never formally defined for all of Western Christianity.
The Reformation forced the issue. Martin Luther, following Jerome’s preference for the Hebrew canon, separated the apocryphal books into their own section in his 1534 German Bible. He described them as “useful and good to read” but “not equal to Holy Scripture.” Luther also had specific theological objections: 2 Maccabees 12:43-45, which describes prayers for the dead, was used to support the doctrine of purgatory that he was opposing.
The Catholic Church responded at the Council of Trent in 1546 CE, formally declaring the deuterocanonical books canonical — the first time a universal church council had issued a definitive list. Trent’s decree was itself a response to the Protestant challenge: by defining the canon explicitly, the council drew a line that had been blurry for centuries.
Over the following centuries, Protestant publishers gradually stopped including the Apocrypha section. The British and Foreign Bible Society’s 1826 decision to cease funding Bibles that included it effectively ended the practice in most Protestant publishing. The result is the situation today: Catholic Bibles contain these texts as canonical, Orthodox Bibles include them and more, and most Protestant Bibles omit them entirely.
What Canon Formation Reveals
The 14 books of the Apocrypha are not a footnote in biblical history. They are evidence that the boundaries of the Bible were debated for centuries and remain drawn differently by different traditions today.
The question of which books belong in the Bible was never settled by a single vote or a single authority. It emerged through community usage, theological argument, translation decisions, and — eventually — formal council declarations that ratified what some communities had already been practicing while overriding what others had practiced differently. The deuterocanonical books provide detailed coverage of the seven texts that Catholic tradition considers canonical. For a broader look at what the term “apocrypha” means and how it has been applied, see What Is the Apocrypha?. And for the story of who decided what is in the Bible — and the gradual, contested process behind that decision — the answer involves more centuries and more disagreement than most people expect.
If you want to encounter the books that did make it into the Protestant and Catholic canons with full historical context — who composed them, when, and the circumstances that shaped them — Uncanon provides scholarly framing before every passage, organized in the order the texts were actually composed.