The Apocrypha, also called the deuterocanonical books, is a collection of ancient Jewish texts composed between roughly 300 BCE and 100 CE. Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Bibles include them as canonical texts; Protestant Bibles do not. “Apocrypha” is the Protestant label; “deuterocanonical” is the Catholic and Orthodox term for the same books.
Catholic Bibles contain 73 books, Protestant Bibles contain 66. The seven-book difference at the center of that gap — Tobit, Judith, 1 Maccabees, 2 Maccabees, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, and Baruch — represents one of the most consequential divides in the history of the Bible, and it has held for nearly five centuries.
What these texts contain is neither marginal nor obscure. They include historical narrative, wisdom literature, philosophical theology, and edifying fiction written in the four centuries between the latest books of the Hebrew Bible and the earliest Christian writings. Bruce Metzger, whose An Introduction to the Apocrypha (1957) remains a standard reference, argued that this literature is essential to understanding the world that produced both Judaism and Christianity as we know them.
Apocrypha vs. Deuterocanonical: A Terminology Split
The two words describe the same texts but carry different verdicts about them.
In Protestant usage, “apocrypha” designates books outside the canon — respected, perhaps, but not authoritative. The Greek root apokryphos means “hidden” or “set aside,” a label that has shaped how millions of readers think about these texts, even though most of them were never hidden at all. In Catholic and Orthodox usage, the same books are “deuterocanonical,” from the Greek deuteros (“second”) and kanon (“rule”). The prefix marks a sequence, not a demotion: these texts entered the canon in a secondary phase but hold full canonical authority in the traditions that keep them.
The split reflects a real disagreement about what makes a text canonical. Jerome, translating the Bible into Latin in the late 4th century, distinguished between books preserved in Hebrew — what he called the hebraica veritas (“Hebrew truth”) — and books known only in Greek. He ranked the Hebrew originals higher and set the Greek-only texts in a separate class.
Augustine of Hippo, his contemporary, disagreed. These texts had been used by Christian communities for centuries, were part of the Septuagint (the Greek translation of Jewish texts that served as the Old Testament for early Christians), and carried the weight of long church use.
Their debate was never resolved in antiquity. Albert Sundberg, in The Old Testament of the Early Church (1964), argued that the very distinction between “canonical” and “apocryphal” was anachronistic when applied backward: the early church’s Old Testament, he wrote, “was not a closed collection of books but an open one,” and the Septuagint — deuterocanonical texts included — was its Bible. The dividing line came later.
The 14 Books of the Apocrypha
The count of 14 comes from Protestant editions that print the Apocrypha as a standalone section between the Testaments — a format established by Luther’s 1534 German Bible and carried into the 1611 King James Bible. Catholic and Orthodox traditions group some of these texts differently (as additions to existing books rather than separate works), which is why the number shifts depending on who is counting.
All 14 appear in the Protestant Apocrypha section. The final column notes which canons treat each as fully canonical.
| Book | Approx. date | What it contains | Canons |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tobit | 2nd c. BCE | A righteous exile’s son, guided by the angel Raphael, defeats a demon and cures his father’s blindness | Catholic, Orthodox |
| Judith | Late 2nd c. BCE | A Jewish widow saves her town by beheading the Assyrian general Holofernes | Catholic, Orthodox |
| Additions to Esther | 2nd–1st c. BCE | Six Greek passages adding prayers and explicit mentions of God, absent from the Hebrew Esther | Catholic, Orthodox |
| Wisdom of Solomon | 1st c. BCE | Greek philosophical meditation on wisdom, justice, and immortality, written in Solomon’s voice | Catholic, Orthodox |
| Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) | c. 180 BCE | A Jerusalem sage’s extensive collection of ethical and practical wisdom, 51 chapters | Catholic, Orthodox |
| Baruch | 2nd–1st c. BCE | Prayer of confession, wisdom poem, and prophecy of Jerusalem’s restoration | Catholic, Orthodox |
| Letter of Jeremiah | 4th–3rd c. BCE | A satirical polemic against idol worship (often printed as Baruch 6) | Catholic, Orthodox |
| Prayer of Azariah & Song of the Three | 2nd–1st c. BCE | Hymns sung inside Daniel’s fiery furnace, inserted into Daniel 3 | Catholic, Orthodox |
| Susanna | 2nd–1st c. BCE | A courtroom tale in which a young Daniel clears a woman falsely accused by two elders | Catholic, Orthodox |
| Bel and the Dragon | 2nd–1st c. BCE | Two detective-style episodes in which Daniel exposes idol worship | Catholic, Orthodox |
| 1 Maccabees | c. 100 BCE | A historical account of the Maccabean Revolt (167–160 BCE); the source of Hanukkah | Catholic, Orthodox |
| 2 Maccabees | c. 124 BCE | The revolt retold with emphasis on martyrdom and resurrection of the dead | Catholic, Orthodox |
| 1 Esdras | 2nd–1st c. BCE | A Greek reworking of Chronicles–Ezra–Nehemiah, with the tale of Darius’s three bodyguards | Orthodox only |
| 2 Esdras | c. 100 CE (core) | Apocalyptic visions attributed to Ezra on divine justice and the end times | Apocrypha only |
The seven the Catholic Church counts as deuterocanonical books are Tobit, Judith, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, Baruch, 1 Maccabees, and 2 Maccabees, with the Esther and Daniel material absorbed into those canonical books. 1 Esdras and 2 Esdras fall outside the Catholic canon; 1 Esdras appears in Orthodox Bibles, while 2 Esdras survives mainly as a Latin and Slavonic appendix.
Inside the Collection: History, Wisdom, and Story
The Apocrypha spans several distinct genres of ancient literature, each carrying something different.
History. 1 and 2 Maccabees document the Maccabean Revolt (167–160 BCE), when Jewish forces led by Judas Maccabeus resisted the Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who had outlawed Jewish practice and desecrated the Jerusalem Temple. 1 Maccabees, composed around 100 BCE, is among the most important primary sources for the period; the festival of Hanukkah comes directly from it. 2 Maccabees, an abridgment of a now-lost five-volume work by Jason of Cyrene, retells overlapping events with a sharper theological emphasis on divine intervention, martyrdom, and bodily resurrection.
One passage from 2 Maccabees became a flashpoint of the Reformation:
He then took up a collection among all his soldiers… which he sent to Jerusalem to provide for an expiatory sacrifice… Thus he made atonement for the dead that they might be absolved from their sin. (2 Maccabees 12:43, 46)
Because these lines supported the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, they became one of Luther’s specific reasons for questioning the book’s canonical standing.
Wisdom. Sirach, also called Ecclesiasticus, was composed around 180 BCE by a Jerusalem sage named Jesus ben Sira — one of the few ancient Jewish authors whose name we actually know. His grandson translated the work from Hebrew into Greek around 132 BCE and added a prologue describing the process. At 51 chapters, it is one of the longest texts in the collection, and church fathers quoted it throughout the patristic period.
Story. Tobit and Judith are widely read by scholars as literary compositions with historical settings rather than historical reports. Judith in particular mixes Persian, Assyrian, and Babylonian details in ways that signal deliberate symbolism — the author was building a narrative, not recording events. Tobit, by contrast, left physical traces: Aramaic and Hebrew fragments were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran, confirming its circulation in the 2nd century BCE.
Prophetic additions. Baruch, attributed to the scribe of the prophet Jeremiah, is regarded by most scholars as pseudepigraphic (composed in Baruch’s name rather than by him). The additions to Daniel — Susanna, Bel and the Dragon, and the furnace hymns — expand the Greek Daniel with courtroom drama, satire of idolatry, and liturgical poetry absent from the Hebrew text.
The Wisdom of Solomon: A Closer Look
The Wisdom of Solomon is a Jewish philosophical text composed in Greek around the 1st century BCE, almost certainly by an educated author in Alexandria, Egypt. It presents itself as the words of King Solomon, but that attribution is a literary device: the Greek vocabulary, Platonic concepts, and Alexandrian setting place its composition roughly eight centuries after Solomon’s traditional dates. David Winston, whose Anchor Bible commentary (1979) remains the standard treatment, called it “the most significant attempt in antiquity to synthesize Jewish religious thought with Greek philosophy.”
The text falls into three movements. Chapters 1–5 argue that the righteous who suffer and die will receive immortality while the wicked who prosper face judgment — some of the most developed afterlife theology in Jewish literature before the Common Era:
But the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and no torment will ever touch them… their hope is full of immortality. (Wisdom 3:1, 4)
Most of the Hebrew Bible offers only limited or ambiguous views of the afterlife, picturing Sheol as a shadowy underworld where all the dead go alike. Lester Grabbe, in Wisdom of Solomon (1997), noted that this clear doctrine of immortality was a distinctive product of the Alexandrian Jewish community, living at the crossroads of Jewish covenant theology and Greek ideas about the soul.
Chapters 6–9 personify Wisdom (Sophia) as a cosmic figure present at creation, described in language borrowed from Greek philosophy:
For she is a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of his goodness. (Wisdom 7:26)
That language proved consequential. The description closely parallels the christological phrasing of Hebrews 1:3 (“the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being”) and Colossians 1:15 (“the image of the invisible God”). Michael Kolarcik, in his studies of the book’s structure, has shown how carefully the author fused Jewish theological claims with Middle Platonic categories. Chapters 10–19 then retell episodes from Israel’s history, chiefly the Exodus, as demonstrations of Wisdom delivering the righteous.
The philosopher Philo of Alexandria, a near-contemporary, pursued a parallel synthesis through allegory. Together their works document a diaspora community that saw no contradiction between ancestral fidelity and the most sophisticated thought of its age.
Beyond the Seven: Orthodox and Ethiopian Canons
Eastern Orthodox traditions include the seven Catholic deuterocanonical books plus several more, reaching roughly 76 to 78 books. The precise boundaries vary by national church, but four texts are widely shared.
1 Esdras reworks material from Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah, adding the story of three of King Darius’s bodyguards debating whether wine, the king, women, or truth is strongest — the winning answer, truth, is attributed to Zerubbabel. The Prayer of Manasseh is a short penitential prayer placed in the mouth of one of Judah’s most condemned kings. Psalm 151, a brief psalm on David’s anointing and his victory over Goliath, turned up in Hebrew among the Dead Sea Scrolls. 3 Maccabees, despite its title, concerns the deliverance of Egyptian Jews under Ptolemy IV rather than the Maccabean era. Some Orthodox traditions add 4 Maccabees, a discourse on reason mastering the passions, as an appendix.
The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church maintains the most expansive canon of any Christian tradition, with 81 books. Beyond the Orthodox deuterocanonicals it includes 1 Enoch, a composite apocalyptic work attributed to the pre-flood patriarch, and the Book of Jubilees, a retelling of Genesis and early Exodus on a solar calendar — both preserved in Ge’ez (classical Ethiopic) after they were lost to European Christianity for centuries.
Why Some Bibles Include Them and Others Don’t
The deuterocanonical question is finally a question about criteria, and traditions have answered it differently for over 1,500 years.
For the first several centuries of Christianity, no firm line separated these texts from the rest of the Greek Old Testament. Communities read the Septuagint as a whole. The first major challenge came from Jerome and his preference for the Hebrew originals; Augustine’s defense of long church use pushed the other way. Lee Martin McDonald has traced how that Jerome–Augustine fault line ran straight through to the Reformation without ever being formally settled for all of Western Christianity.
The Reformation forced a decision. Luther, siding with Jerome, separated the apocryphal books into their own section in 1534, calling them “useful and good to read” but “not equal to Holy Scripture.” The Catholic Church answered at the Council of Trent in 1546, formally defining the deuterocanonical books as canonical — the first time a universal council had issued a definitive list. Trent’s decree was itself a response to the Protestant challenge: by drawing the line explicitly, it fixed a boundary that had been blurry for a millennium.
The rest was publishing economics. Protestant printers increasingly dropped the section to produce shorter, cheaper Bibles, and the British and Foreign Bible Society’s 1826 decision to stop funding editions that contained it effectively ended the practice. Catholic and Orthodox traditions never removed these books; most Protestant Bibles simply stopped printing them.
For the fuller account of how those boundaries were drawn, see who decided what is in the Bible and what books were removed from the Bible. The way Catholic and Protestant traditions arrived at different canons runs through the same centuries of council decisions and theological argument.
Why the Apocrypha Matters for Reading the Bible
The apocryphal texts fill a gap in the historical record. The latest books of the Hebrew Bible — Daniel, Ecclesiastes, Chronicles — reached their final form in the Hellenistic period, roughly the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE. The earliest New Testament texts, Paul’s undisputed letters, date to the 50s CE. Between those markers lie four centuries of religious, political, and intellectual change, and this literature is the primary window onto them.
The Maccabean Revolt reshaped Jewish identity and produced Hanukkah. The wisdom of Sirach and the Wisdom of Solomon shows Jewish thinkers absorbing Greek philosophy on their own terms. The apocalyptic expectations that saturate the New Testament — resurrection, final judgment, cosmic conflict between good and evil — took shape in exactly this window, visible in 2 Maccabees and the broader body of texts outside the canon.
Metzger put it plainly: readers who skip from Malachi to Matthew, from the last book of the Protestant Old Testament to the first of the New, pass over the world that made the New Testament possible. Whether these texts belong in the Bible is a question different traditions have answered differently for centuries. That they belong in any serious study of the Bible’s world is not in dispute.
Read straight through, a Protestant Bible jumps from Malachi to Matthew. These fourteen texts are what a Catholic or Orthodox reader finds in that gap — the four centuries Metzger called the world that made the New Testament possible. Uncanon sets each passage back in that world, with its date, its authorship, and the community that preserved it. Where the line of the canon falls is a question traditions have answered differently for five hundred years, and one you are free to weigh for yourself.