Canon and Value

The canonical standing of 1 Esdras is unusually tangled, reflecting the confusing history of the various "books of Esdras." In the Eastern Orthodox churches it is received as canonical Scripture. In the Latin West, Jerome regarded it as apocryphal, and the Roman Catholic Church did not include it among the deuterocanonical books defined at the Council of Trent; in the Vulgate and in Catholic reckoning it is set apart, and it appears (as 3 Esdras) in an appendix.

Protestant Bibles that print the Apocrypha include it under the name 1 Esdras. Because so much of its content duplicates the canonical Ezra and Chronicles, its chief independent value lies in the Debate of the Three Guardsmen and in the light its variations shed on the textual history of Ezra-Nehemiah and on how the story of the Return was retold in the Hellenistic period. Its memorable maxim that "great is truth, and mighty above all things" (magna est veritas) passed into wide proverbial use. Scholars study 1 Esdras chiefly for the witness it bears to the fluid state of these historical traditions in Second Temple Judaism and for its distinctive literary shaping of them.