The Apocrypha

The set includes Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, the two books of Maccabees and the additions to Daniel and Esther, with further books received in some Orthodox churches and not in others. They stood in the Greek scriptures used by early Christians and passed into the Latin Bible, so the Christian tradition inherited them as part of its scripture without a decision ever being taken to include them. The disagreement that follows is old.

Jerome, translating from Hebrew, held that books outside the Hebrew collection had a lesser status and said so in his prefaces, while Augustine treated the wider set as scripture, and the Latin church went on using Jerome's translation with Augustine's canon. That unresolved tension sat inside Western Christianity for a thousand years. It was forced open at the Reformation.

The Reformers appealed to the Hebrew collection and removed the disputed books from the canon proper, retaining them in a separate section, and the Council of Trent responded by defining the Catholic canon to include them and attaching an anathema to the denial. What had been an unsettled inheritance carried for a millennium became a confessional boundary within a generation. The books themselves did not change. What changed was that the question of who held the authority to settle their status now had to be answered.

Each tradition's term for these books encodes its position. Calling them apocrypha, meaning hidden, marks them as set apart from public scriptural authority. Calling them deuterocanonical, a second canon, marks them as canonical while acknowledging that they were received later and were disputed. Orthodox usage often prefers a term meaning readable, indicating books appointed to be read without settling the question further. No neutral vocabulary exists, and choosing one is choosing a side.

English Protestant practice for a long time occupied a middle position: the books were printed in Bibles as a separate section between the Testaments, appointed to be read for instruction in living but not used to establish doctrine, which is the formula the English articles of religion adopted. Many readers therefore knew them well without regarding them as canonical. That middle position collapsed in the nineteenth century for commercial and organisational reasons as much as theological ones, when Bible societies decided against printing and circulating the books, and Protestant Bibles without them became the norm. The result is that a great many modern readers have never encountered the section at all, which is a change in publishing rather than a doctrinal development.