What Is the Apocrypha and Why Isn’t It in Every Bible?

Borrow a Catholic Bible and you will find books you have never heard of: Tobit, Judith, Sirach, Maccabees. So what is the Apocrypha, and why does its presence depend on which Bible you happen to be holding? The answer involves ancient Jewish libraries, a Greek translation, and a sixteenth-century argument, and none of it involves anyone hiding anything.

Defining the Terms

Apocrypha comes from a Greek word meaning hidden or obscure. In Protestant usage it refers to a specific set of Jewish writings composed roughly between 300 BCE and 100 CE, in the centuries between the last Old Testament prophets and the birth of Jesus. Catholic and Orthodox Christians prefer the term deuterocanonical, meaning belonging to a second stage of the canon, because for them these books are Scripture and the word apocrypha implies otherwise.

The core group includes Tobit, Judith, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach (also called Ecclesiasticus), Baruch, and 1 and 2 Maccabees, along with additions to Esther and Daniel. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops lists all of these among the books of the Old Testament. Orthodox Bibles include further texts such as 3 Maccabees, 1 Esdras, and Psalm 151.

One clarification matters up front: these are not the so-called lost gospels. The Gospel of Thomas and similar second-century works are a completely separate category, and no major Christian tradition includes them.

Why Catholic and Orthodox Bibles Include Them

Greek-speaking Jews in Alexandria produced a translation of the Hebrew Scriptures known as the Septuagint, and the collections circulating under that name included these additional writings. The earliest Christians, writing and preaching in Greek, generally used the Septuagint. Early Christian authors quote from these books, and Jerome’s Latin Vulgate, the standard Bible of Western Europe for a thousand years, contained them.

Manuscript evidence supports the picture of a wide and fluid Jewish library in this period. The Dead Sea Scrolls, which the Israel Antiquities Authority describes as including both biblical manuscripts and a large body of other religious writings from the Second Temple period, include copies of Tobit and Sirach among the texts found near Qumran. The Council of Trent, responding to the Reformation, formally defined the Catholic canon in 1546, affirming what had been the settled Western practice.

Why Most Protestant Bibles Do Not

Reformation-era scholars raised several objections. The Hebrew Bible used in Jewish communities did not contain these books. Jerome himself had distinguished them from the canonical Scriptures, valuing them for edification but not for establishing doctrine. And some passages, notably a reference in 2 Maccabees to prayers for the dead, were connected to practices the reformers were contesting.

The result was not immediate deletion. Martin Luther translated these books and placed them in a separate section with a note that they were useful and good to read but not equal to Scripture. The King James Version of 1611 printed them between the testaments. The Church of England’s Thirty-Nine Articles took a similar line, treating them as valuable for instruction in life and manners but not for establishing doctrine. Only in the nineteenth century did Bible societies begin omitting the section entirely for reasons of cost and controversy, which is why many Protestants today have never seen it.

Value Regardless of Canon Status

Even readers who do not treat these books as Scripture have reason to read them.

• Historical. 1 Maccabees is a major source for the Jewish revolt against Seleucid rule in the second century BCE and for the origins of Hanukkah.
• Contextual. They fill the four-century gap between Malachi and Matthew, showing how Jewish thought about resurrection, angels, wisdom, and martyrdom developed in the world Jesus entered.
• Literary. Sirach and Wisdom sit comfortably alongside Proverbs as wisdom literature, and their influence on early Christian writing is easy to trace.

Because standards of authority, tradition, and antiquity were weighed differently by different communities, disagreement here is genuine rather than manufactured. Studies of how the New Testament collection took shape, such as this survey of the criteria and dates behind canonization, show similar pressures at work across the whole question of canon.

Whichever tradition you come from, reading the Apocrypha is worthwhile. Knowing why it sits where it does is better than assuming something was concealed.