The Apocrypha is a collection of ancient Jewish writings — traditionally counted as 14 books, including Tobit, Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, and 1–2 Maccabees — composed roughly between 300 BC and AD 100. Most of these books appeared in the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament used by the earliest Christians, and they were printed in most Christian Bibles for centuries, including the original 1611 King James Version. Catholic and Orthodox Bibles still contain most of them today; Protestant publishers largely stopped printing them in the 19th century.
This is the classic list as it appeared in the 1611 King James Version, where the Apocrypha stood as its own section between the Old and New Testaments.
| # | Book | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 Esdras | An alternate Greek telling of the Ezra story, famous for its debate over what is strongest: wine, kings, women — or truth. |
| 2 | 2 Esdras | A Jewish apocalypse written after Jerusalem's destruction in AD 70, wrestling with why God permits suffering. |
| 3 | Tobit | A folktale of a blind exile, his son Tobias, and the angel Raphael traveling with them in disguise. |
| 4 | Judith | A widow saves Israel by entering the enemy camp and beheading the Assyrian general Holofernes. |
| 5 | Additions to Esther | Six Greek passages that add prayers — and explicit mentions of God — to a book that otherwise never names Him. |
| 6 | Wisdom of Solomon | A Greek-influenced meditation on wisdom, justice, and the immortality of the soul. |
| 7 | Ecclesiasticus (Wisdom of Jesus ben Sirach) | Practical proverbs from a Jerusalem sage, written around 180 BC — the one book in the collection whose real author signs his own name. |
| 8 | Baruch (with the Letter of Jeremiah) | Attributed to Jeremiah's scribe: confession, consolation, and a sharp satire against idol worship. |
| 9 | Prayer of Azariah & Song of the Three | An addition to Daniel — the hymn sung by the three young men inside the fiery furnace. |
| 10 | Susanna | Daniel cross-examines two false accusers and exposes their lie — often called one of the earliest courtroom dramas in world literature. |
| 11 | Bel and the Dragon | Daniel exposes the idol Bel with a detective's trick — and destroys a living serpent the Babylonians worshiped. |
| 12 | Prayer of Manasseh | A short, moving prayer of repentance placed in the mouth of Judah's most notorious king. |
| 13 | 1 Maccabees | A sober history of the Jewish revolt against the Seleucid empire — the primary source for the story behind Hanukkah. |
| 14 | 2 Maccabees | A theological retelling of the same era, with famous accounts of martyrdom and the hope of resurrection. |
A note on counting: the 1611 KJV printed the Letter of Jeremiah as the sixth chapter of Baruch, which keeps the total at 14. When it is printed as its own book, the same collection is counted as 15. Catholic Bibles include most of these books (there they are called deuterocanonical), while Orthodox Bibles add a few more, such as 3 Maccabees and Psalm 151.
The word comes from the Greek apokryphos, meaning "hidden away." The label was not originally an accusation — it described books whose origins were uncertain or which were set apart from public reading, and it was the church father Jerome who popularized it for the books found in Greek and Latin Bibles but not in the Hebrew scriptures.
Almost all of these works were written in the so-called intertestamental period — the roughly four centuries between the last Hebrew prophets and the New Testament. That makes them one of our best windows into the Jewish world Jesus was born into: the rise of synagogues, the Pharisees and Sadducees, developed ideas about angels and resurrection, and the festival of Hanukkah all take shape in this era, and the New Testament assumes readers know that world.
Some of these books were composed in Hebrew or Aramaic (Sirach, Tobit, 1 Maccabees), others in Greek (Wisdom of Solomon, 2 Maccabees). For centuries scholars knew several of them only in translation — until fragments of Tobit and Sirach in their original languages turned up among the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran, confirming just how old and deeply rooted these texts are.
There was no single meeting where someone voted the Apocrypha out. The canon formed slowly, unevenly, and differently in different communities — which is exactly why Bibles still disagree today.
The earliest Christians read the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament, which included these books, and early church writers quoted them freely. The first serious attempts to draw a boundary came in the fourth century. The Council of Laodicea (c. AD 363) ruled that only "canonical" books should be read in church, and the book list associated with it leaves out most of what we now call the Apocrypha. Four years later, in AD 367, Athanasius of Alexandria's Easter festal letter gave the first surviving list of the 27 New Testament books — and carefully sorted the older writings into three tiers: fully canonical books, books "appointed to be read" by new believers (he named Wisdom, Sirach, Judith, and Tobit among them), and rejected writings. Notice the middle category: these books were set aside from the strict canon, not condemned.
Other councils went the opposite way. The regional councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) approved the longer canon, deuterocanonical books included — the path the Catholic Church would ultimately follow. Meanwhile Jerome, translating the Latin Vulgate directly from the Hebrew, argued that only the Hebrew canon should carry full authority. He translated the extra books anyway, but flagged them — and his prefaces echoed through the next thousand years.
Medieval Bibles simply included the books. The decisive sorting came in the 1500s. Martin Luther's 1534 German Bible gathered them into a separate section under a heading declaring them "not held equal to the Scriptures, but useful and good to read." In response to the Reformers, the Catholic Council of Trent (1546) formally affirmed the deuterocanonical books as fully canonical. The Church of England later took Luther's line: its Thirty-Nine Articles (1563) say the church reads these books "for example of life and instruction of manners," but not to establish doctrine. From that point on, Catholic and Protestant Bibles were officially different — though Protestant Bibles, including the 1611 King James, still printed the Apocrypha for generations.
The books finally disappeared from most Protestant Bibles not by decree but by publishing decisions. In 1826 the British and Foreign Bible Society — then the world's largest Bible distributor — resolved, after years of objections from supporters who did not want the books circulated alongside scripture, to stop funding editions containing the Apocrypha. Smaller, cheaper Bibles without the section became the standard, and within a couple of generations most English readers had never seen these books at all. What had been a theological demotion became, in practice, a quiet disappearance from the printed page.
While Western printers were trimming their Bibles, one ancient church never did. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church preserves the broadest biblical canon in Christianity — traditionally counted at 81 books. (The exact total depends on how the books are grouped and bound; modern collected editions of the broader canon sometimes run to 88 — but 81 is the traditional reckoning.) It includes not only most of the Apocrypha but also works like 1 Enoch and Jubilees, which Ethiopian monks copied by hand in the ancient Ge'ez language for well over a thousand years.
That preservation mattered enormously. 1 Enoch — a book quoted directly in the New Testament letter of Jude — survives complete only in Ge'ez. European scholarship had essentially lost it until the explorer James Bruce brought manuscripts back from Ethiopia in 1773. Nothing about this was a conspiracy: different communities simply drew the boundary of scripture in different places, and the Ethiopian Church happened to draw it widest — and kept copying. Much of what modern readers can access today, they can access because of it.
The deuterocanon and far beyond — the complete 88-book Ethiopian canon in clear modern English.
Get The Complete 88-Book Ethiopian Bible →30-day money-back guarantee · Instant digital deliveryA few reasons these books have fascinated readers for two millennia:
The classic Apocrypha is only the beginning. Ancient Jewish and Christian communities produced a much larger literature — some of it included in Greek and Slavonic Bibles, some preserved only in single manuscript traditions:
These books vary wildly in length and difficulty, so order matters. A reading path that works:
One practical tip: read a modern-English edition. Much of the Apocrypha's reputation for being impenetrable comes from 400-year-old translations, not from the books themselves.
The 14 books, as printed in the 1611 King James Version, are: 1 Esdras, 2 Esdras, Tobit, Judith, the Additions to Esther, the Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiasticus (Sirach), Baruch with the Letter of Jeremiah, the Prayer of Azariah and Song of the Three, Susanna, Bel and the Dragon, the Prayer of Manasseh, and 1 and 2 Maccabees. When the Letter of Jeremiah is printed separately from Baruch, the same collection is counted as 15 books.
The Apocrypha is a set of Jewish writings from roughly 300 BC to AD 100 that appear in ancient Greek and Latin Bibles but not in the Hebrew Bible. "Removed" is really a three-stage story: Jerome and others flagged the books in the fourth century because they were absent from the Hebrew canon; the Protestant Reformers of the 1500s moved them into a separate section as edifying but not doctrinally authoritative; and in the 1800s, Bible societies — led by the British and Foreign Bible Society's 1826 decision — stopped funding editions that contained them. It was a gradual set-aside driven by canon debates and publishing decisions, not a single dramatic ban.
Yes — with a wording difference. The Catholic Church accepts Tobit, Judith, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, Baruch, and 1–2 Maccabees, plus the Greek additions to Esther and Daniel, as fully canonical scripture, a status formally confirmed at the Council of Trent in 1546. Catholics call these books deuterocanonical ("second canon") rather than apocryphal. A few items in the Protestant Apocrypha — 1 and 2 Esdras and the Prayer of Manasseh — are not in the Catholic canon, while Eastern Orthodox Bibles accept slightly more, including 3 Maccabees and Psalm 151.
For anyone interested in history, literature, or the Bible itself — yes. These books are the primary sources for the centuries between the Old and New Testaments, including the Maccabean revolt and the origins of Hanukkah. They shaped Western art and literature for two thousand years, and even traditions that exclude them from the canon have historically commended them: the Church of England's own articles recommend them "for example of life and instruction of manners." You can read them as scripture, as history, or simply as some of the most compelling stories the ancient world produced — the value is there either way.
The deuterocanon and far beyond — the complete 88-book Ethiopian canon in clear modern English.
Get The Complete 88-Book Ethiopian Bible →30-day money-back guarantee · Instant digital deliveryThe fastest way to judge these books is to read them yourself. Our editions restore the complete texts in clear, modern English — browse the full apocrypha collection at More Apocryphal Texts and start with a free preview of any title.