The Lost Books of the Bible: The Complete List (and Where to Read Them)

The "lost books of the Bible" are ancient Jewish and Christian writings — including the Book of Enoch, the Book of Jubilees, the Gospel of Thomas, and dozens of other gospels, acts, epistles, and apocalypses — that stand outside the 66-book canon found in most modern Bibles. Some were set aside as the New Testament canon took shape in the fourth century AD; others, like the Apocrypha, stayed in Christian Bibles for centuries before being dropped. Most were never truly lost: they survived in the Ethiopian Orthodox canon, among the Dead Sea Scrolls, and in manuscript discoveries such as the Nag Hammadi library, and nearly all can be read today in modern English translation.

The Complete List of the Lost Books of the Bible

There is no official register of "lost books," because different churches drew the boundary of scripture in different places. The list below covers the major works in each category — the books most readers mean by the phrase. Titles link to complete modern English editions where we publish them.

The Old Testament Apocrypha — the 14 books printed in the 1611 King James Bible

These books stood between the Old and New Testaments in the original 1611 King James Version, and most remain scripture in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles today.

Book	What it is
1 Esdras	A Greek retelling of Ezra's story and the return from exile.
2 Esdras	Apocalyptic visions attributed to Ezra on why the righteous suffer.
Tobit	A family tale of faithfulness, the angel Raphael, and a dangerous journey.
Judith	A widow saves Israel by beheading the general Holofernes.
Additions to Esther	Greek expansions adding prayers and God's name to Esther.
Wisdom of Solomon	A poetic meditation on wisdom, justice, and immortality.
Ecclesiasticus (Sirach)	Practical proverbs from the sage Jesus ben Sirach.
Baruch (with the Letter of Jeremiah)	Exile-era prayers and a polemic against idols.
Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three	Hymns sung inside Nebuchadnezzar's furnace.
Susanna	Young Daniel exposes two corrupt elders in court.
Bel and the Dragon	Daniel unmasks the idol Bel and slays a worshiped serpent.
Prayer of Manasseh	A short penitential prayer attributed to Judah's most notorious king.
1 Maccabees	The history of the Jewish revolt against the Seleucid empire.
2 Maccabees	A theological account of the revolt, with early texts on martyrdom and resurrection.

The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha

Ancient Jewish writings attributed to figures like Enoch and Moses — several were treasured at Qumran and preserved as scripture in the Ethiopian canon.

Book	What it is
1 Enoch (the Book of Enoch)	The fall of the Watchers, the Nephilim, and Enoch's heavenly journeys — quoted in the epistle of Jude.
2 Enoch (the Slavonic Enoch)	Enoch's ascent through the heavens, preserved in Old Slavonic.
The Book of Jubilees	Genesis and Exodus retold in 49-year "jubilee" periods — scripture in Ethiopia.
Apocalypse of Moses	The Greek Life of Adam and Eve after the expulsion from Eden.
Apocalypse of Elijah	End-times prophecy with a strikingly detailed portrait of the Antichrist.
Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs	Deathbed speeches of Jacob's twelve sons.
Ascension of Isaiah	Isaiah's vision of the seven heavens and his martyrdom.

The Lost Gospels

Early Christian gospels that circulated widely but were not received into the New Testament.

Book	What it is
Gospel of Thomas	114 sayings attributed to Jesus, rediscovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945.
Gospel of Peter	A vivid passion-and-resurrection fragment unearthed at Akhmim, Egypt, in the winter of 1886–87.
Gospel of Mary	Mary Magdalene relays private teaching from Jesus.
Protoevangelium of James	The earliest account of Mary's own birth and childhood.
Gospel of the Nativity of Mary	A later Latin retelling of Mary's early life that shaped medieval devotion.
Infancy Gospel of Thomas	Stories of the boy Jesus between ages five and twelve.
Gospel of Bartholomew	The risen Christ answers questions about the descent into Hades.
Gospel of Gamaliel	A passion narrative centered on Pilate, attributed to the rabbi Gamaliel.
Gospel of the Egyptians	Known chiefly through quotations in Clement of Alexandria; a Coptic namesake surfaced at Nag Hammadi.
Gospel of Judas	A Gnostic dialogue between Jesus and Judas, published in 2006.
Gospel of Nicodemus (Acts of Pilate)	The trial of Jesus and the "Harrowing of Hell."

The Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles

Adventure-filled accounts of the apostles after the New Testament ends.

Book	What it is
Acts of Thomas	Thomas's mission to India, containing the celebrated "Hymn of the Pearl."
Acts of Peter	The source of the "Quo Vadis?" story and Peter's upside-down crucifixion.
Acts of John	Miracle stories from John's ministry in Ephesus.
Acts of Andrew	Andrew's travels, miracles, and martyrdom by crucifixion at Patras in Greece.
Acts of Philip	Philip's ministry and dramatic martyrdom at Hierapolis.
Acts of Paul and Thecla	Thecla, a young woman who defies her family and two Roman governors to follow Paul's teaching.
Acts of Barnabas	Barnabas's final mission and martyrdom on Cyprus.
Acts of Andrew and Matthias in the City of the Cannibals	A rescue mission into a city of cannibals — antiquity's strangest adventure tale.

Lost Epistles and Apocalypses

Letters and visionary works that early congregations read alongside — and sometimes inside — their Bibles.

Book	What it is
First Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians	A letter from the church of Rome (c. 96 AD), bound into one of the oldest complete Bibles.
Third Epistle to the Corinthians	A reply attributed to Paul, long accepted in the Armenian church.
Epistle of Barnabas	An allegorical reading of the Old Testament, included in Codex Sinaiticus.
Shepherd of Hermas	Visions and parables on repentance — a second-century bestseller.
Didache	An early church manual of ethics and worship, rediscovered in 1873.
Apocalypse of Peter	An early vision of heaven and hell, accepted in some early canon lists.
Apocalypse of Paul	Paul's tour of the afterlife — the template for medieval visions of hell.
Apocalypse of Adam	Adam's deathbed revelation to his son Seth, recovered at Nag Hammadi.
The First Apocalypse of James	A farewell dialogue between Jesus and his brother James, also from Nag Hammadi.

What Are the Lost Books of the Bible, Really?

The phrase covers several different kinds of writing. The Old Testament Apocrypha (the deuterocanonical books) come largely from the Greek Septuagint — the Bible of the earliest church — and stood in Christian Bibles for most of history, including the original King James Version. The pseudepigrapha are ancient Jewish works written under the names of famous figures like Enoch and Moses; some, like 1 Enoch, were enormously influential in the era of Jesus. The New Testament apocrypha — lost gospels, acts, epistles, and apocalypses — were written by early Christians from the second century onward, ranging from devotional expansions of familiar stories to Gnostic teaching, a mystical movement the wider church ultimately rejected.

Calling them "lost" is partly a misnomer. A few genuinely vanished for centuries — the Gospel of Thomas lay buried in a sealed jar in the Egyptian desert until 1945. Most were simply set aside as the canon took shape: copied less often, read in fewer churches, preserved at the edges of the Christian world — most completely by the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.

How the Bible's Canon Was Actually Formed

There was no single meeting where bishops voted books out of the Bible. The canon formed slowly, over roughly three centuries, as congregations across the Mediterranean converged on which books to read in worship. The process accelerated in the mid-second century, when Marcion of Sinope published a drastically shortened canon and forced the wider church to answer: which books are scripture? The Muratorian fragment, a canon list usually dated to the late second century, already shows the core of today's New Testament — while still accepting books that later fell away, like the Apocalypse of Peter.

Three fourth-century milestones fixed the boundary. The regional Council of Laodicea (c. 363 AD) ruled that only canonical books should be read aloud in churches, and the book list attached to its canons omits the disputed works. In 367 AD, Athanasius of Alexandria circulated his 39th festal letter — the earliest surviving list that matches the 27-book New Testament exactly. Athanasius did not condemn everything outside his list: he named the Wisdom of Solomon, Tobit, the Didache, and the Shepherd of Hermas as valuable for instruction, just not canon. The councils of Hippo (393 AD) and Carthage (397 AD) then affirmed the canon — deuterocanonical books included — for the Latin-speaking West.

Books outside these lists were rarely destroyed; exclusion was quieter. When every copy was made by hand, a book no longer read in church was no longer copied — and a book no longer copied slowly disappeared, except where local traditions kept it alive.

The Ethiopian Canon: Where the Lost Books Survived

The great exception is Ethiopia. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, one of the oldest Christian communities on earth, never narrowed its Bible to 66 books. Its broader canon — traditionally counted at 81 books — includes 1 Enoch and Jubilees as full scripture, translated into the classical Ethiopian language Ge'ez during the Aksumite era and copied by monastery scribes for over a thousand years. (That traditional tally groups several works under single titles; collected editions that print every text separately run higher — the fullest reach 88 books.)

That preservation mattered enormously. The complete text of 1 Enoch survives only in Ge'ez. When the Scottish traveler James Bruce brought Ethiopian manuscripts of Enoch to Europe in 1773, scholars could finally read a book the rest of Christendom knew only from quotations; Richard Laurence published the first English translation in 1821. The twentieth century brought vindication: Aramaic fragments of 1 Enoch and Hebrew fragments of Jubilees turned up among the Dead Sea Scrolls, proving the books Ethiopia had preserved were substantially the same ones read in Judea two thousand years ago.

What's Inside the Lost Books?

More than most first-time readers expect. 1 Enoch opens with the fall of the Watchers — two hundred angels who descend on Mount Hermon, take human wives, and father the giant Nephilim — expanding the brief, cryptic account in Genesis 6. Later sections describe Enoch's journeys through the heavens and visions of a coming "Son of Man." Jubilees retells Genesis with a precise chronology and angelic narration. The Gospel of Thomas offers 114 sayings, some closely parallel to the Sermon on the Mount, others found nowhere else.

The apocryphal acts read like ancient adventure novels: shipwrecks, sorcerers, talking animals, and the deaths of the apostles — including traditions, like Peter's upside-down crucifixion in the Acts of Peter, that entered mainstream Christian memory even though the books did not. The Apocalypse of Paul gave the Middle Ages its imagery of the afterlife and is widely regarded as influencing later visions of hell, including Dante's. And texts like the First Apocalypse of James and the Apocalypse of Adam open a window onto Gnostic Christianity, recovered in the thirteen leather-bound codices unearthed near Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945.

What were the 14 books removed from the Bible?

The "14 removed books" are the Apocrypha of the 1611 King James Bible: 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 the Song of the Three, Susanna, Bel and the Dragon, the Prayer of Manasseh, and 1 and 2 Maccabees. They were not deleted in 1611 — the original KJV included them between the testaments. They dropped out of most Protestant printings in the early nineteenth century, when Bible societies stopped funding the printing of the Apocrypha. Catholic and Orthodox Bibles retain most of these books as scripture today.

Where are the lost books of the Bible?

The original manuscripts survive in libraries, museums, and monasteries worldwide: the Nag Hammadi codices at the Coptic Museum in Cairo, the Dead Sea Scrolls at the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem, Codex Sinaiticus largely at the British Library, and hundreds of Ge'ez manuscripts of Enoch and Jubilees in Ethiopian churches and European collections. More practically: nearly every book on this page has been translated into English — you can read them all without visiting a single archive.

What did Jesus say about the Book of Enoch?

The Gospels never record Jesus mentioning the Book of Enoch by name. The clearest New Testament connection comes from the epistle of Jude, whose verses 14–15 quote 1 Enoch 1:9 almost word for word ("Behold, the Lord comes with ten thousand of his holy ones…"). Beyond that quotation, many scholars note that Enoch's "Son of Man" language and imagery of coming judgment parallel expressions found in the Gospels — evidence that 1 Enoch was widely read and respected in first-century Judea.

How many lost books are there?

There is no fixed number — it depends on where you draw the canon's edge. As a working count: about 15 books make up the Old Testament Apocrypha; the standard scholarly collection of Old Testament pseudepigrapha runs to more than 60 works; the New Testament apocrypha include dozens of gospels, acts, epistles, and apocalypses; and the Nag Hammadi library alone contains 52 tractates across 13 codices. Taken together, well over one hundred substantial ancient texts sit outside the 66-book Protestant canon.

How to Start Reading the Lost Books

Don't start alphabetically — start with the books that reward a modern reader fastest.

1. 1 Enoch — the essential first read: the Watchers, the Nephilim, and the book quoted in Jude. Read Genesis 6:1–4 and Jude 1:14–15 alongside it.
2. The Book of Jubilees — Genesis retold with the details you always wondered about.
3. The Gospel of Thomas — 114 sayings you can read in an evening, then compare with the Gospels yourself.
4. The Acts of Thomas — the most literary of the apocryphal acts, home of the Hymn of the Pearl.
5. The Apocalypse of Paul — the afterlife vision that shaped a millennium of imagination.

Two practical tips: read a modern-English translation rather than a Victorian one, and read each book's short historical introduction first — knowing whether you're holding a Jewish apocalypse from 200 BC or a Christian romance from 200 AD changes how you read it.

Start reading free: browse our complete collection of lost and excluded texts — every book restored into clear modern English, with free previews — in The Forbidden Library.