Concept

Apocrypha

The category of religious writings set outside an accepted canon — from the Greek for "hidden away" — and the long appeal of the books that were left out.

Apocrypha names the religious writings a community placed outside its accepted canon — texts circulated, read, and sometimes prized, yet not granted the authority of scripture. The Greek apókryphos means “hidden away,” and the word carried both senses from the start: writings kept back as too dangerous or too secret for general use, and writings set aside as spurious. Which meaning a reader hears tends to depend on where they stand. The same shelf can look like a locked cabinet or a refuse heap, and the word does not decide between them; it only marks the line a tradition drew, and the books that ended on the far side of it.

The category is unstable at its root, because no single canon stands behind it. There is no list called the apocrypha in the way there is a list called the Torah. What counts as set-aside is always set aside from something, and the something differs by community. A book that is scripture in the Ethiopian church is a curiosity in the Lutheran one; a book the rabbis did not seal into the Hebrew Bible is read at Catholic mass. The word therefore behaves less like the name of a corpus than like the name of a boundary — a way of marking where one Bible stops, drawn by whoever is doing the stopping.

The disputed middle: the deuterocanonical cluster

The clearest case is the cluster of books — Tobit, Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, Baruch, the two books of Maccabees, and additions to Daniel and Esther — that entered Christian use through the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures known as the Septuagint, the Bible of the Greek-speaking synagogue and then of the early church. These books circulated in Greek among Jews of the Hellenistic Diaspora; several were composed in the last two or three centuries before the common era, in the gap between the latest prophets and the writings of the New Testament. When the rabbinic authorities settled the Hebrew Bible in the centuries after the fall of the Temple, these works were not sealed into it. The church, reading its Old Testament in Greek, kept them.

Jerome, translating the Hebrew scriptures afresh into Latin for the version that became the Vulgate, is the hinge. Committed to what he called the Hebraica veritas — the Hebrew truth, the canon as the Jews of his day held it — he set the Greek surplus apart. In his prologue to the books of Solomon, written in the 390s, he allowed that the church reads Judith, Tobit, and the books of Maccabees, but does not receive them among the canonical books: let it read them for the edification of the people, he wrote, but not for establishing the authority of doctrine. In the so-called Helmeted Preface, the Prologus Galeatus prefacing the books of Kings, he ruled that whatever falls outside the Hebrew list is to be set among the apocrypha. The name attached to the books along that line, and the distinction Jerome drew — edifying but not doctrine-bearing — would be argued about for a thousand years.

It was argued about because Jerome lost the practical battle even as the church adopted his translation. At almost the same moment, the North African councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) listed the disputed books as canonical without qualm, and Latin Christianity read them as scripture for a millennium, Jerome’s prefaces notwithstanding. The fault line ran quietly until the Reformation reopened it. The Reformers, returning to the Hebrew canon as Jerome had, pressed the distinction hard: Luther, in his German Bible of 1534, gathered the disputed books into a separate section under the heading Apocrypha, good to read but not equal to scripture — the first time they were printed as a bloc with that label. The English Bible followed; the King James Version of 1611 set the same books in an inter-testamental section “Books called Apocrypha,” which later printings would quietly drop. Against this, the Council of Trent, in its fourth session on 8 April 1546, declared the books of the Vulgate — the disputed cluster included — sacred and canonical, with an anathema on any who disagreed. The term that fixed the Catholic position, deuterocanonical — of the canon, but established at a second stage — had been coined two decades later, in 1566, by the convert friar Sixtus of Siena. The same texts thus sit inside one Bible and outside another, scripture at a Catholic or Orthodox altar and appendix or excised page in a Protestant pew, which is why a flat claim about what “the” apocrypha contains is rarely safe.

The wider field: pseudepigrapha and the rejected gospels

Beyond that disputed middle lies a wider field of works no major Western church received as scripture: the pseudepigrapha, ascribed to ancient worthies who did not write them — Enoch, Ezra, Moses, the patriarchs — and the many gospels, acts, letters, and apocalypses that early Christianity read but the forming canon excluded. Pseudepigrapha — falsely-titled writings — is a near-synonym shaded toward authorship rather than canon-status: a book is pseudepigraphic because of whose name it bears, apocryphal because of where the canon put it, and most of these works are both. The borrowed name is rarely a simple forgery. To write under Enoch’s name, or Ezra’s, was to claim a particular kind of authority — to set a teaching in the mouth of a figure already old when the canonical books were young, and so to reach behind the visible scriptures toward a stratum older still.

The case of Ezra shows the layering. The scribe who is remembered as restorer of the Law after the Babylonian exile became, centuries later, the named visionary of an apocalypse — the work scholars call 4 Ezra, the Jewish core of the book the King James translators printed as 2 Esdras. Composed in the late first century, in the shadow of the second destruction of the Temple, it was never received as Hebrew scripture and never entered the Septuagint; the Latin church appended it to the Vulgate without canonizing it, where it sat as an addendum to an addendum. A scribe of the fifth century before the common era thus lends his authority to a seer of the first century after it — the pseudepigraphic move in miniature.

Scholarship treats these works less as failures than as evidence. They preserve currents of belief — about angels and fallen watchers, hidden heavens, the calendar of the cosmos, and the end of the age — that the canonical books mention only in passing, and they document the range of what early Judaism and early Christianity actually read before the lines hardened. The Book of Enoch is the standing example. A composite of visionary books ascribed to the patriarch who walked with God and was taken, it elaborates the fall of the angelic Watchers, the secrets of the heavens, and the judgment to come at length the canon never matched. It was lost to the Latin West for more than a thousand years, surviving whole only in Ge’ez, the classical language of Ethiopia, where the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church kept it as scripture and keeps it still. The West recovered it by accident of travel: the explorer James Bruce returned from Abyssinia in 1773 with Ethiopic copies, and Richard Laurence published the first English translation from a Bodleian manuscript in 1821. That a book so thoroughly excluded should turn out to be quoted as prophecy within the New Testament — the letter of Jude names Enoch, the seventh from Adam, and reproduces his oracle of the Lord coming with his holy myriads to judge the ungodly — is the kind of fact that keeps the boundary from ever settling. Twentieth-century discoveries sharpened the point: Aramaic fragments of several Enochic books surfaced among the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran, proving the corpus older than the church that left it out.

The rejected Christian writings form the other half of the field. Gospels, acts, and apocalypses circulated under apostolic names — among them the sayings-gospel recovered at Nag Hammadi and ascribed to the apostle Thomas, the Gospel of Thomas, and the Gospel of Judas, a text the heresiologist Irenaeus already knew and condemned around 180 and which surfaced again only in the twentieth century. Many of these carry the tincture of Gnosticism, the second- and third-century movements that read the cosmos as a flawed work and salvation as a saving knowledge, a gnosis; the Nag Hammadi find of 1945 returned a shelf of them to readers who had known them, if at all, only through their enemies. The policing of these books was itself a literary enterprise. The heresiologists — Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Epiphanius — cataloged the rejected gospels in order to refute them, and in doing so preserved, in hostile paraphrase, much of what would otherwise have vanished; for centuries the excluded books were known chiefly through the pens of those who excluded them.

The buried stratum: the esoteric appeal of the excluded

What made the excluded books attractive is partly the exclusion itself. To a reader convinced that the deepest truths are guarded, a text labeled hidden, suppressed, or known only to the few reads as a promise rather than a warning; the very stamp the canon used to set a book aside becomes, in this key, the seal of its value. Here the word’s older sense reasserts itself: apokryphos as the hidden teaching, the knowledge withheld from the crowd, returns to the surface the moment a tradition prizes interiority and secret transmission. Esoteric currents have read the apocrypha along exactly this line — finding in Enoch’s angelology, in the prophecies of the Sibylline Oracles (Greek hexameter verse in which Jewish and Christian writers spoke through the mask of the pagan prophetess, making an oracle of the nations testify to the one God), and in the rejected gospels a buried stratum of revelation that the official canon was thought to have pruned away. The apocalyptic temper of much of this literature — its visionary unveilings, its angelic guides and sealed heavens, its accounting of the end — supplied a vocabulary later esotericism drew on freely, though the apocalypse as a genre and as a horizon of history is a matter in its own right; here what counts is that the canon’s surplus became, for some readers, its secret center.

That reading is not merely modern. The conviction that an inner doctrine travels alongside the public scriptures, carried by texts the authorities suppressed, is nearly as old as the canon itself, and it accounts for the durability of the apocryphal shelf in traditions of Jewish mysticism and Christian esotericism alike. The excluded book is, structurally, the perfect vessel for a secret: its very absence from the approved list can be construed as the trace of its suppression, and suppression as the proof of its power.

Scholarship and the critical editions

The modern study of the apocrypha rests on a small set of monumental editions that gathered the scattered texts into usable form. The pivotal English-language work is the two-volume collection edited by the Oxford scholar R. H. Charles, The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament in English (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913) — its first volume the deuterocanonical apocrypha, its second the wider pseudepigrapha — which remained the standard Anglophone gateway to the corpus for most of the twentieth century and is freely available (Internet Archive scan of Volume II; a transcription is maintained at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, ccel.org/c/charles/otpseudepig). Charles had earlier produced the critical English of the Book of Enoch itself (1912, with the printing of 1917 widely circulated), the edition through which most English readers first met 1 Enoch entire and which remains the common reading text (full text at sacred-texts.com). The Sibylline corpus reached English readers through Milton S. Terry’s verse translation of 1899. These pre-1931 works are public domain and serve as the library’s reading texts; the modern scholarly successor, James H. Charlesworth’s two-volume The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (1983–1985), vastly expands the corpus but remains under copyright and is consulted, not hosted.

The terminology that organizes the field has its own scholarship. Edmon L. Gallagher’s study of Jerome’s canonical theory (Journal of Early Christian Studies 20, 2012) reconstructs precisely how Jerome used the words canonical, apocryphal, and ecclesiastical, and shows the distinction to be sharper and more deliberate than later polemic, on both sides, made it. For the rejected Christian books, the evidentiary baseline shifted in 1945 with the discovery of the Coptic codices at Nag Hammadi; before that find, knowledge of Gnostic and apocryphal Christianity rested on the heresiological reports of Irenaeus, Hippolytus, and Epiphanius and on a handful of Coptic manuscripts — the Askew Codex bearing the Pistis Sophia, the Bruce Codex, and Berlin Codex 8502. The principal English vehicle for that older material, the translations and surveys of G. R. S. Mead (1863–1933), made the late-antique sources available to general readers for the first time but framed them through a Theosophical metaphysics of a single perennial “Gnosis” that current scholarship — Michael Williams’s Rethinking “Gnosticism” (Princeton, 1996), Karen King’s What Is Gnosticism? (Harvard, 2003), Wouter Hanegraaff’s Esotericism and the Academy (Cambridge, 2012) — treats as a modern construction read back onto incompatible ancient systems. The texts and the lens, in other words, have to be separated even when they arrive in the same volume.

The canon-boundary the word marks is not a wall but a decision, taken and retaken by particular communities in particular centuries — Jerome in his study, the North African bishops in council, the rabbis sealing the Hebrew Bible, Luther at his desk, the fathers at Trent, the Ethiopian church keeping Enoch when Rome and Wittenberg had let it go. Apocrypha is the name for whatever each of those decisions left on the outside, and because the decisions disagree, the shelf has no fixed contents: it is defined entirely by the canon it stands against, and so there are exactly as many bodies of apocrypha as there are canons to exclude them. To ask what the apocrypha is is already to have chosen a Bible.

→ In the library: Charles — The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (1913) · Charles — The Book of Enoch (1912) · Terry — The Sibylline Oracles (1899)

Sources

Charles 1913
Gallagher 2012 — Jerome's canonical theory