Apocrypha

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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 category is not fixed, because no single canon stands behind it. The clearest case is the cluster of books — Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Maccabees, and others — that entered Christian use through the Greek Septuagint but were absent from the Hebrew Bible the rabbis settled on. Jerome, translating the Latin Vulgate, flagged them as useful for edification but not for doctrine, and the name “apocrypha” attached to them. The Reformers pressed that distinction harder and printed the books in a separate section or dropped them entirely; the Catholic and Orthodox churches affirmed them as scripture, calling them deuterocanonical — of the canon, but established later. The same texts thus sit inside one Bible and outside another, which is why a flat claim about what “the” apocrypha contains is rarely safe.

Beyond that disputed middle lies a wider field of works no major church received: the pseudepigrapha, attributed to ancient worthies who did not write them — Enoch, Ezra, the patriarchs — and the many gospels, acts, and apocalypses that early Christianity read but the forming canon excluded. Scholarship treats these less as failures than as evidence: they preserve currents of belief, about angels and fallen watchers, hidden heavens, and the end of the age, that the canonical books mention only in passing. The Book of Enoch, lost to the West for centuries and kept whole only in Ethiopic, is the standing example; the New Testament letter of Jude quotes it directly.

What made the excluded books attractive is partly the exclusion itself. To a reader convinced that the deepest truths are guarded, a text labelled hidden, suppressed, or known only to the few reads as a promise. Esoteric traditions have drawn on the apocrypha along exactly this line — finding in Enoch’s angelology, the Sibylline prophecies, and the rejected gospels a buried stratum of revelation that the official canon was thought to have pruned away. Whether the excluded writings really preserve an older or secret teaching, or were excluded for the ordinary reasons of date, authorship, and doctrine, is the point on which historical study and esoteric reading diverge. The texts survive either way, and have been read in both keys for a very long time.

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

→ Related: Old Testament · Torah · Gospel Of Thomas · Gnosis · Jewish Mysticism