Deuterocanonical Books

← Encyclopedia

The deuterocanonical books are a group of Old Testament writings — among them Tobit, Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach (Ecclesiasticus), Baruch, the two books of Maccabees, and the longer Greek forms of Daniel and Esther — that the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches receive as Scripture but that the Hebrew Bible and the Protestant Old Testament leave out. The name means “of the second canon,” and it carries the whole argument inside it: these are books whose scriptural standing was settled later, and not everywhere the same way. The word is itself a product of the dispute it describes — coined in 1566 by the Dominican Sixtus of Siena, in his survey Bibliotheca Sancta, to name a class of writings received into the canon at a second remove. He paired it with a companion term, protocanonical, for the books no one had ever questioned. The vocabulary thus draws a line of reception, not of worth: a deuterocanonical book is, in Catholic usage, fully canonical and fully inspired, but it arrived at that standing by a longer road.

The corpus and its names

The twelve writings counted as deuterocanonical fall into the familiar genres of the older scriptures. There are the devotional tales — Tobit, in which a disguised angel guides a young man through exile and binds a demon, and Judith, in which a widow saves her city by killing an Assyrian general. There is the history: 1 Maccabees, a sober chronicle of the second-century-BCE revolt against Seleucid rule, and 2 Maccabees, a more rhetorical retelling of the revolt’s early years, dwelling on the martyrs. There is the wisdom literature — Sirach, the long book of a Jerusalem scribe, and the Wisdom of Solomon, written in Greek and saturated in Platonic language. There is the prophetic supplement of Baruch, ascribed to Jeremiah’s secretary. And there are the passages that swell two canonical books beyond their Hebrew length: the Greek Daniel adds the Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Young Men, the tale of Susanna, and the story of Bel and the Dragon, while the Greek Esther interleaves six long sections of prayer and decree that the Hebrew Esther — which never names God — does not contain. To this list the Eastern churches add more, and the exact tally shifts from communion to communion. That mobility is the point: the deuterocanon is not a fixed shelf but a contested margin, and its membership is a record of who did the receiving.

A textual root in the Septuagint

The division has a textual root. Most of these works survive in Greek, and were carried in the Septuagint — the Greek translation of the Jewish scriptures produced in Alexandria from the third century BCE onward and used across the early Greek-speaking world. The shorter Hebrew collection that later Judaism fixed as authoritative either lacked them or held them apart; several, like Sirach, had a Hebrew original that was lost to most readers for centuries and known only through the Greek. The early church, reading in Greek, inherited the larger set as a single inheritance and used it freely — quoting it, preaching from it, drawing doctrine from it without marking a seam. The seam was nonetheless there, and learned readers knew it. The clearest witness is Jerome, who in the late fourth century undertook a fresh Latin translation from the Hebrew rather than from the Greek and so came face to face with the gap between the two collections. In the prefaces he attached to his work — most pointedly the Prologus Galeatus, the “helmeted preface” to Samuel and Kings — he set out the Hebrew reckoning of the canon and stated that the books standing outside it should be ranked among the apocrypha: read for the edification of the people, but not adduced to establish doctrine. He named Wisdom, Sirach, Judith, and Tobit among them.

Jerome’s own practice was less tidy than his theory. He translated Tobit and Judith all the same, if grudgingly, and his Vulgate carried the disputed books along with the rest; later copyists made no effort to quarantine them. His distinction survived as a scholar’s footnote rather than a worshipper’s boundary. Through the Middle Ages the books circulated bound with the canonical scriptures, read in the liturgy, cited by the great theologians, their borderline status a matter for the schools rather than a line drawn in the pew. When the Council of Florence, under Pope Eugene IV, issued its decree of union with the Eastern Christians in 1442 — the bull Cantate Domino, with its attached instruction for the Jacobites — it listed the deuterocanonical works without distinction alongside the others, an early conciliar signal of the direction Rome would later take.

The sixteenth-century hardening

The seam split open in the sixteenth century. The Protestant reformers, returning to the Hebrew canon as their measure and prizing the original languages over the Greek and Latin that had carried Christian Scripture for a millennium, drew Jerome’s old line again and pressed it much harder. Luther, in his German Bible of 1534, gathered the disputed books into a section of their own, placed between the Testaments and headed Apocrypha — “hidden” or “set aside” — with the verdict that they were useful and good to read but not equal to Holy Scripture. The English reformers followed: Article VI of the Thirty-Nine Articles allowed the church to read the apocryphal books for example of life and instruction in manners, while denying that they could be used to establish any doctrine, and the Westminster Confession of 1646 went further still, ruling that the books commonly called Apocrypha, not being divinely inspired, were no part of the canon and of no authority in the church of God. The trajectory ran from a separate section to a separate appendix to, in many later printings, omission altogether — so that within a few generations most Protestant readers met a Bible from which the deuterocanon had simply vanished.

The Catholic response was definitive and is the hinge of the whole history. At the Council of Trent, convened to answer the Reformation, the fourth session on 8 April 1546 issued the decree De canonicis scripturis, which set out a single list of the inspired books — the deuterocanonical works included, named without separation among the rest — and declared that the church received them all with, in the decree’s phrase, an equal feeling of piety and reverence. To this it attached an anathema: anyone who did not accept the listed books as sacred and canonical was placed under the church’s formal condemnation. The same session declared the Latin Vulgate the authentic edition for public use. Trent did not invent the deuterocanon; it closed a question that had stood open, in practice, since Jerome. After 1546 the term deutero-canonical became the preferred Catholic name precisely because it could mark the books’ later and contested reception without conceding the reformers’ point that later meant lesser. For Rome the books are of the second canon in order of recognition, not in degree of authority.

The Orthodox reckoning

The Eastern churches arrived at acceptance by a different road and with a different vocabulary. Orthodoxy inherited the Septuagint directly, never having passed through Jerome’s Hebrew-first re-translation, and so its scriptural instinct ran toward the wider Greek collection from the start. The Synod of Jerusalem in 1672, called under Patriarch Dositheos largely to answer Calvinist influence that had reached the Greek church, affirmed a generous list and gave it a characteristic name: the anagignoskomena, the books “to be read” or “worth reading.” The Orthodox canon as it settled is broader than the Catholic one — Greek and Slavonic Bibles carry, beyond the Tridentine deuterocanon, such works as 1 Esdras, the Prayer of Manasseh, Psalm 151, and 3 Maccabees, with 4 Maccabees printed in an appendix. No single Orthodox council bound the whole communion to one fixed roster with Trent’s juridical sharpness, and the precise list still varies among the autocephalous churches; what holds steady is the practice of reading these books as Scripture within the worshipping life of the church.

A terminology that is confessional, not neutral

The vocabulary is therefore confessional, not neutral. The same writings are “deuterocanonical” to one tradition and “apocryphal” to another, and what the word reports is which body did the receiving. A reader cannot use either term without standing somewhere. To call Tobit deuterocanonical is to read it from inside a church that holds it as Scripture; to call it apocryphal is to read it from a church that does not — and there is no third name from nowhere. This is why a flat statement about what “the” Bible contains is rarely safe: the Bible is not one book but a collection counted differently by the communions that revere it, and the deuterocanon is the exact place where the counts diverge.

Real doctrine turned on the divergence, and turns on it still. The Catholic and Orthodox practice of praying for the dead found one of its scriptural warrants in a scene in 2 Maccabees: after a battle, when pagan amulets are found on the bodies of fallen Jewish soldiers, Judas Maccabeus takes up a collection and sends a sin offering to the Temple in Jerusalem, and the narrator commends the thought of praying for the dead that they might be loosed from their sin. To a church that held the book as Scripture, this was an inspired witness to the efficacy of intercession for the dead and, in time, a building block of the doctrine of purgatory. To the reformers, who lacked the book, the same passage could carry no doctrinal weight at all. The argument over a teaching thus reduced, in part, to a prior argument over a table of contents — which is the recurring shape of the deuterocanonical question. Where a book stands inside the canon, the practices it underwrites stand inside the faith; where it stands outside, they fall.

The wisdom stream and its long reach

Several of these books carry weight well beyond the canon dispute. Wisdom and Sirach above all belong to the stream of Hellenistic Jewish wisdom literature that took shape in the last centuries before the common era, when Jewish writers in Greek were thinking the inheritance of Israel through the categories of Greek philosophy. Sirach, composed in Hebrew around 180 BCE, made the bold identification of Wisdom with the Torah — the cosmic ordering principle present at creation, settled at last in Jerusalem as the Law. The Wisdom of Solomon, written in Greek a century or more later in Alexandria, pressed the personified figure further still, describing Wisdom as a breath of the power of God and a reflection of eternal light, a feminine presence who pervades and orders all things and who alone leads the soul toward immortality. This hypostatized Sophia stands close kin to the divine Logos that Philo of Alexandria developed in the same city and same generation, and to the mediating intelligence of the Hermetic writings — three currents converging on the problem of how a single divine principle can be at once the transcendent attribute of an unknowable God and the immanent agent through which a world is made. Early Christian writers read these wisdom hymns as anticipations of Christ, the Logos through whom all things came to be; and the same texts fed, by long and branching descent, into the wisdom speculation of later esoteric and mystical traditions, where a personified divine Wisdom would surface again and again. The New Testament itself moves in this orbit: the same canon that later disputes would draw around the deuterocanon also had to settle the standing of borderline writings in its own half, the Epistle to the Hebrews among them, by criteria no less contested.

The texts and their study

The standard English gateway to the corpus remains the great public-domain apparatus of R. H. Charles, The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament in English (Oxford: Clarendon, 1913) — two volumes of fresh translations with critical introductions, foundational even after a century, hosted here as Charles’s Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha. The modern scholarly orientation begins with Bruce M. Metzger, An Introduction to the Apocrypha (Oxford University Press, 1957), still the most lucid short account of how the books were written, transmitted, and disputed; David A. deSilva’s Introducing the Apocrypha (Baker Academic, 2002) carries the treatment into the present. The history of the term and of the Catholic position is set out in the Catholic Encyclopedia’s article Canon of the Old Testament, which traces the line from Jerome through the Council of Florence to Trent and attributes the coinage deuterocanonical to Sixtus of Siena. The conciliar precedent itself survives in Eugene IV’s bull Cantate Domino of 1442, whose list of inspired books prefigures Trent’s. And the broader scholarship on the corpus and its status is gathered in the chapter on the deuterocanonical and apocryphal books in the Cambridge Companion to the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, which surveys the manuscript traditions, the genres, and the long reception across the communions. These writings are also the deep background to the wider field of Second Temple Judaism, the half-millennium of Jewish literary and religious creativity from which they came.

The books themselves did not change across the centuries of dispute; what changed, and changed differently in each communion, was the edge of the canon drawn around them.

→ In the library: Charles (ed.) — The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (1913)

→ Related: Gospel Of James · Old Testament · Apocrypha · Sirach · Book Of Wisdom · Book Of Baruch · Book Of Tobit · 1 Maccabees · 2 Maccabees · Book Of Daniel · Jerome · Second Temple Judaism · Philo Of Alexandria · Bible · New Testament · Epistle To The Hebrews · The Reformation · Eastern Orthodox Christianity