Deuterocanonical Books

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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 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 used across the early Greek-speaking world — but were absent from, or held apart in, the shorter Hebrew collection that later Judaism fixed as authoritative. The early church, reading in Greek, inherited the larger set and used it freely; figures such as Jerome nonetheless noted that several books stood outside the Hebrew reckoning, and the distinction was never quite forgotten. Through the Middle Ages they circulated bound with the rest, their borderline status a matter for scholars rather than a line drawn in worship.

The split hardened in the sixteenth century. The Protestant reformers, returning to the Hebrew canon as their measure, gathered these books under the name Apocrypha — “hidden” or “set aside” — and either removed them or relegated them to a separate, uncanonical section, useful for edification but not for doctrine. In response the Catholic Church, at the Council of Trent in 1546, defined them as fully canonical; “deutero-canonical” is the term Catholic usage prefers, marking a second tier of reception rather than a lesser authority. The Orthodox churches accept a comparable, somewhat wider list, which they more often call the anagignoskomena — the books “worth reading.”

The terminology 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. Real doctrine turned on the question. The Catholic appeal to prayer for the dead, for instance, drew on a passage in 2 Maccabees that the reformers, lacking the book, did not weigh the same way. The contents range across the genres of the older scriptures — historical narrative, devotional tale, proverb, and apocalyptic vision — and several, Wisdom and Sirach above all, belong to the stream of Hellenistic Jewish wisdom literature that fed early Christian and later esoteric thought alike. 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