Apocrypha
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[edit] Definition
The Apocrypha or deuterocanonical books are those books which were rejected from the Hebrew Canon but which have been taken to be canonical by one or more Christian churches.
Although you will often hear people talking of the Apocrypha (by which is usually meant the Catholic apocrypha), different apocryphal books appear in different version of the Bible, as shown in the table below:
| Catholic apocrypha | Greek apocrypha | Slavonic apocrypha | |
| 1 Esdras | No | Yes | Yes |
| 2 Esdras | No | No | Yes |
| Prayer of Manasseh | No | Yes | Yes |
| Psalm 151 | No | Yes | Yes |
| Tobit | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Judith | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Additions to Esther | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| 1 Maccabees | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| 2 Maccabees | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| 3 Maccabees | No | Yes | Yes |
| Wisdom of Solomon | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Ecclesiasticus | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Baruch | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Additions to Daniel | Yes | Yes | Yes |
These books are usually not included in Protestant Bibles: those that do include apocryphal books follow the Catholic apocrypha.
[edit] History
The Greek apocrypha (from which the Slavonic apocrypha are derived) were to be found in the Septuagint, an early (pre-Christian) translation of Hebrew sacred literature.
The Catholic canon was developed in the fourth century AD, when St Jerome produced his translation of the Bible into Latin (the Vulgate). To translate "the Bible", it was necessary to decide what "the Bible" actually was. The translator himself, St Jerome, was in favor of following the Hebrew Canon, but he was forced to bow to popular opinion, as expressed most eloquently by his contemporary St Augustine.
This did not, strictly speaking, prevent other books from appearing in Catholic Bibles, so long as it was made clear that they didn't actually count as Scripture: the books 1 and 2 Esdras were often placed as an appendix to the Old Testament, with a disclaimer stating that they were not canonical. (In the same way, a fourth book of Maccabees appears as an appendix to the Greek Bible.)
The first change to this situation came with the Protestant reformation, and it was slight. In the Vulgate and in Catholic translations, the apocryphal books appear grouped with the other books of the Old Testament in accordance with their subject matter: so, for example, the books of Maccabees, being Jewish history, are put with the other historical books, after the book of Esther, whereas the Wisdom of Solomon goes with the "wisdom books" of the Bible, just after the Song of Songs.
The early Protestant reformers adopted the solution of printing the Apocrypha in a separate section between the Old Testament and the New, with a note stating that they were of less authority that the other books. This expedient was adopted by Luther in his German translation (1534), by Matthew's English translation of 1537, and in the 1611 version of the King James Bible.
However, this could not satisfy those who based their theology on the notion that the Bible was the Word of God, rather than the writings of holy men about God. Given this premise, it is absurd to have some books in the Bible "of lesser authority" than the rest: either they were the Word of God, and should be in the Bible, or they weren't and they shouldn't be. For this reason, most Protestant Bibles follow the Hebrew Canon of the Old Testament.
