The Apocrypha (Greek, “hidden books”) are Jewish books from 13th – 3rd centuries BC not preserved in the Tanakh, but included in the Latin (Vulgate) and Greek (Septuagint) Old Testaments.

Pre-Apocalyptic
Apocrypha

“The Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) consists of a collection of writings dating from approximately the 13th – 3rd centuries BCE.  The Apocrypha (Greek, “hidden books”) are Jewish books from that period not preserved in the Tanakh, but included in the Latin (Vulgate) and Greek (Septuagint) Old Testaments. The Apocrypha are still regarded as part of the canon of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches, and as such, their number is fixed.” | Part of Post-Canon, Pre-Apocalyptic Literature Movement

SEE ALSO:

• Apocalyptic Literature Study Archive

List of Apocrypha

• Tobit
• Judith
• The Additions to the Book of Esther
• Wisdom of Solomon
• Ecclesiasticus, or the Wisdom of Joshua ben Sira
• Apocryphal Baruch
• The Letter of Jeremiah
• The Additions to the Book of Daniel
• The Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Jews
• Susanna
• Bel and the Dragon
• 1 Maccabees
• 2 Maccabees

In addition, the following books are in the Greek and Slavonic Bibles but not in the Roman Catholic Canon, though some of them occur in Latin:

• 1 Esdras
• 2 Esdras
• 3 Maccabees
• 4 Maccabees
• Prayer of Manasseh
• Psalm 151, following Psalm 150 in the Greek Bible

• The Doctrine of Last Things “This is an analysis of Judeo-Christian eschatology that delves into the Jewish roots of the Christian concept of the end of the world. He begins in the Jewish writings of antiquity, particularly the Tanach and the non-deuterocanonical apocrypha such as The Book ofEnoch and The Book of Jubilees. Traces the development from a ‘Particularist’ apocalypse in the Jewish Bible and Apocrypha (limited to Jewish people), to a ‘Universalist’ apocalypse in Christian belief, in which everyone is judged equally. “

Blue Letter Bible
“The Translator Jerome Rejects The Apocrypha As Scripture

A few hundred years after Christ, the church Father Jerome translated the Bible into Latin-the language of the common people at that time in the western Roman Empire. His translation, the Vulgate, included the Apocrypha, but only because the books were popular among his readers. Jerome explicitly denied that they should have the status as Scripture. Jerome said they were not books of the canon but rather books of the church. He believed they could be helpful to people but he clearly stated his belief that they were not divinely authoritative.

His assessment of the Apocrypha was ignored. Eventually the Vulgate became the official Roman Catholic text on which all other translations were based. The tradition of using the Vulgate has continued until the twentieth century.

Augustine Accepts The Old Testament Apocrypha As Authoritative

Another key figure in the history of the Apocrypha was the church father St. Augustine. Augustine believed that the books of the Apocryphal were canonical. Soon thereafter, the councils of Hippo and Carthage, under the influence of Augustine, declared the books of Apocrypha as Scripture. A few years later Pope Leo also testified that the Apocrypha was indeed part of the Old Testament canon.

Except for a few dissenting voices the matter was not really addressed for the next one thousand years.

The Protestant Reformers Reject The Apocrypha

The debate about the extent of the canon did not really come to a head until the Protestant Reformation in the 1500’s. The Roman Catholic Church had been using the Latin Vulgate translation since the time of Jerome. However Martin Luther, and the Protestant Reformers, argued that one should go back to the original sources – the Hebrew Old Testament. Therefore they rejected the Latin Vulgate, the Greek Septuagint and the Apocrypha. In his 1534 German translation, Luther placed these “outside books” at the end of his version. He declared that these books did not belong in the Old Testament canon of Scripture.

The Council Of Trent Declares The Apocrypha Scripture

The Roman Catholic Church responded quickly to Luther and the reformers. From 1545 to 1563 a church council met at Trent to answer some of their charges. As part of the Counter Reformation (called the Catholic Reformation by Roman Catholics) the Council of Trent affirmed the Apocrypha as Scripture and proclaimed it authoritative for Roman Catholics. From that day to this, the Roman Catholic Church has followed that ancient tradition and included these books in the Old Testament. The Protestant Church continues to reject these works as Holy Scripture.

The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha

By Michael E. Stone
June 2001

The Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) consists of a collection of writings dating from approximately the 13th – 3rd centuries BCE. These books were included in the Jewish canon by the Talmudic sages at Yavneh around the end of the first century CE, after the destruction of the Second Temple. However, there are many other Jewish writings from the Second Temple Period which were excluded from the Tanakh; these are known as the Apocrypha and the Pseudepigrapha.

The Apocrypha (Greek, “hidden books”) are Jewish books from that period not preserved in the Tanakh, but included in the Latin (Vulgate) and Greek (Septuagint) Old Testaments. The Apocrypha are still regarded as part of the canon of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches, and as such, their number is fixed.

The term Pseudepigrapha (Greek, “falsely attributed”) was given to Jewish writings of the same period, which were attributed to authors who did not actually write them. This was widespread in Greco-Roman antiquity – in Jewish, Christian, and pagan circles alike. Books were attributed to pagan authors, and names drawn from the repertoire of biblical personalities, such as Adam, Noah, Enoch, Abraham, Moses, Elijah, Ezekiel, Baruch, and Jeremiah. The Pseudepigrapha resemble the Apocrypha in general character, yet were not included in the Bible, Apocrypha, or rabbinic literature.

All the Apocrypha and most of the Pseudepigrapha are Jewish works (some contain Christianizing additions). They provide essential evidence of Jewish literature and thought during the period between the end of biblical writing (ca. 400 BCE) and the beginning of substantial rabbinic literature in the latter part of the first century CE. They have aroused much scholarly interest, since they provide information about Judaism at the turn of the era between the Bible and the Mishna (Biblical Law and Oral Law), and help explain how Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity came into being.

When were they written

The oldest known Jewish work not included in the Bible is the Book of Enoch. This is a complex work, written in the third (or perhaps even the late fourth) century BCE, after the return from the Babylonian Exile and the establishment of the Second Jewish Commonwealth (6th-5th centuries BCE) and before the Maccabean revolt in 172 BCE. The oldest copies of the Book of Enoch, dating from the third century BCE, were discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls (see below).

The latest of the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha are the Apocalypses of Ezra and Baruch, written in the decades following the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. These works, contemporary with those of the early Rabbinic school of Yavneh, reflect the theological and ethical struggles and dilemmas aroused by the Roman conquest of Judea and the destruction of the Temple.

Most of these works were written in the Land of Israel, in Aramaic or Hebrew. However, some of them, such as The Wisdom of Solomon, were written in Greek. These Jewish Greek writings were produced in the widespread Jewish Diaspora of the time, mainly in Egypt (Alexandria) and in North Africa. Although most of the Hebrew and Aramaic texts have been lost over the centuries, many of them, translated into Greek or Oriental Christian languages (such as Ethiopic, Syriac or Armenian) have been found. Early Christianity showed great interest in Jewish traditions and stories about biblical figures and events, and as a result scholars now have access to a substantial library of Jewish writing, created during a crucial period of Jewish history, but preserved only within the Christian tradition.

The Development of Biblical scholarship

Certain of the apocryphal works were known in Jewish tradition throughout the Middle Ages, not necessarily in their full texts, but in shortened and retold versions, or in translations back into Hebrew or Aramaic from Christian languages. Thus forms of the Books of Judith, Maccabees and Ben Sira, as well as parts of Wisdom of Solomon were familiar to Jewish scholars. But these works never achieved wide acceptance in Judaism and remained, to a greater or lesser extent, curiosities.

During the Renaissance in Europe and in the following centuries, an interest in various Oriental languages developed in Christian circles. First Hebrew, then Arabic, Aramaic, Ethiopic, Syriac and more took their place alongside Greek and Latin in the scholarly purview. At the same time, Christian scholars began to be interested in rabbinic sources (preserved in Hebrew) and Jewish biblical exegesis. This combined interest in language and rabbinics was an important component in the complex development that, by the end of the eighteenth century, provided the basis for “modern” critical biblical scholarship.

Other developments contributed to and stemmed from this process: the beginnings of archeology, the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphs and Babylonian cuneiform, and antiquarian and scholarly study of the Holy Land. In this context, interest developed in Jewish documents which could help illuminate the New Testament. Many works were discovered, published, translated and studied, and they came to be called the Pseudepigrapha. An English translation of works known by the early twentieth century was prepared under the guidance of the renowned English scholar R. H. Charles and entitled The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, published in 1913. To modern Jewish scholars, these works are known as the Sefarim Hitsonim (“External Books”). Two major annotated translations into Modern Hebrew have been published, one edited by Abraham Kahana (most recently re-issued in 1959) and one by A.S. Hartom (1969).

The Dead Sea Scrolls

Scholarly interest was renewed after the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947. In the eleven caves near Qumran north-west of the Dead Sea, parts of more than 700 ancient Jewish manuscripts were discovered. These had been written in the same period as the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, mostly in Hebrew, with a lesser number in Aramaic and even fewer in Greek. The Dead Sea Scrolls, as they came to be known, are assumed to have been the library of a sectarian community at Qumran. The scrolls survived the Roman ravaging of Judea in the years 68-70 CE, because they were hidden in caves. They have been a major focus of scholarly and general interest for the last half-century.

Among the Dead Sea Scrolls were a number of manuscripts of the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, including ten manuscripts of the Book of Enoch in the original Aramaic (until then copies were extant only in an Ethiopic translation of a Greek translation of a Semitic original), which were vital to answering many questions about its origins. Dating of the manuscripts by their script shows that certain parts of Enoch are at least as old as the third century BCE. Fragments of Ben Sira in Hebrew, Tobit in Aramaic, the Epistle of Jeremiah in Greek, and others were also found at Qumran.

In addition to these discoveries, the scrolls included other, similar writings that were previously unknown. In a Psalms Scroll from Qumran, a number of additional compositions were discovered, thereby increasing the corpus of texts already known. They also assisted in understanding a literary genre – the later Psalms – which happen to be poorly represented in the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha. These prayerful poems provide a deep insight into the religious feelings and sentiments of their authors. The knowledge that a lively literary production of Psalms existed at that time means that any study of ancient Jewish literature must now take these apocryphal Psalms very seriously into account.

A third important aspect of the Dead Sea Scrolls is that they were discovered in a known archeological and sociological context, firmly fixing them in the Second Temple period. Before 1947, only medieval, Christian manuscripts of the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha were known, and they could be dated only on the basis of details contained in them. This is not always a dependable procedure. The Dead Sea Scrolls, stemming from a clearly established archeological context, are vital in dating the writings accurately.

What do these texts teach us about ancient Judaism?

In addition to the discoveries at Qumran, a substantial number of ancient Pseudepigrapha have been found elsewhere. Some of them were preserved in Greek and Latin; others in translations from Greek and Latin into various Oriental Christian languages – Syriac, Ethiopic, Arabic, Church Slavonic, Armenian and Georgian, among others. The most prominent of these are the Book of Enoch (Ethiopic and Greek); the Book of Jubilees, also preserved in Ethiopic; Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs in Greek; The Apocalypse of Baruch in Syriac; the Book of the Secrets of Enoch in Old Church Slavonic; and the Books of Adam and Eve in Latin, Greek, Slavonic, Armenian and Georgian.

Among this literature are works of varied character. Some are histories: the main source for knowledge of the Maccabean wars are the apocryphal First and Second Books of Maccabees. Other works, called apocalypses, present visions of heavenly and earthly secrets, of God and his angels. The concern with heavenly realities is a very prominent development in the Second Temple Period. In these works central religious questions dominate, above all the issue of the justice of God. Such visions are attributed to Enoch, Ezra, Baruch and Abraham.

A substantial number of works transmit proverbial teaching about religious and practical issues. These numerous wisdom or sapiental books are a continuation of the tradition of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes in the Bible. The Wisdom of Ben Sira is a record of the teachings of Ben Sira, the head of an academy in Jerusalem in the early decades of the second century BCE. In addition, the Jews of the Second Temple period composed many psalms and prayers, expressing their love for God, their yearning to be close to Him, and their anguish over the fate of individuals and of Israel.

The manuscripts demonstrate that Jewish thought of this period was orientated between poles: Israel and mankind; the earthly and heavenly world; the righteous and the wicked. The people at that time lived in a consciousness of these dualities and in tension created by them. A certainty of Gods just and merciful providence was challenged by the turbulent and violent events of their times. These books are different from the rabbinic literature; they deal only peripherally with traditions of a legal (halakhic) character, which dominated the next, rabbinic stage of Jewish creativity.

What is their importance?

When these books were first studied, scholars realized that they could help to provide a context for the understanding of the origins of Christianity. No longer was rabbinic Judaism to form the primary basis for comparison with the earliest Christian literature, but rather the Jewish literature of the Second Temple Period, and particularly the Pseudepigrapha, could contribute much insight, making the Jewish origin of Christianity more comprehensible.

The contribution of the study of the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha to the understanding of the New Testament should not be underrated. The approach to Jesus that is typified by Schweitzers Quest of the Historical Jesus (1964) – using the context of “Jewish apocalyptic” to help understand his activity – would not have been possible without the discovery of the Pseudepigrapha. As a result of these studies, we now have insight into types of Judaism and religious ideas within the Jewish tradition that would otherwise have remained lost.

Here we move closer to answering a central question: why study this literature at all? The general answer is that the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha should be studied because they embody an expression of the human spirit, and the historian is enjoined to study the human past. But, for scholars of the so-called “Judeo-Christian culture”, a particular interest is inherent in the investigation of that segment of the past in which Judaism took on the form it still has and in which Christianity emerged. Yet this very agenda, when formulated thus, bears within it potentialities for the perversion of truth and the misconception of reality. The historical enterprise is an interpretative one; there is a great danger inherent in the study of the origins of ones own tradition. Modern and medieval “orthodoxies” tend to interpret the time before they existed in terms of themselves. It has only been in the last generation of scholarship of Judaism in the Second Temple Period, that the implications of this way of seeing the world have begun to penetrate the fabric of historical thinking and writing.

This is an extremely important development, for it permits the Jewish literature of the Second Temple Period, and the people who produced and cherished these works, to step outside the giant shadows cast by the twin colossi of the Talmud and the New Testament. It then becomes possible to start to delineate what appear to have been central aspects of Judaism in the Second Temple Period. New features of Jewish life and thought become evident and the task of their detailed description and integration into an overall picture can be broached. Only such an endeavor will, in the final analysis, make it possible for us to advance our understanding of the development of rabbinic Judaism and of Christianity. This is a weighty labor but a very important one, and it is the Pseudepigrapha that provide us with evidence of vital aspects of Judaism that would otherwise have remained unknown.

This aspect of the study of the pseudepigraphical literature is in its very infancy. By pursuing it, we are able to trace the influence of ancient Jewish traditions and documents down the centuries. There have been one or two researches that have shown the way (Satran 1980; Stone 2001); other associated investigations have looked at the way Jewish apocryphal traditions were taken up and developed by medieval Judaism and Christianity (Bousset 1896; Stone 1982, Stone 1996). These two avenues of investigation seem likely to produce real results in the direct study of the texts, in the evaluation of their character and function, as well as in the differentiation of Jewish and Christian materials, not always an easy task. From this particular perspective, the study of the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha teaches us to understand significant aspects of medieval culture, of Jewish history and of Christian origins.

List of Apocrypha

• Tobit
• Judith
• The Additions to the Book of Esther
• Wisdom of Solomon
• Ecclesiasticus, or the Wisdom of Joshua ben Sira
• Baruch
• The Letter of Jeremiah
• The Additions to the Book of Daniel
• The Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Jews
• Susanna
• Bel and the Dragon
• 1 Maccabees
• 2 Maccabees

In addition, the following books are in the Greek and Slavonic Bibles but not in the Roman Catholic Canon, though some of them occur in Latin:

• 1 Esdras
• 2 Esdras
• 3 Maccabees
• 4 Maccabees
• Prayer of Manasseh
• Psalm 151, following Psalm 150 in the Greek Bible

What do YOU think ?
Submit Your Comments For Posting Here

Date: 03 Mar 2009
Time: 03:16:27

Hi, I’m looking for an Arabic Version of the Apocrypha. Can’t seem to find it. Any suggestions? Obviously interested. I wonder why those books would be left out of the canon of texts. Some of them I find very inspiring, much more than some of the other books that ARE in the canon. Sirach: how oh how could that have been left out of the canon?

Anyway, if you have any suggestions to help me get an arabic version of the Apocrypha, please send them to julianwp@hotmail.com, with “Apocrypha” as the subject (so I don’t think the email is spam and ignore it – as I’ve got in the habit of doing with almost all my emails). Thanks, Ju.