Deuterocanonical

What these books are

In the centuries between the Old and New Testaments, Jewish writers produced histories, wisdom books, prayers, and stories that circulated widely among Greek-speaking Jews. Most of them come down to us in Greek and appear in manuscripts of the Septuagint — the Greek Old Testament that many of the earliest Christians read — and none of them belongs to the Hebrew Bible. A few, such as 2 Esdras, are later still and survive mainly in Latin.

Why they are in some Bibles and not others

Catholic and Orthodox Christians receive most of these books as scripture and call them deuterocanonical, meaning “second canon” — not second-rate, but recognised at a later stage.

Those two canons are not identical, and neither matches this table exactly. The Orthodox canon includes books the Catholic canon does not, among them 1 Esdras; 2 Esdras falls outside both. Each book page here says where that particular book stands.

Protestant Christians do not treat any of them as canonical and generally call them the Apocrypha, meaning “hidden things”. This is not a modern omission: early Protestant Bibles, including the 1611 King James Version, printed them in a separate section between the Testaments. The Anglican Articles of Religion set out the historic Protestant position, that the church reads them for “example of life and instruction of manners” but does not use them to establish doctrine — and that list names both books of Esdras, under their older numbering.

That difference is real, it is old, and it is held sincerely on both sides. This site does not take a position on it.

Why they are here

They are included for two reasons. Most of them are scripture to a large part of the Christian world, and this site would be incomplete without them. And several of them illuminate the centuries between the Old and New Testaments — 1 and 2 Maccabees in particular are the main surviving account of the events that shaped the world Jesus was born into.

You will notice they sit in their own block, set apart below the main table. That is deliberate, and it is the one place where the periodic table metaphor does some real work: it is exactly where a chemistry chart puts the lanthanides and actinides — a distinct family, given its own row beneath the main grid. They are shown here because they matter to the history and to a large part of the church, and kept visually separate because Christians differ over their standing.