Apocrypha & Canon

The biblical canon did not fall ready from heaven. It was a process of recognition by the faith community over centuries.

The Septuagint and the Deuterocanonical Books

The Deuterocanonical books are included in the Septuagint, the oldest existing Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. The term 'Deuterocanonical' (from the Greek deutero, 'second', and canon, 'rule') refers to the books included in the Septuagint but later excluded from the Jewish canon.

Books Included

Seven books are accepted as deuterocanonical by all ancient churches:

•Tobias
•Judith
•Baruch with the Letter of Jeremiah
•Sirac (Ecclesiastic)
•Wisdom
•1 and 2 Maccabees
•Greek additions to Esther and Daniel

Fluidity of the Early Jewish Canon

At the time of early Christianity, the Jewish canon was still somewhat fluid. When rabbinical Judaism began to solidify its canon after the destruction of the Second Temple in A.D. 70, Greek texts were excluded.

Councils of the Primitive Church

The Catholic Church considers that at the Council of Rome in 382 AD, under the papacy of Damasus I, the complete canon of the Bible was defined, accepting 46 books for the OT. This decision was ratified by the councils in Hippo (393), Carthage (397, 419), II Nicaea (787), Florence (1442) and Trento (1546).

Jeronimo and Agostinho

Saint Jerome, whose Latin Vulgate translation became the official translation of the Catholic Church, did not want to include the deuterocanonical books. His contemporary Saint Augustine, arguing from tradition, wanted to include them. After consulting Pope Damasus, Jeronimo included them.

The Protestant Reformation

The Protestant reformers decided to exclude the apocryphal books, based on the fact that the shorter Hebrew Bible (39 books) was older and therefore more authoritative, and also because they disagreed with the Catholic Church, which relied in part on 2 Maccabees to defend the doctrines of purgatory and the mass for the dead.

However, many Protestants attested to the value of the deuterocanonical books. The title of these books in Luther's 1534 German translation reads: 'Apocrypha, that is, books which are not considered equal to the Holy Scriptures, but are useful and good to read.'

The Fluidity of the Canon and the Political Process of Exclusion

Contemporary academic understanding of the biblical canon rejects the idea that there was a 'divine list' established once and for all. The Septuagint—which served as the Bible of the early Church—included apocryphal books and texts originally composed in Greek that the later Hebrew canon excluded. The very notion of 'canon' simultaneously implies an authoritative rule and a prescriptive closed list — two concepts that in historical practice have become quite separate. Rabbinic Judaism solidified its 24-book canon after the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD, motivated in part by the need for identity consolidation after the national catastrophe. When 16th-century Protestant reformers decided to adopt the shorter Hebrew canon (39 books) instead of the Septuagint, they did so partly out of anti-Catholic motivations—the Catholic Church supported doctrines like purgatory in deuterocanonical texts like 2 Maccabees. Recent philological translations of the Septuagint highlight the semantic complexity of antiquity: they prioritize fidelity to the likely semantic field of ancient terms, often to the detriment of ease of reading or adequacy to liturgical expectations established by denominational traditions.