What Are the Apocrypha and Deuterocanonical Books?

Why Christian traditions name and classify these books differently

Open a Catholic Bible and Tobit appears within the Old Testament as Scripture. Open many modern Protestant Bibles and Tobit is absent, although historic Protestant editions often printed it in a separate Apocrypha section. Open an Orthodox Bible and Tobit appears again, sometimes alongside additional books not found in the Catholic Old Testament. The same ancient writings therefore sit within different canonical and publishing traditions — and the labels deuterocanonical and Apocrypha do not mean exactly the same thing in every Christian context.

This guide answers, directly and without taking sides, the question so many readers eventually ask: what are the Apocrypha and Deuterocanonical books, exactly which titles do these terms cover, and how does each Christian tradition actually treat them? For the practical Catholic-versus-Protestant Bible comparison this topic connects to, our guide comparing the two Bibles book-for-book covers that ground directly; this article focuses specifically on the books themselves — what they contain, what they're called, and how each tradition regards them.

The Core List: Which Books Are Involved

Before working through terminology and tradition, it helps to identify the Catholic deuterocanonical collection that forms the core of this comparison. It consists of seven books plus additional material within Esther and Daniel. Eastern Orthodox Old Testaments include this core material but may also contain further books, while historic Protestant Apocrypha sections have varied and can include texts beyond the Catholic deuterocanonical list.

These writings are preserved within the broader manuscript and translation history associated with the ancient Greek Septuagint tradition, though the Septuagint should not be imagined as one universally fixed ancient volume with a single table of contents. Christian communities read and cited many of these works for centuries, while their canonical status was not treated uniformly by every writer or region. Beyond the Catholic core listed above, some Orthodox traditions preserve additional texts not found in the Catholic canon, discussed further below.

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"Deuterocanonical": The Catholic and Orthodox Term

In Catholic usage, deuterocanonical comes from Greek roots meaning roughly "second canon." The terminology itself is not ancient: the Catholic scholar Sixtus of Siena introduced the distinction between protocanonical and deuterocanonical books in the sixteenth century. It describes books whose canonical status was disputed in some Christian settings, not a second-rate level of inspiration. The Catholic Church receives the Old Testament deuterocanonical books as fully canonical Scripture. Eastern Orthodox writers also use the term at times, although Orthodox terminology and lists are not perfectly uniform and the category anagignoskomena ("books that are read") also appears in Orthodox discussion. For the broader process by which biblical collections developed, see how the biblical canon was formed.

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"Apocrypha": The Protestant Term

In Protestant usage, Apocrypha commonly refers to books printed outside the Old Testament canon but retained in some editions for historical, devotional, or ecclesiastical reading. The word comes from Greek for things "hidden" and has had a much broader history than this particular Protestant category. It is therefore misleading to say that Apocrypha and deuterocanonical are simply two names for exactly the same fixed list. The Catholic deuterocanonical collection overlaps substantially with the traditional Protestant Apocrypha, but historic Apocrypha sections may also contain books such as 1 Esdras, 2 Esdras, and the Prayer of Manasseh, which are not part of the Catholic canon. Protestant Reformers generally favored the shorter Jewish/Hebrew canon for the Old Testament while differing over how useful the other books remained for Christian reading.

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Luther's Bible and the King James Bible: Printed, Not Erased

A detail often missing from popular accounts complicates any simple story of these books immediately vanishing from Protestant Bibles. Martin Luther's 1534 German Bible gathered a group of books into a distinct Apocrypha section between the Old and New Testaments and described them as useful reading while distinguishing them from canonical Scripture. Luther therefore did not simply erase these writings; his edition preserved them while marking a clear difference in authority.

English Bibles followed a similar pattern for centuries. The original 1611 King James Bible included an Apocrypha section between the Testaments, as did earlier English translations including the Coverdale and Geneva Bibles. Omission became increasingly common long before the end of the nineteenth century, influenced in part by Protestant publishing and Bible-society practice. The date 1885 is sometimes repeated as though the Apocrypha were officially removed from the King James Bible at that moment, but that is misleading: the English Revised Version's Old and New Testaments appeared in 1885, and its revised Apocrypha followed separately in the 1890s. The modern absence of these books from many Protestant Bibles is therefore the result of a gradual publishing and confessional history, not one universal act of removal. Anglican and Lutheran traditions have also continued to preserve forms of liturgical or devotional use.

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Orthodox Usage Is Not Perfectly Uniform

It would be a mistake to describe "the Orthodox Old Testament" as though one universally identical list existed across every Orthodox church. The Synod of Jerusalem of 1672, an important Eastern Orthodox council, explicitly defended several books rejected as apocryphal by Protestant confessions and called them canonical Scripture. Orthodox discussions also use the term anagignoskomena, meaning "books that are read," for additional Old Testament writings received in ecclesial use. The terminology and exact contents are not applied with complete uniformity across all Orthodox traditions, so no single short formula captures every jurisdiction equally well.

Beyond the books shared with Catholic tradition, Greek Orthodox editions commonly include 3 Maccabees and Psalm 151, while 4 Maccabees may appear in an appendix. Slavonic and Russian traditions have their own additional textual history, including forms of 2 Esdras. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church belongs to the broader Oriental Orthodox family rather than Eastern Orthodoxy and preserves a still wider biblical canon that includes works such as 1 Enoch and Jubilees. These traditions should therefore not be collapsed into one generic "Orthodox canon": Eastern Orthodox collections themselves vary, and the Ethiopian canon represents a distinct Oriental Orthodox canonical tradition.

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Are These Books Echoed in the New Testament?

One question that surfaces often deserves a careful answer. The New Testament contains no generally recognized formal quotation from the Catholic deuterocanonical books comparable to its explicit quotations of Isaiah or the Psalms. That does not mean the New Testament shows no knowledge of this literature. Scholars identify numerous parallels and possible allusions: Hebrews 11:35 is often connected with the martyr traditions of 2 Maccabees 7, and Paul's language has been compared with the Wisdom of Solomon, among other examples. The strength and significance of individual parallels remain debated, and an allusion by itself does not settle a book's canonical status. The wider New Testament also quotes or alludes to literature outside later Old Testament canons — Jude's use of 1 Enoch is the clearest reminder that literary use and canonical status are not identical questions.

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Reading These Books Today

For a reader simply curious what these books actually contain, most are approachable in the same way as other Old Testament historical, wisdom, or narrative books. Tobit and Judith read as extended narratives with clear moral and theological themes. Wisdom and Sirach sit comfortably alongside Proverbs and Ecclesiastes in style and concern. First Maccabees provides a sustained historical narrative of the Maccabean revolt, while Second Maccabees offers a different, more theologically shaped account of overlapping events — the crisis from which the celebration of Hanukkah emerged. Whatever a particular reader's tradition holds about their canonical status, these books offer a substantial, historically significant body of Second Temple Jewish literature that shaped the world both Judaism and early Christianity emerged from.

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