Apocryphal literature is one of those phrases that sounds precise and is used to mean at least four different things. It can mean books in Catholic Bibles that are absent from Protestant ones, or ancient Jewish writings attributed to patriarchs who did not write them, or early Christian gospels that no church accepted, or simply any old religious text somebody wants to make sound forbidden. This page separates them.
The word itself
Apocrypha comes from the Greek apokryphos, meaning hidden or hidden away. Its earliest religious uses were not insults. A hidden book could be one reserved for the initiated, too holy or too dangerous for general circulation, or simply one kept apart.
The negative sense arrived later, as Christian writers argued about which texts could be read publicly in church. Hidden shifted from a description of how a book was kept to a judgement about why: not held back because it was precious, but held back because it could not be trusted. By the time Jerome used the term in the fourth century, it functioned mainly as a boundary marker.
Two consequences follow, and both matter for anyone reading these books today.
First, apocryphal describes a book's relationship to a canon and says nothing about its date, its quality, or its influence. Some apocryphal works are older than books that were included. Some were read in churches for centuries.
Second, the boundary moves. A book that is apocryphal in one tradition is scripture in another. This is not an accident or an error. Different communities settled their lists at different times for different reasons, and there has never been a single moment when all of them agreed.
Three words that are constantly confused
Most confusion in this subject dissolves once these are separated.
Deuterocanonical means second canon. It describes books accepted as scripture by Catholic and Orthodox churches and excluded from Jewish and Protestant canons. Catholics use this word precisely because they reject the label apocryphal for these books. Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, and the books of Maccabees belong here.
Apocrypha, in Protestant usage, usually means those same deuterocanonical books. In wider usage it stretches to cover almost any excluded religious text, which is where the confusion begins. When somebody says apocrypha without qualifying it, ask which set they mean.
Pseudepigrapha means falsely inscribed: works written under the name of a famous ancient figure who did not write them. 1 Enoch, Jubilees, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, and 2 Baruch belong here. The label describes authorship, not status, and it is worth remembering that writing under a revered name was an accepted convention in the ancient world rather than a fraud in the modern sense.
A fourth word turns up occasionally and is worth adding. Antilegomena, meaning spoken against, was used by early Christian writers for books that were disputed without being condemned: read in some churches, doubted in others, and left in an unresolved middle. It is the most honest label of the four, because it describes a state of argument instead of pretending to a verdict.
The categories overlap untidily. A book can be pseudepigraphal in authorship, apocryphal to one church, and fully canonical to another. 1 Enoch is all three at once.
Why books were left out
The popular version of this story involves a council, a vote, and a suppression. The actual process was slower, messier, and considerably less dramatic.
Canons formed by usage before they were formalised by decree. A book was read in churches, or copied, or quoted by respected teachers, or it was not, and lists written down later mostly recorded a consensus that had already settled. Where formal decisions appear, they usually confirm existing practice.
The criteria that mattered, insofar as they can be reconstructed, were roughly these. Was the book old enough to belong to the apostolic or prophetic period? Was it used widely, or only by one region or one group? Did it agree with what the community already believed? And, for the Hebrew scriptures, did it exist in Hebrew, which weighed against books surviving only in Greek.
Some exclusions were about content. Texts teaching doctrines the majority rejected were pushed out deliberately, and the arguments were often sharp. But the more common reason is duller: a book fell out of use, stopped being copied, and quietly disappeared from the lists.
Two dates are worth knowing. Athanasius, in his festal letter of 367, gives a list of twenty-seven New Testament books matching the modern one. The Council of Trent, in 1546, fixed the Catholic canon formally in response to the Reformation. Between them lies more than a millennium of local variation.
The Old Testament apocrypha
This is the narrowest and best defined group: books present in the Greek Septuagint and in the Latin Vulgate that later Protestant Bibles set aside.
The core list runs: Tobit, Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach (also called Ecclesiasticus), Baruch with the Letter of Jeremiah, 1 and 2 Maccabees, and additional passages in Esther and Daniel, the Daniel material including Susanna, Bel and the Dragon, and the Song of the Three Young Men.
Orthodox canons go further, variously including 1 Esdras, 3 Maccabees, the Prayer of Manasseh, and Psalm 151, with 4 Maccabees appearing in an appendix in some traditions. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo canon is the broadest of all and includes 1 Enoch and Jubilees as full scripture, which is why complete Enoch survived in Ge'ez when it was lost everywhere else.
Worth knowing: these books were not absent from early Protestant Bibles. The King James Version of 1611 printed them, gathered in their own section between the testaments. Their disappearance from most English Bibles came later, driven partly by cost and partly by nineteenth century Bible society policy, so a great many readers inherited a Bible shaped by a printing decision they never heard about.
The New Testament apocrypha
Far larger, far more varied, and never accepted by any major church.
Gospels. The Gospel of Thomas, a collection of one hundred and fourteen sayings with no narrative and no crucifixion. The Gospel of Peter, which survives in fragments and includes a resurrection scene of startling strangeness. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, in which a child Jesus performs miracles with alarming inconsistency of temper. The Protevangelium of James, which supplied much of later tradition about Mary's parents and childhood despite never being canonical anywhere.
Acts. The Acts of Paul and Thecla, whose heroine baptises herself and preaches, and which was popular enough to be attacked. The Acts of Thomas, which carries the Hymn of the Pearl, one of the finest short poems to survive from the period.
Apocalypses. The Apocalypse of Peter, an early tour of punishments that shaped the medieval imagination of hell far more than anything canonical did. The Apocalypse of Paul, which extended the same tradition.
Near misses. The Shepherd of Hermas and the Epistle of Barnabas were read as scripture in some early communities and appear in important biblical manuscripts. They came genuinely close, and their exclusion is the clearest evidence that the boundary was once movable.
The pseudepigrapha, and why Enoch dominates them
The Jewish pseudepigrapha are the largest and least tidy group: dozens of works written between roughly the third century before the common era and the second century after it, attributed to Enoch, Moses, Abraham, Ezra, Baruch, Solomon, and the twelve patriarchs.
1 Enoch matters more than the rest combined. It is a composite work of five parts, the earliest of which are among the oldest Jewish writings outside the Hebrew Bible, and it supplies the story of the Watchers: two hundred angels who descend, take human wives, father giants, and teach humanity metallurgy, weaponry, cosmetics, sorcery, and astrology. That descent narrative shaped later demonology, angelology, and the whole idea of a fall that occurs before humanity's own.
Its status is unusual in one specific way. The New Testament Epistle of Jude quotes it directly, at Jude 14 to 15, attributing the prophecy to Enoch by name. A canonical book quotes a non-canonical one as prophecy, which has generated commentary for eighteen centuries and has never been resolved to everyone's satisfaction.
Jubilees retells Genesis and Exodus on a calendar of forty-nine year cycles. The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs give each of Jacob's sons a deathbed speech. 2 Baruch and 4 Ezra wrestle with the destruction of the Temple. Enoch has its own guide here.
The rediscoveries that changed the field
Most of what is now known about this literature was unavailable a century ago.
Ge'ez Enoch, 1773. James Bruce brought manuscripts of 1 Enoch back from Ethiopia, where the book had been preserved as scripture while Europe knew it only from quotations. A complete work believed lost for over a thousand years was suddenly readable again.
Nag Hammadi, 1945. A jar of codices found in Upper Egypt containing more than fifty texts, among them the only complete Gospel of Thomas. Before that find, most of these writings were known only through the hostile summaries of the churchmen who condemned them. The label gnostic is often applied to the collection and is contested by scholars, since the texts are considerably more varied than the term suggests.
Qumran, from 1946 onward. The Dead Sea Scrolls produced Aramaic fragments of 1 Enoch, confirming its antiquity and its language, along with fragments of the related Book of Giants. They also showed that the community reading these texts read them alongside books that became biblical, without any visible boundary between the two.
Codex Tchacos. The Gospel of Judas, published in 2006 after a long and damaging journey through the antiquities trade, in which Judas acts on instruction rather than betrayal.
How to read them without being misled
This material attracts confident nonsense, and a few habits protect against most of it.
Check the date before believing the attribution. A gospel bearing an apostle's name written a century and a half after his death is a valuable second century document and not a first century witness. That does not make it worthless. It makes it evidence of something other than what its title claims.
Distrust the suppression narrative. Some texts were suppressed. Far more simply lost their readers. A story about a conspiracy is more exciting than a story about a book nobody kept copying, and the second is usually the true one.
Prefer a translation with an introduction. These works assume a world you do not live in, and fifty pages of context change what the text means. For 1 Enoch, R. H. Charles remains the most widely reproduced English translation and later scholarship has improved on it in places.
Notice which community preserved it. A book survives because somebody copied it for centuries, and knowing who did is often the most useful single fact about it.
Read the primary text before the commentary. Most popular claims about these books collapse on contact with the books themselves.
The word beyond Jewish and Christian texts
Apocryphal is a category built inside Jewish and Christian canon disputes, and it travels badly. It is still worth knowing what lies adjacent to it, since these bodies of writing are constantly mixed together in popular accounts.
Manichaean literature. The writings of a religion founded in third century Mesopotamia that spread from the Roman west to China and was eventually stamped out almost everywhere. Its scriptures were largely lost until fragments surfaced in Central Asia and Egypt in the twentieth century, including material connected to the Book of Giants. These are not apocryphal in the strict sense. They are the canon of a different religion, and the distinction matters.
Mandaean texts. The Ginza Rabba and related writings belong to a living religious community, not to a Christian excluded-books list, and describing them as apocrypha misrepresents both.
Islamic narrative traditions. Islam has no equivalent category, and the closest parallel is the body of narrative material about earlier prophets, some of it drawn from Jewish and Christian sources, which scholars and Muslim tradition alike treat with varying degrees of caution. It is a genre of story, not a rejected canon, and the difference is more than terminological.
The general point holds across all three. Excluded is always excluded from somewhere specific, and a text that sits outside one boundary usually sits comfortably inside another.
A short shelf, if you want the texts themselves
The single most useful thing anyone can do with this subject is read the primary sources, and a handful of editions make that straightforward.
For the Jewish pseudepigrapha, James Charlesworth's two volume collection remains the standard English gathering, with introductions to each work. It is a reference shelf, not a book to read straight through, and it settles most questions of what a text actually says. Nothing else in English covers so much ground in one place, which is why it turns up in the footnotes of almost everything written on the subject since.
For 1 Enoch specifically, the translation and commentary by George Nickelsburg and James VanderKam represents current scholarship. R. H. Charles's older translation is the one most widely reproduced, including in our own illuminated edition, and it retains a cadence that later versions trade away for precision.
For the Christian material, Bart Ehrman and Zlatko Pleše's edition of the apocryphal gospels prints the original languages beside the English, and Marvin Meyer's collected Nag Hammadi Scriptures gathers that entire find in one volume with introductions.
Most of these texts are also available free online in older public domain translations, which is a reasonable way to find out whether a work interests you before buying anything. The older versions carry the scholarship of their own century and should be checked against a modern edition before being quoted.
For the Old Testament apocrypha in the narrow sense, any annotated study Bible with the deuterocanonical books included does the job, and costs less than any of the above.
Why this material keeps returning in fiction
Apocryphal literature has an unusual quality for a storyteller: it is authentically old, genuinely strange, and unfixed.
Canonical texts arrive with a settled reading. Centuries of interpretation stand between the reader and the page, and a novelist who touches them is arguing with all of it. The excluded books carry no such weight. They can be encountered directly, and they are frequently stranger than anything invented for them: angels teaching cosmetics, a giant dreaming of a flood he cannot escape, a hymn about a prince who forgets his own name.
They are also formally free. Because they were never harmonised into a single system, they contradict each other and themselves, and contradiction is where fiction lives.
My own books draw on this material openly, particularly the Enochic strand, and the illuminated edition of The Book of Enoch exists because the primary text deserves to be met on its own terms, without a retelling standing between the reader and the page. The guide to why Enoch was left out goes further into what else is out there.
Questions readers ask
What does apocryphal actually mean?
It comes from the Greek apokryphos, meaning hidden away. Early uses could be neutral or even positive, describing books reserved for the initiated. The dismissive sense developed as Christian writers argued about which texts could be read publicly in church.
What is the difference between apocrypha and pseudepigrapha?
Apocrypha describes canonical status: books excluded from a particular Bible. Pseudepigrapha describes authorship: books written under the name of an ancient figure who did not write them. A single book can be both, and 1 Enoch is.
Which books are in the Old Testament apocrypha?
Tobit, Judith, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, Baruch with the Letter of Jeremiah, 1 and 2 Maccabees, and additions to Esther and Daniel. Orthodox canons add several more, and the Ethiopian canon is broadest of all, including 1 Enoch and Jubilees.
Were the apocrypha ever in Protestant Bibles?
Yes. The King James Version of 1611 printed them in their own section between the testaments. They disappeared from most English Bibles later, for reasons that were partly theological and partly to do with printing costs and Bible society policy.
Does the Bible quote apocryphal books?
The Epistle of Jude quotes 1 Enoch directly at verses 14 to 15 and attributes the prophecy to Enoch by name. A canonical book quoting a non-canonical one as prophecy has generated commentary for eighteen centuries.
Were these books banned or suppressed?
Some were, and lists of rejected books do exist. Most simply fell out of use and stopped being copied, which is a duller explanation and usually the correct one.
Where should I start reading apocryphal literature?
1 Enoch, for its influence and for the strangeness of the Watchers narrative. Then the Gospel of Thomas for a completely different kind of text, and Jubilees if the retold Genesis interests you. Use a translation with a substantial introduction.