What the deuterocanonical books are

There are seven whole books: Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach — also called Ecclesiasticus or Ben Sira, and not to be confused with Ecclesiastes — Baruch and the two books of Maccabees. All belong to the Old Testament. No New Testament book is under discussion: the 27 are exactly the same in every Christian tradition.

Beyond the seven books there are additions inside two books that exist in both editions. In Daniel, editions that carry them add the prayer of Azariah and the song of the three young men inside chapter 3, plus two further narrative blocks at the end — the story of Susanna and the episode of Bel and the dragon, which in this edition appear as chapters 13 and 14. In Esther, the Greek passages appear grouped at the end of the book, from chapter 11 onwards.

There is one further arrangement detail that confuses people searching: the letter attributed to Jeremiah, which in some editions is a separate book, appears in the Latin tradition as chapter 6 of Baruch — and that is how it is published here. None of this is a difference of content between Catholic editions; it is a difference in how the same material was grouped.

“Deuterocanonical” means, literally, of the second canon. The term was coined in the sixteenth century and does not mean second-rate book: it means a book whose entry into the canon was discussed for longer than the others. Anyone using that word is asserting that the books are canonical, and explaining that their acceptance had a different history.

“Apocryphal” comes from a Greek term tied to what is hidden. In Protestant vocabulary it designates exactly these seven books plus the additions, with the sense of profitable but not normative writings. In Catholic vocabulary, the same word designates an entirely different set — late gospels and apocalypses that no Christian tradition accepts, and which are called apocryphal there for precisely that reason.

The consequence is a real conversational trap: two people use the word “apocryphal” thinking they mean the same thing and are talking about different sets of texts. When the argument starts heating up, it is worth asking which books exactly the other person means. Half the disagreements end right there.

In the third century BC, the translation of the Scriptures of Israel into Greek began in Alexandria, for a Jewish population that already spoke Greek day to day. That translation, called the Septuagint, kept growing across generations — and the collection circulating in Greek ended up gathering more books than the collection transmitted in Hebrew.

That is the point of origin of everything. The first Christians were, in large part, Greek-speaking people, and the Bible they read and quoted was that one. The New Testament authors quote the Old Testament predominantly in its Greek form, and the ancient Church expanded in a world where Scripture circulated that way.

One historical correction that tends to be necessary: the idea that Judaism closed the Hebrew canon at an assembly around the year 90, at Jamnia, is today widely questioned among scholars, who treat it as a nineteenth-century reconstruction without solid grounding in the sources. What can be said with confidence is more modest and more interesting: in the first century there was still variation, and the exact boundary of the collection was not established in the same way everywhere.

At the end of the fourth century, Jerome was given the task of producing a standard Latin translation. He made a methodological choice with consequences lasting a thousand years: to translate the Old Testament from the Hebrew rather than the Greek. And in doing so, he recorded in his prefaces an explicit distinction between the books he found in Hebrew and those he found only in Greek.

His position in those prefaces is that the latter could be read for edification but should not be used to establish doctrine. He translated Tobit and Judith anyway, on request, and included them — which gives the measure of the tension: the Vulgate, which became the Bible of the Latin West for more than a thousand years, carried the books while its translator had reservations about their standing.

Augustine disagreed with Jerome publicly on this point and defended the full use of those books, on the basis of the practice of the churches. Regional councils in North Africa, at the end of the fourth century, approved lists that include them. In other words: the divergence is ancient, it was fought out between two of the greatest names of the ancient Church, and neither side of the modern argument invented it.

The Council of Trent, in a session of April 1546, formally defined the list of canonical books for the Catholic Church, including the seven and the additions. That is the date the polemic usually cites, and two things need to be said about it — one that displeases each side.

The first: the list was not born at Trent. A decree of the Council of Florence, in 1442, already listed the same books, and before that there were the lists of the African councils and continued liturgical use. Trent did not add books to the Bible; it made dogmatic, with a formula of anathema, a list that was already in circulation.

The second: the context of the decision was one of controversy, and ignoring that would also be dishonest. Trent was responding to the Reformation, and the 1546 formulation has the tone of someone closing a disputed question. That the list was ancient does not make neutral the moment when it was raised to a definition — and that the moment was polemical does not make the list a sixteenth-century invention. Both things are true at once, and that is exactly what the polemical versions on both sides refuse to say.

Here is the fact that is almost always missing, and it surprises readers on both sides. The sixteenth-century Reformers did not discard these books from the printed volume. Luther kept them in his German Bible, grouped in a separate section between the two Testaments, with a note saying they were not held equal to the Scriptures but were useful and good to read.

The King James Bible of 1611 followed the same arrangement: the books were there, in an intermediate section. For more than two centuries, then, the printed Protestant Bible was a volume containing the deuterocanonical books in a section apart — which is a third position, distinct both from treating them as canonical and from excluding them.

The change that produced the 66-book Bible as standard belongs to the nineteenth century and had practical motivation as well as doctrinal. After a controversy that split the British Bible societies in the 1820s, it was decided in 1826 to stop funding the printing and distribution of copies containing these books. Given the volume of distribution those societies achieved over the following century, the Bible without the intermediate section became the normal format — and a few generations later, for most readers, the only one they knew.

The discussion in English is usually presented as a duel between two numbers, and that frame is far too narrow. The Orthodox churches of the Greek tradition receive, besides the seven, further texts — among them 1 Esdras, the Prayer of Manasseh, Psalm 151 and 3 Maccabees, with 4 Maccabees appearing as an appendix in several editions. Slavic traditions include yet another book of Esdras.

And the broadest canon in Christianity is none of those. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church recognises a considerably larger collection — commonly cited as 81 books, though the count varies with the way of grouping — which includes works such as the book of Enoch and the book of Jubilees, absent from all the others.

Knowing this changes the shape of the question. There is no single Christian canon from which somebody deviated; there are canons, with boundaries that settled in different ways in different regions, and an enormous core common to all. That common core — the 39 shared Old Testament books and the 27 of the New — is what practically every Christian in the world reads, and it is far larger than any area of divergence.

It is worth saying what there is to gain by reading, because the argument about status tends to eclipse the content. The two books of Maccabees are the main narrative source for Judea in the second century BC — the period between the last prophet and the beginning of the New Testament, which without them is practically empty. It is there that the revolt against forced Hellenisation and the rededication of the temple are told.

And that has a direct consequence for anyone reading only the 66: the feast the Gospel of John mentions in passing, without explaining, is precisely the one whose origin Maccabees narrates. A reader of a 66-book edition meets the reference and does not have, inside their own Bible, the text that explains it.

Wisdom and Sirach belong to wisdom literature, in the same family as Proverbs and Job, and the second is one of the longest texts of the genre in all antiquity. Tobit and Judith are short, well-built narratives with strong literary charge. Baruch gathers prayer and reflection on the exile. No Christian tradition holds that reading these books does harm; the divergence is about the weight they carry in a doctrinal argument.

There is a passage in 2 Maccabees that appears in practically every discussion of this subject, and it is honest to put it in plain sight rather than leave it implicit. The passage narrates a collection taken after a battle so that a sacrifice might be offered for the dead, and comments on the gesture with a reflection on resurrection and on praying for those who have died.

It is the text Catholic theology cites when treating prayer for the deceased, and it is one of the reasons the argument about the canon was never only about how many books there are — it touches concrete practices. On the other side, the most frequent objection is not about what the passage says, but about the authority it has to ground doctrine, which leads back to the canonical question.

This site does not decide that. What it does is publish the text, so that anyone who wants to form an opinion reads the whole passage instead of reading somebody’s description of it.

For daily practice, less than the temperature of the argument suggests. If you read within a community, use the edition it uses — following the reading in the same text you hear is worth more than any argument. If you read on your own, the route for a first reading is the same in both editions, because none of these seven books is among the first anyone recommends.

Two concrete situations where the difference shows. First: following Catholic liturgical readings requires a 73-book edition, because some of them come from these books. Second: any conversation about the period between the Testaments is truncated without Maccabees, and it is worth reading them even for someone who does not consider them normative — as one reads any important historical source.

And a reminder of proportion to close. The area of divergence is seven books and some passages. The area of agreement is the whole New Testament, the Gospels, the Psalms, the prophets, the Law and the historical books — practically everything any reading plan covers in the first year. Turning that proportion into a wall is a mistake of scale.