Books that Didn't Make it into the Bible

The word Apocrypha comes from the Greek adjective Apokryphos, meaning obscure, which ultimately derives from the verb Apokryptaion, to hide away. It's related to our word cryptic, which means something hidden or mysterious. So an Apocryphal book refers to a text that is hidden away, and contains secret writings. That said, they can't be that secret, because we know that a huge amount of them existed. The Old and New Testaments both have Apocryphal books that were not included into the final cut of the Bible, or in some Bibles, they were pushed to the end in some sort of honourable, or should I say dishonourable, mention section, aptly titled the Apocrypha. So in this video, we're going to see what kind of books were labelled Apocrypha, in both the Old and New Testaments. The Old Testament You may have heard of terms like Biblical canon or canonical texts, it simply means works that a group deems to be authoritative. You'll probably be aware of some of the canonical books in the Old Testament, the book of Genesis, which contains the creation of the world, Adam and Eve, Noah, the stories of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, or the book of Exodus, which contains the story of Moses and how the Hebrews escaped Pharaoh. There's a bunch of other books, like Isaiah, Job, Ezekiel, Jonah and so on. We describe these Biblical texts as canon. The book of Enoch is an example of an Apocryphal text. The book of Enoch draws upon a brief passage in the book of Genesis, where he is mentioned once in passing. Right before the story of Noah and the Great Flood, Enoch is said to have lived for 365 years and, quote, walked with God and he was no more, for God took him. It's a really brief and unusual account. What does it mean to walk with God, and why did God take him? To answer these questions, an unknown author produced an expansive background story, embroiling him in a tale of fallen angels and Nephilim, which ultimately led to God flooding the earth to rid the world of evil. This Apocryphal text expands on the Biblical text in order to supplement it and explain away any inconsistencies. Oh, and if you want to learn more about Enoch, consider watching my video on the Biblical Origins of Lucifer, after this video of course, I'll provide a link at the end. There are a great deal of other Apocryphal books in the Old Testament. The Book of Jubilees, like Enoch, expands on the Book of Genesis and retells the history of the world and of Israel, but this time introducing a new calendar built around the Jubilee, a period of 49 years, with important days and observances. Oh, and a few more fallen angels to boot, as well as demons like the Mestamor and Baeliel. Other texts include Bel and the Dragon, an additional chapter to the canonical book of In it, Daniel debunks a myth that the statue to the god Bel is able to eat offerings that it's given. In fact, whilst the king's back is turned, the priests are the ones who eat the offerings and pass it off as this statue. Consequently, the priests are swiftly executed. Later, it describes how Daniel slays a ferocious dragon. Surprisingly, however, it's not with a sword, but by feeding it enough cakes to cause it to explode. There's a bunch of other books in the Apocrypha, like Tobit, Judith, 1 and 2 Maccabees and some others, but above are some of the highlights. These Apocryphal texts were written and circulated around 300 BCE to 0 CE and by all accounts they seem to be quite popular. There are masses of manuscript fragments of the Book of Enoch and Jubilees from the Dead Sea Scrolls, so they may have been viewed just as authoritatively as any other book in the canon. But many of these texts were written late and not as established as texts like Genesis and Exodus. They simply did not have a long enough history and tradition behind them. What's more, all the talk of fallen angels in books like Enoch and Jubilees may have been too theologically controversial for them to be officially canonised. The New Testament With the arrival of Christianity came the New Testament and 27 more canonical books. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, many letters including Corinthians and Thessalonians, Acts, the Book of Revelation and the list goes on. This canon was drafted up by the Nicene Christians, the more quote-on-quote mainstream group of Christianity, from which Catholicism, Protestantism and Eastern Orthodoxy are all descended from. Their canon is pretty straightforward, it's the one in your everyday bible. But the New Testament Apocrypha largely comes from a group known as the Gnostics. From the Greek word Gnosticos, meaning having knowledge, Gnostic Christians were a diverse group claiming to have secret knowledge about Jesus, passed down through their hidden, apocryphal texts. One of these texts is the Gospel of Judas. It originally came from Egypt and is dated to 280 CE. The badly preserved manuscript describes a secret conversation between Jesus and Judas. Judas is told the true nature of Christ and his cosmic role as Messiah. It's got some other unusual features, like how God is supposed to be a luminous ball of light and how the other disciples, apart from Judas, have got Jesus' message entirely wrong. Another example includes the Gospel of Mary. Again, coming from Egypt, it's believed to have been written in the 2nd century. In it, Jesus has a conversation about matters of the soul with his disciples, including Mary. It's unsure, however, whether it's meant to be the Virgin Mary or Mary Magdalene, but either way, she offers a vision of her own where she describes the ascent of the soul into the afterlife. These texts, as exciting as they are, were written a lot later than the canonical gospels, which repend anywhere between 66 to 100 CE, but they do reveal the diversity of early Christianity and some highly unusual beliefs. Yet, they pose enough problem for the Nicene Christians, for theologians like Irenaeus of Leon, to have to debunk them in a book suitably titled On Heresies. But there are some texts in the New Testament Apocrypha which are a bit harder to simply discard as being Gnostic. The Gospel of Thomas is one of them. It's a text that dates to 60 to 140 CE, around the time when the other soon-to-be canonical gospels were being written. It contains a bunch of sayings by Jesus, 114 to be specific, but two-thirds of these sayings crop up in the other gospels in one form or another, implying that they were somehow connected or even had a shared origin. Some go as far as to call it a fifth gospel, but others say that it copied these sayings from an already completed gospel, and so should be kept in an Apocrypha. It was not until far later when a formal collection of what is and what isn't canon came about. For example, in Christianity, a fixed canon came with the Council of Rome in 382 CE, during which the council drafted up a list of all the canonical books from the Old Testament and New Testament, and officially excluded the Apocryphal texts from further consideration. The Apocryphal books were considered to be inauthentic, or simply too controversial to be given the green light, and were therefore discarded. A final note is that what is and what isn't canonical does depend on specific religious communities. For example, the Ethiopian church has Enoch in its canon, and because of this, they managed to preserve the Book of Enoch. Without this church, it may have been lost to history. Equally, Catholic Bibles contain more books in the Old Testament than in Protestantism. Books like Tobit, Judith, and even Bell and the Dragon are, one way or another, featured in Catholic Bibles. In these cases, the texts are pseudo-divinely inspired, and shouldn't necessarily be excluded from the Bible entirely. So, I hope this gives you a decent overview of the Apocrypha, and what it means to be canonical or non-canonical. As with anything in Biblical studies, it can get a little complex, so add us some links below if you want to learn more. I'd love to go into these texts with more detail, and perhaps dedicate a video or two to a single Apocryphal work, like the Book of Enoch or the Gospel of Judas. Write below which book you'd like to see in more detail, and I might cover it for you.