Apocrypha, from the Greek άϖοχρυφο, a term that in its origin and according to its etymology, signifies hidden .

In this sense we call apocrypha any writing that has been kept secretly and concealed from public knowledge. Thus the Sibylline Books in Rome, confided to the keeping of the Decemvirs, and the annals of Egypt and of Tyre, of which only the priests of these kingdoms were the trustees and the reading of which was not permitted equally to everybody, were apocryphal Books . Among divine Writings a Book might in this general sense be at once both a sacred and divine Book, and an apocryphal Book: sacred and divine , because its origin was known, it was known to have been revealed: and apocryphal, because it was placed in the temple, and had been never communicated to the people; for when the Jews published their sacred Books, they called them canonical and divine , and the name apocrypha was reserved to the ones they kept in their archives. The whole difference consisted in that some were made public, and that others were not used in the same way, which did not prevent them from being sacred and divine, although they were not known as such by the public; thus before the translation of the Septaguint, the books of the Old Testament might be called apocryphal in relation to the Gentiles; and in relation to the Jews the same qualification applied to books that were not inserted into the canon or the public catalogue of Scriptures. It was precisely thus that one must understand what Saint Epiphanius said, that the apocryphal Books were never deposited in the Ark among the other inspired writings .

Within Christianity, the word apocryphal is attached to a different meaning, and is used to express any doubtful Book whose authorship is uncertain and the faith of which cannot be established; as one may see in Saint Jerome and in some other Greek and Latin Fathers more ancient than he: thus one says an apocryphal book, passage, story, andc. when there are strong reasons to suspect its authenticity, and to think that these writings are presumed. In matters of doctrine, one calls apocryphal the Books of heretics and schismatics, and even Books that contain no error but which are not recognized as divine, that is to say, which were not included either by the Synagogue or the Church within the canon, to be read in the assemblies of Jews or Christians. See Canon, Bible.

In cases of doubt whether a Book is canonical or apocryphal , whether it is authoritative or not with respect to religion, it was felt necessary to have a superior and infallible tribunal in order to settle the uncertainty among minds; and this tribunal was the Church, which was alone responsible for giving a Book the title divine , by declaring that the name of its author might make it accepted as canonical, or rejected as presumed.

The Catholics and the Protestants have had very lively disputes over the authority of some Books that the latter treat as apocryphal , such as Judith, Esdras, the Maccabees: the former based themselves on ancient canons or catalogues, and on the uniform testimony of the Fathers; the others on the tradition of some Churches. M. Simon, in particular, maintains that the Books rejected by the Protestants were certainly read in Greek in the most ancient Churches and even by the Apostles, which he infers from several passages in their writings. He adds that the Church received them from the Hellenistic Greeks along with the other Books of Scripture, and that if the church of Palestine always refused to accept them, it is only because they were not written in Hebrew like the other Books that it read, not because it regarded them as apocryphal , that is to say, presumed. To this reasoning the Protestants opposed the authority of the Writers of every century, who distinguish precisely the Books in question from those that were included in the canon of the Jews.

The Books recognized as apocryphal by the Catholic Church, which are truly outside the Old Testament canon, and which we still have today, are the Prayer of Manasseh , which is at the end of ordinary Bibles, the Third and Fourth Book of Esdras, the Third and Fourth of the Maccabees . At the end of the Book of Job, we find an addition in Greek, which contains a genealogy of Job, a speech by the wife of Job; we also see, in the Greek edition, a Psalm that is not among the 150 and at the end of the Book of Wisdom, a speech by Solomon taken from the eighth chapter of the Third book of Kings. We no longer have the Book of Enoch , so celebrated in Antiquity; and according to Saint Augustine, one supposes it to be another one full of fictions that all the Fathers, except Tertullian, have regarded as apocryphal . We must also place in the class of apocryphal works the book of the assumption de Moses, and that of the assumption or apocalypse of Elijah. Some Jews have assumed some Books under the name of the Patriarchs, like that of the eternal generations ,, which they attribute to Adam. The Ebionites had similarly assumed a book entitled Jacob 's Ladder and another that took as its title the Genealogy of the Sons and Daughters of Adam , works imagined either by the Jews, lovers of fictions, or by the heretics who by this artifice sowed their opinions, and sought their origin even in an antiquity suitable for imposing it upon those who are not very perceptive. See Acts of the Apostles.