In addition to the canonical—that is, authoritative or sacred—books of the Old Testament, there is, as is well known, a group of books called "The Apocrypha," concerning which very varied opinions are held. Certain branches of the Christian church regard these books as of equal authority with the books of the Old Testament; while among Protestant denominations the apocryphal books are either printed in the form of an appendix to the Old Testament, being accounted as of distinctly lesser importance, or, in the majority of cases, they are omitted altogether from the pages of our Bibles.
The word "Apocrypha" means literally "hidden," but in course of time this word and its derivative term "apocryphal" came to be used to describe books considered as uncanonical or even spurious. The general view now taken by Protestant scholars is that while these books of the Apocrypha should not be reckoned as on an equal footing with the Old Testament, they need not be regarded as false or spurious, since they contain much that is of interest.
The more important of the apocryphal books are seven in number: First and Second Maccabees, The Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiasticus, Tobit, Judith, and Baruch, while there are also certain additions to canonical Old Testament books. These apocryphal books are not to be found in the original Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament, but when the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek, these same books, or parts of books, being at that time current in Greek, were incorporated in the Greek Bible, or Septuagint. Thus, while we are justified in not regarding them as canonical, they are of considerable interest and of great antiquity, since most of them date from the second or first centuries before our era.
