Deuterocanonical Books

Deuterocanonical Books, writings included in the Roman Catholic canon of the Bible, and—with certain exceptions—in the canon of the Orthodox Church, but not in the Hebrew canon (see Canon). They were definitively introduced into the Roman Catholic canon by the Council of Trent in 1546. Until that time, their place in the Bible had been disputed for about 12 centuries.

The Council of Trent decreed that the authentic canon was to be determined by what had been included in the Latin Vulgate translation of the Old Testament. The Vulgate Old Testament, in part a translation of the Greek Septuagint, which was in part an original translation by Saint Jerome of the Hebrew Scriptures, included certain books and parts of books that Jews and most Protestants today know as the Apocrypha. Catholics reserve that term for the works that Protestants call the pseudepigrapha—books that stand entirely outside the biblical canon.

Many Jewish scholars accepted the books now considered deuterocanonical (a term derived from Greek words meaning “second canon”) until about ad 90. Then the Council of Jamnia ruled them to be outside the authentic Hebrew canon. The early Christian church and the Septuagint also accepted these books as part of the Old Testament. The books excluded by the Hebrew canon but included in the Septuagint and Vulgate are Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon, Tobit, Sirach (Ecclesiasticus, not to be confused with the Book of Ecclesiastes), Baruch, and 1 and 2 Maccabees. The Council of Trent designated these books, and parts of Esther and Daniel, deuterocanonical. As the minutes of the council make clear, however, the prefix deutero- was not intended to indicate a secondary canonical status for this literature but rather to note the controversy over these materials during the church’s canonizing process.

The Orthodox Church has a similar canon, although it rejects the Book of Baruch and tends to include a third book of Maccabees and a 151st Psalm that appear in some manuscripts of the Greek translation of the Old Testament.