Apocrypha of Jewish origin

The general Apocrypha consists of these fifteen books: 1. .The First Book of Esdras, 2. .The Second Book of Esdras, 3. .Tobit, 4. .Judith, 5. .The Rest of the Chapters of the Book of Esther, 6. .The Wisdom of Solomon, 7. .Ecclesiasticus or the Wisdom of Jesus Son of Sirach, 8. .Baruch, 9. .A Letter of Jeremiah, 10. .The Song of the Three, 11. .Daniel and Susanna, 12. .Daniel, Bel, and the Snake, 13. .The Prayer of Manasseh, 14. .The First Book of the Maccabees, 15. .The Second Book of the Maccabees.

Though these books were considered non-canonical, slowly over the years they came to be regarded by the Roman Catholic Church as part of the Bible, and were finally officially labled as such. But the Historical Hebrew Religion, and the Historical Christian Religion growing from it, understood that these writings were non-canonical.































I. APOCRYPHA OF JEWISH ORIGIN

Ancient literature, especially in the Orient, used methods much more free and elastic than those permitted by our modern and Occidental culture. Pseudographic composition was in vogue among the Jews in the two centuries before Christ and for some time later. The attribution of a great name of the distant past to a book by its real author, who thus effaced his own personality, was, in some cases at least, a mere literary fiction which deceived no one except the ignorant. This holds good for the so-called "Wisdom of Solomon", written in Greek and belonging to the Church's sacred canon. In other cases, where the assumed name did not stand as a symbol of a type of a certain kind of literature, the intention was not without a degree of at least objective literary dishonesty.























1. 1 Esdras
2. 1 Maccabees
3. 2 Esdras (a.k.a 4 Ezra)
4. 2 Maccabees
5. 3 Maccabees
6. 4 Ezra (a.ka. 2 Esdras)
8. Baruch
9. Bel and the Dragon (addition to Daniel)
10. Daniel and Susanna (addition to Daniel)
11. Esther, Additions to
12. Judith
13. Letter of Jeremiah
17. Sirach
18. Tobit
19. Wisdom of Solomon, The