The Deuterocanonical Books

"Deuterocanonical" — literally "second-canon" — is a term borrowed from Western usage. The older Orthodox name for them, from the Greek Church's use of the Septuagint, is Anagignoskomena, "things to be read" in church. The name is honest about their standing: these are not marginal writings, but they are received in a slightly different key from the books read as Scripture by Jews and Christians alike.

The collection, as it stands in Orthodox Bibles, includes Tobit, Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon, the Wisdom of Sirach (also called Ecclesiasticus), Baruch, the Letter of Jeremiah, and 1 and 2 Maccabees; 1 Esdras; the Prayer of Manasseh; Psalm 151; and several passages woven into other books — the additions to Daniel (the story of Susanna, Bel and the Dragon, and the Song of the Three Holy Children) and the additions to Esther. The Greek Bible also carries 3 Maccabees, and prints 4 Maccabees and 2 Esdras as an appendix. The exact reach of the list varies a little between Orthodox editions, which is itself part of the story.

These books were part of the Bible the first Christians used. The Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament read across the apostolic world, carried them, and the Church simply kept reading what she had received. The Fathers quote them freely: Wisdom's serene confidence that "the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God" (Wisdom 3:1), Sirach's summons to "praise famous men" (Sirach 44:1), Tobit's counsel that "prayer is good with fasting and alms" (Tobit 12:8) — all pass into Christian prayer and preaching as Scripture.

The Protestant reformers took a different path, and their reasoning deserves a fair hearing. Returning to the Hebrew Scriptures as the Jewish community had settled them — a shorter list that does not contain these books — they concluded that the extra books, however edifying, should not be used to establish doctrine. The early reformers did not discard them: Luther's Bible and the original 1611 King James Version both printed them, gathered in a separate section headed "Apocrypha" ("hidden" or "set aside") between the Testaments. Only later did most Protestant Bibles drop the section entirely. So the difference is real but narrower than it can look: where Orthodoxy reads these books as part of one Old Testament, the Protestant tradition honors them as ancient and useful while denying them full canonical weight.

It is often asked exactly what authority the Anagignoskomena carry — the same as Genesis and Isaiah, or something slightly less. Orthodoxy has answered less by decree than by use. St. Athanasius, listing the Scriptures in 367, set some of these books in a distinct category — "not indeed included in the Canon, but appointed by the Fathers to be read" by those newly coming to the faith — and that very phrase, "to be read," is where the name Anagignoskomena comes from. Other Fathers and local councils simply counted them with the rest.

The Church has never bound herself to a single rigid, numbered Old Testament list issued by an ecumenical council. The Council in Trullo (692) endorsed several earlier canon lists at once, and those lists do not perfectly agree with one another — a telling sign that the Church was content to receive her Scriptures through tradition rather than freeze them in one ordinance. When the question was pressed by post-Reformation controversy, the Synod of Jerusalem (1672) affirmed the disputed books as genuine Scripture. But the deeper Orthodox witness is not a conciliar list at all; it is the plain fact that these books are simply there — sung at Vespers, read at the feasts, quoted by the saints, woven into the Church's memory. A book the Church has prayed with for two thousand years is not easily called an outsider.