The deuterocanonical books (from the Greek meaning “belonging to the second canon”) are books and passages considered by the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church and Assyrian Church of the East to be canonical books of the Old Testament but which are considered non-canonical by Protestant denominations. They are books from the Septuagint, the standard translation of the Hebrew Bible in the Hellenistic period, written during the reign of Ptolemy II (283–246 BCE) and referenced extensively in the New Testament, particularly in the Pauline Epistles. With the rise of Rabbinic Judaism at the end of the Second Temple Period, the Hebrew Canon was in flux, until the Masoretic Text, compiled between the 7th and 10th centuries, became the authoritative text of the mainstream Rabbinic Judaism. The Masoretic Text excluded the seven deuterocanonical books and formed the basis for their exclusion in the Protestant Old Testament. The term distinguished these texts both from those that were termed protocanonical books, which were the books of the Hebrew canon; and from the apocryphal books, which were those books of Jewish origin that were known sometimes to have been read in church as scripture but which were considered not to be canonical.
The deuterocanonical books of the Old Testament are:
Canonical by the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church:
- Tobit
- Judith
- 1 Maccabees
- 2 Maccabees
- Wisdom of Solomon
- Wisdom of Sirach (also called Ecclesiasticus)
- Baruch including the Letter of Jeremiah
- Additions to Esther
- Additions to Daniel:
- Prayer of Azariah and Song of the Three Holy Children (Septuagint Daniel 3:24–90)
- Susanna (Septuagint prologue, Vulgate Daniel 13)
- Bel and the Dragon (Septuagint epilogue, Vulgate Daniel 14)
Canonical only by the Orthodox Church:
- The Prayer of Manasseh
- 1 Esdras
- 3 Maccabees
- Psalm 151
This 16th-century debate drew on traditions witnessing a counterpart debate in the 4th and 5th centuries; occasioned then by the awareness that the Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, which the early church used as its Old Testament, included several books not recognised in the Jewish canon of the Bible as it had since been defined in Rabbinic Judaism. In this debate, which had preceded the dissemination of Jerome’s Vulgate version, the books in the Hebrew Bible had been termed “canonical”; the additional books that were recognised by the Christian churches had been termed “ecclesiastical”, and those that were considered not to be in the Bible were termed “apocryphal”.
Forms of the term “deuterocanonical” were adopted after the 16th century by the Eastern Orthodox Church to denote canonical books of the Septuagint not in the Hebrew Bible (a wider selection than that adopted by the Council of Trent), and also by the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church to apply to works believed to be of Jewish origin translated in the Old Testament of the Ethiopic Bible; a wider selection still.
Since the 16th century, most Protestant Churches have accepted only works in the Masoretic Text of the Hebrew Bible as canonical books of the Old Testament, and hence classify all deuterocanonical texts (of whichever definition) with the Apocrypha.