In 367 CE, Athanasius of Alexandria wrote an Easter letter that changed the Bible forever. He listed the 27 books of the New Testament, the same list we use today. But his letter did something else: it prohibited the reading of other books, including the Shepherd of Hermas, a text many Christians had considered scripture. That line in the sand marks the difference between canon and apocrypha. Canon refers to the closed list of books considered divinely inspired and authoritative by a religious community. Apocrypha designates texts excluded from that list, often considered useful for instruction but not for establishing doctrine. We trace the historical boundaries between biblical canon and apocrypha, from early church councils to esoteric traditions that revive hidden scriptures for mystical practice.
Where Did the Canon Come From?
The Hebrew canon that Jesus and his followers knew took shape over centuries. By the second century BCE, most Jewish communities recognized the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings as sacred. The Greek translation called the Septuagint (third to first centuries BCE) included additional books like Tobit, Judith, and Wisdom of Solomon. Those extra books became the core of what later Christians would debate.
Early Christian writers quoted from a range of texts. Irenaeus of Lyons (circa 180 CE) and Clement of Alexandria (circa 200 CE) cited the Shepherd of Hermas and the Epistle of Barnabas as scripture. But by the fourth century, a consensus began to form. Athanasius’ Festal Letter of 367 CE is the first document that names exactly the 27 books we call the New Testament. He wrote that “these are the fountains of salvation,” and warned that other books were only “read by those who wish to be instructed in the word of godliness.” The Shepherd of Hermas lost its place on the lectern.
Councils at Hippo in 393 CE and Carthage in 397 CE ratified similar lists. Jerome, who translated the Latin Vulgate around 400 CE, included the Septuagint extra books but noted they were not in the Hebrew canon. He called them “books of the church” rather than scripture. That distinction waited centuries for a crisis.
Martin Luther exploded the question in the sixteenth century. His German Bible of 1534 placed the apocryphal books in a separate section between the Old and New Testaments. He wrote that they were “not held equal to the Holy Scriptures, but are useful and good to read.” The Council of Trent in 1546 fired back: the Catholic Church declared the deuterocanonical books fully canonical. Protestant Bibles after that often omitted the apocrypha entirely. Households suddenly had different Bibles on the same shelf, and nobody was sure which books a prayer should come from.
What Does “Apocrypha” Actually Mean?
The word apokryphos is Greek for “hidden” or “secret.” In early Christianity it described books that circulated privately, often claiming to contain teachings Jesus gave only to his closest disciples. The Gospel of Thomas opens with those exact words: “These are the secret sayings that the living Jesus spoke.” That claim alone put it on the wrong side of Athanasius’ list.
Hidden does not mean false. Many apocryphal books were read in churches for centuries. The Didache, a manual of early Christian practice from the late first century, was considered core teaching by many communities but never made the final canon. The Book of Enoch, quoted in the New Testament letter of Jude, was canonical in the Ethiopian Orthodox tradition but excluded everywhere else. The boundary was never about authenticity alone. It was about authority: who decides what gets read aloud in a congregation, and what standard of doctrine a text must meet to be used for teaching.
For esoteric traditions, the hiddenness is precisely the point. If a text was excluded, it might contain the knowledge that the church suppressed. The Nag Hammadi library, discovered in 1945 in Upper Egypt, contains fifty-two texts from the fourth century CE, many of them Gnostic. The Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Truth, the Apocryphon of John. They were buried in a jar, hidden from the authorities who condemned them as heresy. When we read them now, we are reading what someone risked their life to preserve.
How Esoteric Traditions Use the Apocrypha
The apocrypha came alive again when the esoteric revival of the nineteenth century found them. The Theosophical Society, founded in 1875 by Helena Blavatsky, drew heavily on the Book of Enoch and the Pistis Sophia. Blavatsky wrote that the apocrypha contained “the remnants of a vast primeval literature” that the church had mutilated.
Aleister Crowley published his own edition of the Gospel of Thomas in 1904, calling it a record of “the secret knowledge of the Master.” The Ordo Templi Orientis used apocryphal texts in their rituals, treating them as a second canon that bypassed orthodox authority. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 only deepened the hunger. The scrolls included books like the Book of Jubilees and the Temple Scroll, works that had been dismissed as apocryphal or pseudepigraphal. Now they existed in Hebrew manuscripts from before the destruction of the Temple. The line between canon and apocrypha suddenly looked like a modern convenience, not an ancient verdict.
At Le Grand Grimoire, we keep a shelf for the apocrypha. Not because we reject the canon, but because we recognize that the boundaries of inspiration are not fixed. You can hold two books side by side: one that says “blessed are the meek” and one that says “every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.” The Gospel of Thomas says the second. The canon says the first. Both claim to be the words of Jesus. Which one you accept changes how you read everything else.
The Catholic-Protestant Divide Still Matters
The most visible difference remains the Catholic canon versus the Protestant canon. Catholic Bibles contain seven deuterocanonical books: Tobit, Judith, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach (Ecclesiasticus), Baruch, and 1 and 2 Maccabees, plus additions to Daniel and Esther. Protestant Bibles omit them entirely or print them in a separate section. The Eastern Orthodox canon includes even more: 3 and 4 Maccabees, 1 Esdras, the Prayer of Manasseh, and Psalm 151.
That is not a trivial list. The story of Judith beheading Holofernes, the martyrdom of the seven brothers in 2 Maccabees, the poetry of Sirach on friendship and wisdom. These shaped Catholic liturgy and art for fifteen centuries. Dante quoted Wisdom of Solomon. Michelangelo painted Judith. The Protestant Reformation removed them from public reading, which meant that whole generations grew up without Maccabees explaining the origin of Hanukkah, or Wisdom describing the fate of the soul after death.
For esoteric readers, those omissions are significant. The Book of Wisdom contains a long meditation on the relationship between spirit and matter that sounds like Gnostic cosmology. “I was a subtle spirit,” Wisdom says, “I penetrate all things.” That verse is canonical for Catholics and apocryphal for Protestants. The same text, two different statuses, depending on which shelf you pull it from.
Figure of the Debate: Jerome and the Battle Over Authority
Jerome stands at the fulcrum. In the late fourth century CE, Pope Damasus commissioned him to produce a reliable Latin Bible. Jerome went to Palestine, studied Hebrew with rabbis, and concluded that the Hebrew canon was the only authentic one. He translated the Septuagint extra books grudgingly, marking them as “not in the Hebrew.” His Vulgate became the standard Bible of the medieval church, but his own opinion on the apocrypha was clear: they were ecclesiastical books, not scripture.
Yet the church overruled him. The Councils of Hippo and Carthage had already listed those books as canonical. Jerome’s translations stayed in the Bible, and his doubts were buried in his prefaces. Centuries later, Luther dug them up and used them to justify his own separation. Jerome’s personal view, meant for scholars, eventually split Christendom.
Common Misconceptions About Canon and Apocrypha
“The apocrypha were removed from the Bible.” No. They were never in the Hebrew canon. The Septuagint included them, and early Christians used them, but they were not removed. They were moved: to a marginal position in Protestant Bibles and retained fully in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles. Nobody cut them out with a knife.
“Apocrypha means fake.” It means hidden. Some apocryphal texts are indeed late forgeries, but many are as old as the canonical books. The Gospel of Thomas predates the canonical Gospel of John by some scholars’ reckoning. Age does not equal authenticity. But hidden does not equal false either.
“All apocrypha are Gnostic.” False. Tobit is a folk tale. 1 Maccabees is a historical chronicle. The Prayer of Manasseh is a pensive penitential psalm. Only a subset of apocryphal literature is Gnostic, and even that subset contains Christian, Jewish, and syncretic material.
“The canon was decided at the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE.” No. Nicaea dealt with the nature of Christ, not the list of books. The canon was a slow process across the fourth and fifth centuries, and different regions accepted different lists. The idea that Constantine forced a single canon is a modern myth.
FAQ
What is the difference between apocrypha and pseudepigrapha? Apocrypha refers to books excluded from the canon but still considered useful for instruction. Pseudepigrapha are books falsely attriibuted to a biblical author and usually excluded from both canon and apocrypha.
Why do Catholic and Protestant Bibles have different numbers of books? The Catholic Church accepts the Septuagint extra books as canonical, following the Latin Vulgate tradition. Protestant reformers, following the Hebrew canon, rejected them as not inspired.
Are the apocrypha considered inspired? Catholic and Orthodox Christians hold the deuterocanonical books as inspired scripture. Protestants generally do not, though they may find them edifying. Esoteric traditions treat them as inspired in a different sense: they convey hidden knowledge.
Do occultists treat apocrypha as canon? Some do. Orders like the Gnostic Church or the Ecclesia Gnostica treat certain apocryphal texts as primary scripture. Most practitioners, including those at Le Grand Grimoire, read them alongside the canon as complementary voices, not replacements.
The Map and the Uncharted
The canon is a map, not a cage. It tells you which roads the community traveled and considered safe. The apocrypha are the uncharted territories. We often find the most interesting landmarks there: visions of cosmic journeys, teachings that challenge orthodoxy, texts that the church worked hard to bury. For a deeper look at one such uncharted territory, read our guide to the Gnostic gospels, or explore the full sacred texts hub to see how different traditions draw their lines. The question is not which list is correct. The question is which books you are willing to open.
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