Deuterocanonical Books

Deuterocanonical Books, writings included in the Roman Catholic canon of the Bible and also, with certain exceptions, in the canon of the Orthodox Church, but not in the Hebrew canon. They were fixed in the Roman Catholic canon by the Council of Trent in 1546, their place in the Bible having been disputed previously for some 12 centuries (hence the name deuterocanonical, which is derived from Greek words meaning “second canon”).

The Council of Trent decreed that the authentic canon was to be determined by what had been included in the Latin translation of the Old Testament, the Vulgate, up to that time the common Bible of the Western Church. The Vulgate, in part a translation of the Greek Septuagint, in part an original translation by St Jerome of the Hebrew Scriptures as he knew them, included certain books and parts of books that Jews and most Protestants today term Apocryphal (see Apocrypha). As the minutes of the council make clear, 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.

For Roman Catholics, the deuterocanonical books of the Old Testament are Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon, Tobit, Sirach (Ecclesiasticus), Baruch, 1 and 2 Maccabees, and certain portions of Esther and Daniel. 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.