Several Months ago, while attending the funeral of my wife’s Amish cousin, I was startled to hear one of the preachers quote from “the second book of Esdras.” As a child I once memorized the books of the Bible with the help of a song. But as I silently hummed through that list in my mind, 2 Esdras never popped up. 

The reason, of course, is that 1 and 2 Esdras — along with numerous other texts such as Tobit, Judah, 1 and 2 Maccabees, the Wisdom of Solomon, and Sirach — are a part of a cluster of writings known as the Apocrypha, or “deuterocanonical” texts, that have been eliminated from most modern Protestant Bibles.

The story behind the Apocrypha opens up a host of complicated details and fascinating questions about the process by which most Protestants (and most modern Mennonites) settled on the 66 books in their Bibles today. 

Sometime in the third century BCE, a group of Jewish scholars translated their sacred texts into Greek. That translation, known as the Septuagint, contained all the writings that Christians have come to call the Old Testament — and more than a dozen texts that later became known as the Apocrypha. 

When the Catholic church father Jerome translated the Old Testament into Latin in the fourth century CE, he worked primarily from the Septuagint, thereby bringing the Apocrypha into the standard biblical text in the Catholic tradition known as the Vulgate. The Vulgate was the foundation for the development of Catholic theology throughout the Middle Ages and still serves as the basis for Catholic translations of the Bible today. With some small differences, most Orthodox Christians around the world also use versions of the Bible that contain the Apocrypha.

In the meantime, Jewish rabbis in the second century CE established an authoritative set of Hebrew scriptures, which, after an editorial process extending over several centuries, winnowed out most of the apocryphal writings. In his highly influential German translation, Martin Luther regarded this version of the Old Testament, known as the Masoretic Text, to be definitive. Although the first edition of Luther’s translation did include the Apocrypha, he considered these books — now associated with the Catholic Bible — as “not equal to holy scriptures” and soon dropped them from later editions.

In contrast to the Luther translation, which became the standard for most later Protestant Bibles, the Anabaptists of the 16th century favored translations of scripture based on the Latin Vulgate. Thus, the Froschauer Swiss-German translation of 1531 and the Biestkens Bible published by a Dutch Mennonite printer in 1560 continued to include the Apocrypha. And early Anabaptists — including Hans Hut, Balthasar Hubmaier, Pilgram Marpeck and Menno Simons — cited these texts frequently.

In an essay on “Anabaptists and the Apocrypha” that will appear in the forthcoming Anabaptist Community Bible, Anabaptist scholar Gerald Mast highlights key passages and themes from each book in the Apocrypha that early Anabaptist writers cited in the course of their extensive biblical commentary. Modern readers might be surprised that their Anabaptist forebears drew from at least 17 texts that are no longer included in most Protestant Bibles, nearly always referring to them as if they had the same authority as the other canonical writings. 

Letters in the Martyrs Mirror, for example, include a host of references to apocryphal books, alongside more familiar texts, that offered encouragement in the face of suffering. Anabaptists cited Sirach to defend the freedom of the will, the Letter of Jeremiah to critique religious processions, Susanna (an account sometimes appended to the book of Daniel) in their laments against unjust accusations, 2 Esdras in their reflections on human sin and Tobit as a morality tale encouraging generosity. 

Tobit continues to be a favored text in many Old Order Amish wedding services — a testimony to the authority that the Froschauer translation of scripture continues to wield in Amish circles today.

Early in the development of the Anabaptist Community Bible, our editorial team wrestled with the question of whether to include the Apocrypha. After much deliberation, we decided against it. Among most Mennonite groups today, the writings in the Apocrypha are simply not relevant in private devotions, weekly sermons or congregational Bible study.  

But questions remain. What does it mean to us that the early Anabaptists regarded the Apocrypha as part of the Bible? What might we be missing by excluding these writings from our understanding of scripture today? 

Can we ask questions about canon formation without threatening the authority of the Bible?