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Apocrypha (Greek for ‘hidden things’) or Deuterocanon (‘second canon’) is the collection of Jewish writings (composed between ca. 250 BCE – 100 CE) that are in the Septuagint or its Old Latin Bible but not in the Hebrew Bible. Hellenistic Judaism and the early Christian Church treated these Jewish writings as sacred scripture.
The background of Apocrypha / Deuterocanon dates back to Jerome (ca. 382 CE), who produced the Vulgate as a revision of the Old Latin Bible. Jerome and his team translated the Hebrew Bible, but also used the Septuagint, the New Testament, and the Old Latin Bible. The Jewish writings were then placed into a distinguishable corpus, called the ‘apocrypha’.
The theological and physical status of the Apocrypha / Deuterocanon is not unanimous among different traditions.