The Wider Old Testament and the Anagignoskomena
The Orthodox Old Testament is broader than the Protestant and Jewish canon, taking in the books the Greek tradition calls anagignoskomena (“readable,” “worthy to be read”) and the Latin West calls “deuterocanonical.” This file is written from the standpoint of the Orthodox canon: it sets the Church’s reception beside the Protestant, Jewish, and Roman Catholic canons, presents each of the others fairly and in its own terms, and reports honestly that the exact Orthodox list is sober and not perfectly settled.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox
The Names for the Books
The same group of books goes by different names in the different traditions, and the names carry the arguments. Protestants call them the Apocrypha (“hidden,” implying doubtful authority) and place them outside Scripture. Roman Catholics call them the deuterocanonical books (“second canon” — canonical, but recognized as such later or with some earlier dispute) and receive them as fully canonical. The Greek Orthodox tradition prefers anagignoskomena — “books to be read,” “readable” — a term that signals genuine ecclesiastical use and value while historically carrying a slightly different weight from the “protocanonical” books received by all (Pentiuc, The Old Testament in Eastern Orthodox Tradition, Oxford, 2014, on the terminology and its history; the anagignoskomena term derives from the ancient distinction of books “to be read” in church, as in Athanasius, Festal Letter 39). Orthodoxy generally avoids the term “apocrypha” for these books, reserving that word for genuinely non-canonical or pseudepigraphal writings (see Holy Scripture in Orthodox Theology).
The Books
The books received in the Orthodox wider Old Testament, beyond the Hebrew canon, are principally:
| Book | Note |
|---|---|
| Wisdom of Solomon | A Greek wisdom book; heavily used in liturgy and patristic theology. |
| Wisdom of Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) | By Jesus ben Sira; a major wisdom text. |
| Tobit | A narrative of piety, almsgiving, and angelic aid. |
| Judith | A narrative of deliverance through a courageous woman. |
| 1 Maccabees | History of the Maccabean revolt (167–134 BC). |
| 2 Maccabees | Independent account; includes prayer for the dead (12:43–45). |
| 3 Maccabees | Among the Greek and Slavonic anagignoskomena; absent from the Roman Catholic deuterocanon. |
| Baruch and the Letter of Jeremiah | Attributed to Jeremiah’s scribe; the Letter sometimes counted separately. |
| Additions to Daniel | The Prayer of Azariah and Song of the Three Youths, Susanna, Bel and the Dragon. |
| Additions to Esther | Greek passages absent from the Hebrew. |
| 1 Esdras (Greek Esdras A′) | A parallel to parts of 2 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah. |
| Prayer of Manasseh | A penitential prayer; used liturgically. |
| Psalm 151 | A short psalm after David’s victory over Goliath. |
The Slavonic and Russian Bibles also carry, in an appendix, 3 Esdras (the Latin 4 Ezra / 2 Esdras), which is absent from the Greek Bible — an example of how the exact contents of the wider Old Testament differ even among Orthodox Bibles (Pentiuc, The Old Testament in Eastern Orthodox Tradition, 2014; and the data in Holy Scripture in Orthodox Theology).
The Four Canons, Fairly Stated
The Jewish (rabbinic) canon. The Hebrew Bible — Torah, Prophets (Nevi’im), and Writings (Ketuvim), the twenty-four books of the Tanakh — does not include these books. The older scholarly idea that a “Council of Jamnia” (c. AD 90) formally closed the Jewish canon and expelled these books is now widely doubted; most scholars hold that the boundaries of the Writings were still somewhat fluid in the first century and hardened over the following generations, and that the rabbinic tradition came to receive only books it regarded as composed in Hebrew within the prophetic period (Lee Martin McDonald, The Biblical Canon, Hendrickson, 2007; Timothy Lim, The Formation of the Jewish Canon, Yale, 2013). [Corrected: the once-common claim that a "Council of Jamnia" closed the Jewish canon and rejected the deuterocanonical books is no longer accepted by most scholars; there is no evidence of a formal canonizing council at Yavneh. The narrowing of the Jewish canon is better described as a gradual process (Lim, *The Formation of the Jewish Canon*, 2013).]
The Protestant canon. The Reformers, following Jerome’s earlier preference for the Hebraica veritas (the “Hebrew truth”), restricted the Old Testament to the books of the Hebrew canon and set the additional books apart. Luther’s Bible printed them in a separate section headed “Apocrypha: these are books which are not held equal to the Sacred Scriptures, and yet are useful and good to read”; the Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles (Article VI) likewise say the Church reads them “for example of life and instruction of manners” but does not apply them “to establish any doctrine.” This is the position on its own terms: the books are edifying but not canonical and not doctrinally probative. Proponents: Luther, Calvin, the Reformed and Anglican confessions; the modern Protestant Bible societies that print Old Testaments without them.
The Roman Catholic canon. The Council of Trent (Session IV, 1546), against the Reformers, dogmatically defined the deuterocanonical books as fully canonical and “sacred and canonical” in every part, listing Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, 1–2 Maccabees, and the additions to Daniel and Esther. Trent did not, however, include 3 and 4 Maccabees, 1 Esdras (its numbering), Psalm 151, or the Prayer of Manasseh (the last three were later printed in an appendix to the Vulgate as sub-canonical). So the Roman canon of the wider books is both firmer (dogmatically fixed) and somewhat narrower than the fullest Greek list. Proponents: the Council of Trent and subsequent Roman magisterium.
The Orthodox reception. Orthodoxy has always used these books liturgically and theologically, reading them as Scripture within the Church, but it has generally refrained from a single, precise dogmatic definition of their status equal to Trent’s. Several regional synods affirmed them: the Synod of Jerusalem (1672), under Patriarch Dositheos, responding to the Calvinizing Confession attributed to Cyril Loukaris, explicitly affirmed the canonicity of Wisdom, Sirach, Tobit, Judith, the Maccabees, and the additions to Daniel against the Protestant restriction (Confession of Dositheos, Question 3; trans. Robertson, The Acts and Decrees of the Synod of Jerusalem, 1899). Yet the great patristic lists — Athanasius, and the canons confirmed at Quinisext — count a stricter “canonical” Old Testament while assigning the wider books to the class “to be read” (Athanasius, Festal Letter 39; trans. NPNF II/4). The two strands coexist in Orthodoxy to this day.
Sober, Not Settled
The honest description of the Orthodox position is that the wider Old Testament is received and used, but its precise canonical rank is not uniformly defined. Pentiuc, the leading modern authority, concludes that Eastern Orthodoxy has never promulgated a binding, church-wide decree fixing the exact list and status of the Old Testament books in the way Trent did for Rome; the practical canon is carried by liturgical use and the great codices (Vaticanus, Alexandrinus, Sinaiticus, whose contents themselves differ), and a certain flexibility at the edges is simply tolerated (Pentiuc, The Old Testament in Eastern Orthodox Tradition, 2014, on the absence of a pan-Orthodox canonical definition and the variation among the codices and local Bibles).
[Disputed: the exact canonical status of the anagignoskomena within Orthodoxy. (a) A "maximal" reading treats them as fully canonical Scripture, citing their liturgical use and the affirmations of the Synod of Jerusalem (1672) and the Confession of Dositheos, Q. 3. (b) A "graded" reading distinguishes them as a genuine but secondary class of books "to be read" (anagignoskomena), following Athanasius' *Festal Letter* 39 and the Fathers who counted a stricter twenty-two-book Old Testament core. (c) The scholarly consensus (Pentiuc, 2014) is that Orthodoxy has issued no single binding definition and that both strands persist; the contents even of Orthodox printed Bibles vary (e.g., the Slavonic/Russian appendix book 3 Esdras, absent from the Greek). This compendium reports the variation and does not collapse it.]
Why the Difference, and Why It Need Not Divide
Behind the differing canons lies a differing instinct about authority. Protestantism, prizing the Hebrew original and a bounded, self-authenticating text, followed the narrower Jewish canon. Rome, prizing juridical definition, fixed its list dogmatically at Trent. Orthodoxy, prizing the living liturgical tradition, received what the Church prays and reads, and felt little pressure to draw a hard juridical line where the Church’s use had drawn a soft one. From the Orthodox side, the very looseness is a witness: the authority of the wider books rests not on a decree but on their long, fruitful presence in the Church’s worship, theology, and piety — Wisdom and Sirach in the festal readings, the Prayer of Manasseh in Great Compline, the Maccabean martyrs on 1 August, the Song of the Three Youths in the canon of Matins. The books prove themselves by being prayed. Orthodoxy can therefore hold its wider canon firmly in practice while treating the precise cataloguing of its edges as a matter on which sober disagreement — even within Orthodoxy — does no damage to the faith (Pentiuc, The Old Testament in Eastern Orthodox Tradition, 2014; Ware, The Orthodox Church, Penguin, 1993).
See Also
- The Formation of the Canon — the wider process within which the anagignoskomena were received
- The Septuagint as the Church’s Old Testament — the Greek text that carried these books
- The Bible as the Liturgical Book — the worship that “proves” the wider books
- Holy Scripture in Orthodox Theology — the topical article with the canon table
References
- Pentiuc, Eugen J. The Old Testament in Eastern Orthodox Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. (The anagignoskomena; the absence of a single pan-Orthodox canonical decree; the variation among codices and local Bibles.)
- Athanasius of Alexandria. Festal Letter 39 (AD 367) [PG 26:1436]; trans. NPNF II/4. (The stricter Old Testament core and the books “to be read.”)
- Robertson, J. N. W. B., trans. The Acts and Decrees of the Synod of Jerusalem [1672]. London: Thomas Baker, 1899. (Confession of Dositheos, Question 3, affirming the wider books against Calvinism.)
- Council of Trent, Session IV (1546), Decree Concerning the Canonical Scriptures. (The Roman dogmatic list of the deuterocanon.)
- The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion (1571), Article VI; Luther’s Bible (1534), heading to the Apocrypha. (The Protestant position on its own terms.)
- McDonald, Lee Martin. The Biblical Canon: Its Origin, Transmission, and Authority. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2007; Lim, Timothy H. The Formation of the Jewish Canon. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. (The gradual formation of the Jewish canon; the abandonment of the “Council of Jamnia” theory.)
- Ware, Kallistos (Timothy). The Orthodox Church. New ed. London: Penguin, 1993. (“The Bible.”)