The Apocrypha is a bunch of books between the Old Testament and the New Testament in the Catholic Bible. Protestant Bibles don’t have them.
After Alexander the Great conquered the world around 330 BC, Greek became the predominate language. Just about everybody no matter what country you lived in spoke Greek at the time, sort of like all countries speak English now. The Hebrew authorities decided to translate their Hebrew Bible into Greek so more people could read it. They approved 70 scholars to translate the Hebrew Bible into Greek and they named this translation the Septuagint because septuagint is a Greek word meaning “70.”
For some reason, the Septuagint came to include a bunch of Jewish stories that were not in the Jewish Bible. Around 90 years after Christ was born a bunch of Jews got together and decided that they weren’t going to approve the Septuagint translation any more because it had these extra stories. The Jews rejected the Septuagint translation, but the Christians—all of whom belonged to the Catholic Church at that time—decided to keep these so called “apocryphal” stories in their Bible.
After the Protestant Revolution in the sixteenth century, the Protestants decided to remove the apocryphal stories from the Protestant Bible. The Roman Catholic Bibles still have the apocryphal stories, but the Protestant Bibles and the Jewish Bibles don’t include the apocrypha.
The word “apocrypha” means hidden. The Catholics call these extra stories “apocrypha” because they are missing (or hidden) from the Jewish and Protestant Bibles.
The most important stories in the Apocrypha are First and Second Maccabees that tell about how the Jews got their independence from the Greeks. These two books also describe the bad things that Antiochus IV did to the Jews. He made the Jews worship the Greek gods. Antiochus also sacrificed a pig on the altar of the Hebrew Temple. This was dastardly thing to do and is called the “Abomination of Desolation.” The Maccabee family got mad and led a revolt against the Greeks and won. (Afterward, the Jews had an independent state for about eighty years until Rome took over in 63 BC, but the Apocrypha doesn't tell about this .)
Another book in the Apocrypha, Judith, tells about a beautiful Jewish princess who gets the Assyrian king drunk, decapitates him, and smuggles his head out of the Assyrian camp by hiding it in a food bag. Susanna is a good courtroom drama that tells how Daniel tricks two evil Jewish elders into contradicting their story about a young virgin who they accuse of adultery.The Bel and the Dragon tells how Daniel solves the mystery of disappearing food from the temple. Some of the other books are songs, prayers, wisdom writings, and fables. It doesn’t take a scholar to tell why the Protestants and Jews left the Apocrypha out of their Bible. At the same time, we can appreciate the Catholics for leaving some juicy stories in their Bible.
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