How apocrypha went from secret sacred books to a word for dubious stories
Call a tale apocryphal today and you mean it is probably untrue. The word once implied almost the opposite: texts kept hidden because they held knowledge judged too deep or holy for outsiders, meant for private reading rather than for recitation in church.
The root is Greek, joining apo, away, with kryptein, to conceal, and it passed into medieval Latin as apocryphus, secret or non-canonical. Gnostic groups valued the label; followers of a teacher named Prodicus boasted of owning hidden books attributed to Zoroaster. Over time, though, hidden also came to mean excluded. Origen contrasted books read openly by churches with ones found only in secret collections, and complained that many contained corrupt ideas.
Early Christian writers never quite agreed. Augustine took the term to mean simply that a book's origin was obscure. Jerome declared everything outside the Hebrew canon apocryphal, yet in practice treated some such books as scripture. A sixth-century decree even applied the label to works by respected figures such as Tertullian and Clement of Alexandria.
The Reformation hardened the lines. In 1546 the Council of Trent affirmed most of the disputed books as fully canonical, and Catholic, Orthodox and Church of the East traditions call them deuterocanonical. Luther's 1534 Bible printed them in a separate section, and Lutherans and Anglicans kept them for moral instruction but not doctrine. Reformed editions warned readers to treat them like any other human writing. Protestant Bibles once ran to 80 books, of which 66 form the accepted canon.
Traces survive in odd places. Amish weddings retell the marriage of Tobias and Sarah, and Catholic, Methodist and Anglican wedding services read from Tobit. The idea travels beyond Christianity, too: scholars describe later Buddhist Jataka tales, some from the 19th century, as apocryphal, and Anna Seidel applied the word to Chinese talismans and charts that once confirmed an emperor's heavenly mandate.
Source: Apocrypha
