Apocryphal Books Timeline is a phrase that promises dates, and dates are the one thing most guides to the Apocrypha avoid. The books themselves rarely give their own dates, and the scholars who date them disagree by a century or more. Still, the order in which they appeared is clearer than the exact years, and that order tells a story.
The apocryphal books timeline runs from the Greek conquest of Judea to the fall of the Temple in 70 CE. It begins with a blind man in Nineveh and a sage in Jerusalem. It ends with a scribe weeping over the ruins of the city. Between those points lie the Maccabean revolt and the rise of Rome. There is also the growth of a Jewish community in Alexandria that read its scriptures in Greek.
This post sets the books in that order, decade by decade where the evidence allows it. The dates are the ones most scholars accept today, and where they argue, the post says so. A short section at the end follows the books through the later centuries, when the church decided what to call them.
Apocryphal Books Timeline: What Counts and Why the Dates Matter
The Apocrypha, in the sense used here, are the books that stand in the Greek Septuagint but not in the Hebrew Bible. Protestant Bibles print them between the testaments or leave them out, and Catholic Bibles call them deuterocanonical. This blog has a post on what the word Apocrypha means and how the lists differ from church to church.
Fifteen books or additions make up the usual collection. They are Tobit, Judith, the Additions to Esther, the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, Baruch and the Letter of Jeremiah. Then come the three Additions to Daniel, 1 and 2 Maccabees, 1 and 2 Esdras and the Prayer of Manasseh. Greek and Slavonic Bibles add 3 and 4 Maccabees and Psalm 151.
The dates matter because these books come from the most eventful three centuries of Jewish history. A book from 200 BCE knows nothing of the Maccabees, while a book from 100 BCE cannot stop talking about them. Read in order, as an apocryphal books timeline, the shelf of odd texts becomes a record of how a people thought under Greek and then Roman rule.
Before 200 BCE: The Oldest Books on the Apocryphal Books Timeline
The oldest book in the collection is probably Tobit, and its age surprised everyone. Scholars once put it in the second century BCE, but fragments in Aramaic and Hebrew turned up at Qumran in Cave 4. Those copies push the composition back to the third century BCE, somewhere between 250 and 175. This blog has a post on the Book of Tobit and its story of the angel on the road.
The Book of the Watchers, the first part of 1 Enoch, belongs to the same century. It is not in the Apocrypha proper, but it was read alongside them, and Jude quotes it in the New Testament. The Astronomical Book of Enoch is at least as old, and the Qumran copies of it date from around 200 BCE.
The Letter of Jeremiah may be older still, though nobody can prove it. It attacks the idols of Babylon in a style that suggests the Persian or early Greek period. A Greek fragment from Cave 7 at Qumran shows it existed by 100 BCE. Most scholars place it between the fourth and the second century BCE and leave the matter there.
Around 190 BCE: Sirach and the First Firm Date
Sirach is the first book with an author who signs his work and a date that history can check. Jesus ben Sira taught in Jerusalem, and his book praises the high priest Simon II, who died around 196 BCE. It says nothing of the persecution that began in 175, so the book falls between those two years. This blog has a full post on the Book of Sirach.
The Greek translation carries a date of its own. Ben Sira’s grandson says in his prologue that he came to Egypt in the thirty-eighth year of King Euergetes, which is 132 BCE. He translated the book there some years later, probably after 117.
That prologue is the earliest witness to a Jewish scripture in three parts: the Law, the Prophets and the other books. It is also the earliest complaint that translation loses something. The Hebrew original vanished for a thousand years. Then Solomon Schechter found pages of it in the Cairo Genizah in 1896, and further pieces came from Qumran and Masada.
175 to 100 BCE: The Maccabean Century
The persecution under Antiochus IV in 167 BCE changed everything, and the books written after it show the change. Among them, the Additions to Daniel come first. Greek scribes attached the Prayer of Azariah, the Song of the Three, Susanna and Bel and the Dragon to Daniel during the second century BCE. The Song fits the years of persecution best.
Jubilees dates from around 160 to 150 BCE, in Hebrew, and its author wanted the Law kept by a calendar of 364 days. It is not in the Apocrypha, but it shares the Enoch tradition and the same decade of anxiety. The Dream Visions of Enoch, which retell history as a story of sheep and beasts, come from the same years. They mention Judas Maccabeus as a ram with a great horn.
After the Victory: Judith, Baruch and the Maccabees
Judith belongs to the later part of the century, after the Hasmoneans had won. Its villain is a Nebuchadnezzar who rules Assyria from Nineveh. That deliberate jumble of history points to a moral tale rather than a chronicle. This blog has a post on Judith in the Apocrypha that sets out the case for a date around 150 to 100 BCE.
Baruch, a composite book of confession, wisdom poem and consolation, took shape in the same period. The confession borrows from Daniel 9, so it is later than Daniel, and the whole was probably in Greek by 100 BCE.
First Maccabees appeared in Hebrew around 100 BCE, after the death of John Hyrcanus in 104. Its author admired the dynasty and wrote in the manner of the books of Kings, and the Hebrew disappeared early. Second Maccabees is an abridgment of a five-volume history by Jason of Cyrene, made in Greek near the end of the century. Its story of the mother and her seven sons became the model for every later account of martyrdom.
The Greek Esther closes the century with the second firm date in the collection. A colophon says the book reached Egypt in the fourth year of Ptolemy and Cleopatra. The likeliest pair gives 114 BCE. The six additions that make Esther a religious book, with prayers and the name of God, were in place by then.
100 BCE to 70 CE: The Roman Century
Nobody can date the Prayer of Manasseh, fifteen verses of penitence, at all closely. It comes from Greek, probably from the first century BCE or the first CE. Its purpose was to supply the prayer that 2 Chronicles mentions but never gives. First Esdras, a Greek retelling of Ezra with a story about three bodyguards, comes from the second or first century BCE.
Third Maccabees has nothing to do with the Maccabees. It tells of a Ptolemy who tried to kill the Jews of Alexandria with drunken elephants. Its author lived there in the first century BCE. The Alexandrian community also produced the Letter of Aristeas, which tells how the Septuagint was made. This blog has examined it on its own.
The Wisdom of Solomon is the last book of the collection that Alexandria wrote, and it is the most Greek. Its author knew Plato and the Stoics, and he wrote fluent Greek in the voice of Solomon. Most scholars place it between 30 BCE and 40 CE. Some tie its picture of persecution to the riots under Caligula in 38.
Psalm 151, the short psalm of David and Goliath, survives in Hebrew in the great Psalms scroll from Cave 11. That copy dates from the first century CE, and the psalm is older. The Similitudes of Enoch, with their Son of Man, belong to the same period. That is just before or just after the birth of Christianity.
After the Temple: The Apocryphal Books Timeline Ends, 70 to 130 CE
The last books of the timeline come from the shadow of the ruined Temple. Fourth Maccabees, a philosophical sermon on reason and the passions, uses the martyrs of 2 Maccabees as its examples. Its author wrote in Greek in the first century CE, and most scholars now put it after 70.
Second Esdras, or 4 Ezra in its Jewish core, is the latest and the saddest. Its narrator sits in Babylon thirty years after the fall of the city. That makes the fiction of 557 BCE a mask for the year 100 CE. The eagle vision names three heads that are the Flavian emperors, so the author finished under Domitian or just after. This blog has a post on the end times in 2 Esdras that follows the seven visions.
Christian scribes later added two chapters at the front and two at the back. The first pair, called 5 Ezra, dates from the second century, and the last, 6 Ezra, from the third. That is why 2 Esdras in a Protestant Bible runs to sixteen chapters while the Jewish book had seven visions.
Second Baruch, a companion to 4 Ezra, comes from the same decade. It asks the same question, which is how God could let the Temple fall twice. With those two books the apocryphal books timeline ends. After 130 CE Jewish writers stopped producing scriptures of this kind, and the books that came later belong to the Christian apocrypha.
How the Books Got Their Dates
Two books date themselves, as the apocryphal books timeline shows. The grandson of Ben Sira names a king’s regnal year, and the Greek Esther names a royal couple. Everything else rests on inference.
The commonest clue is silence or noise about the Maccabees. Tobit and Sirach never mention them, while Judith, Daniel’s additions and both books of Maccabees are full of them. A second clue is the manuscript floor: a book copied at Qumran by 100 BCE existed before that, whatever else is unknown. A third is quotation, since Jude cites Enoch and Hebrews 11 seems to know the martyrs of 2 Maccabees.
Language helps too. Tobit, Sirach, Judith, 1 Maccabees and Baruch began in Hebrew or Aramaic, which points to Judea. Wisdom and 2, 3 and 4 Maccabees began in Greek, which points to the Diaspora. The two groups form two halves of the apocryphal books timeline, and the Greek half is later on the whole.
From the Septuagint to Trent
All the books existed by 130 CE, but their status kept changing for another fifteen centuries. Greek churches read them in the Septuagint, and the West read them in the Old Latin. Jerome, translating the Vulgate around 390 to 405, called them apocrypha and set them apart from the Hebrew canon. He translated Tobit and Judith anyway.
The councils of Hippo in 393 and Carthage in 397 listed them as scripture. The Western church read them as such for a thousand years. Luther’s Bible of 1534 gathered them in a separate section between the testaments. The Council of Trent answered in April 1546 by declaring them canonical, and the two decisions have stood since.
English Bibles kept them for another two centuries. The Thirty-Nine Articles of 1563 said they were read for example of life but not for doctrine. The King James Bible of 1611 printed them. Then, in 1826, the British and Foreign Bible Society stopped paying to print them, and after that most English Bibles dropped them. This blog has a post on why the apocryphal books were removed that follows those decisions in detail.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which apocryphal book is the oldest? Tobit, most likely, from the third century BCE, with the Letter of Jeremiah as a possible rival. Sirach, from about 190 BCE, is the oldest book with a date that scholars can fix within a few years.
Which is the latest on the apocryphal books timeline? Second Esdras, whose Jewish core dates from around 100 CE. Christian scribes added its extra chapters in the second and third centuries. Fourth Maccabees and 2 Baruch belong to the same generation.
Were the apocryphal books written in Hebrew or Greek? Both. Tobit, Sirach, Judith, 1 Maccabees and Baruch began in Hebrew or Aramaic. Wisdom, 2 Maccabees, 3 Maccabees and 4 Maccabees began in Greek. Scholars recovered the Hebrew of Sirach and Tobit only in the last hundred and thirty years.
Why do scholars disagree about the dates? Because most books give no date and name no author. The disagreements are usually about a few decades, not centuries. The order of the books is much more secure than the years.
Apocryphal Books Timeline: The Shape of the Whole
This apocryphal books timeline runs for four centuries, and it has a shape. Tobit and Sirach, the early books, are calm, and they teach a piety of almsgiving and honest work. Then come the middle books, written under persecution and after it. They are full of tyrants, martyrs and a God who acts in history.
Wisdom and 4 Maccabees, the late books, turn that faith into philosophy, and 2 Esdras turns it into grief. Read in order, the collection is the diary of a people between two temples. That is why the dates are worth the trouble.
Check out the author’s book here: The Apocrypha.
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