Apocrypha means hidden, and the word has carried a suspicion with it ever since. These are the writings that circulated alongside scripture, were copied by monks and read aloud in churches, and then found themselves outside the list a council finally agreed on. This archive is the way in to everything else on the site: what these books are, how they were set apart, and why readers keep coming back to them.

If the apocrypha meaning is what brought you here, begin with what the word means in a biblical context and then walk through the timeline of the apocryphal books, which puts each text next to the century that produced it. The harder question comes next: why the apocryphal books were removed from the Bible is a story about councils, languages and politics rather than a single verdict.

From there the collection opens out. The non-canonical gospels were never a secret library, only books that lost a vote. The role of women in apocryphal texts shows how much of that lost material gave women a voice the canon later muted, and a survey of the forgotten scriptures traces the ideas that shaped Christian thought from outside the canon.

Once these articles have given you the map, the texts themselves are collected and annotated in the Apocrypha Master Collection, where each book is printed in full with the context that explains it.