The deuterocanonical books sit inside Catholic and Orthodox Bibles and outside Protestant ones, which makes them the clearest case of a canon that was never quite one list. They are not obscure fragments: they are finished works of history, wisdom and storytelling, and several of them are better written than the books that displaced them.

The narratives hold up on their own terms. Tobit is a domestic story with an angel travelling in disguise, and Raphael does not say who he is until the last chapter. Judith walks into an enemy camp and out again, and the mother of the seven sons in Maccabees faces a king with a composure the Stoics would have recognised. Susanna and Bel and the Dragon are the earliest detective stories anyone wrote down.

The wisdom books are quieter and more useful. Sirach is a working ethics manual from a Jerusalem teacher, the Wisdom of Solomon argues with Greek philosophy in its own language, and the Prayer of Manasseh is fifteen lines of repentance that outlived the king who supposedly spoke them. Psalm 151 survives in Greek and, since 1956, in Hebrew from a cave.

All of these texts, with introductions, are printed together in the Apocrypha Master Collection.