Apocrypha comes from the Greek apókryphos (ἀπόκρυφος), meaning "hidden" or "obscure." In Christian usage it refers to a set of Jewish writings composed roughly between 200 BC and 100 AD that sit between the Old and New Testaments — books such as Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach (Ecclesiasticus), Baruch, 1 and 2 Maccabees, and additions to Esther and Daniel. Whether these books are "hidden" in the sense of spurious or simply set apart from public reading has been debated since the early church, and the term carries different weight in different traditions.
The Apocrypha circulated as part of the Greek Septuagint, the Old Testament used by Greek-speaking Jews and the early church. Early Christian writers — including Clement of Rome, Polycarp, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen, and Augustine — cited these books alongside other Scripture. The North African councils at Hippo (393) and Carthage (397, 419), under Augustine's influence, affirmed them as canonical. Jerome, translating the Latin Vulgate (c. 405), was the notable dissenter: he preferred the shorter Hebrew canon and labeled the extra books "apocryphal," though he translated them anyway and later copies of the Vulgate carried them without distinction.
For roughly a thousand years afterward, Western Christendom read these books as Scripture. The Eastern Orthodox churches still do, calling them anagignoskomena ("worthy to be read"). The Roman Catholic Church formally affirmed them as canonical at the Council of Trent (1546).
The Reformers revived Jerome's distinction. Luther's Bible of 1534 was the first major edition to gather them into a separate intertestamental section, presenting them as profitable but non-canonical. The Geneva Bible (1560) and the 1611 King James Version both included the Apocrypha in a section between the Old and New Testaments, labeled in the KJV as "the Books called Apocrypha." All KJV printings before 1666 contained them. The Westminster Confession (1647) excluded them from the Protestant canon, and in 1826 the British and Foreign Bible Society resolved to stop printing them, primarily on cost grounds. From that point on, most Protestant Bibles — including most modern KJV reprints — omit the Apocrypha entirely, while Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Oriental Orthodox Bibles continue to include them.
S. H. Froehlich occasionally quotes Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) in his meditations and offers this comment in his diary:
These days I am reading the Proverbs of Sirach, among which there are many excellent ones that contain truth and wisdom.