The excluded books are known as "Apocrypha," and are as follows: I Esdras, II Esdras, Tobit, Judith, several chapters of Esther which are found neither in the Hebrew nor the Chaldee, The Wisdom of Solomon, The Wisdom of Jesus, son of Sirach, or Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, The Song of the Three Holy Children, The History of Susanna, The History of the Destruction of Bel and the Dragon, The Prayer of Manasseh, I Maccabees, II Maccabees. They were excluded by the early Christian Church on the ground that they were of doubtful authority and not tending to spiritual edification. This decision has never been reversed, although in some periods of the Church's history a number of the apocryphal writings were published in smaller type after the regular books in the Bible. At one time the volume of apocryphal writings was even larger than the genuine, but very many of them, being rejected, quickly perished.
