The Name Is Part of the Argument

Each tradition's term for these books encodes its position. Calling them apocrypha, meaning hidden, marks them as set apart from public scriptural authority. Calling them deuterocanonical, a second canon, marks them as canonical while acknowledging that they were received later and were disputed. Orthodox usage often prefers a term meaning readable, indicating books appointed to be read without settling the question further. No neutral vocabulary exists, and choosing one is choosing a side.

English Protestant practice for a long time occupied a middle position: the books were printed in Bibles as a separate section between the Testaments, appointed to be read for instruction in living but not used to establish doctrine, which is the formula the English articles of religion adopted. Many readers therefore knew them well without regarding them as canonical. That middle position collapsed in the nineteenth century for commercial and organisational reasons as much as theological ones, when Bible societies decided against printing and circulating the books, and Protestant Bibles without them became the norm. The result is that a great many modern readers have never encountered the section at all, which is a change in publishing rather than a doctrinal development.