that in themselves, nor did they in the minds of those who first applied them to books. They began by being terms of dignity and respect: they have degenerated into terms of something like abuse. An apocryphal book was—originally—one too sacred and secret to be in every one’s hands: it must be reserved for the initiate, the inner circle of believers. But, in order to enlist respect, such books were almost always issued under venerable names which they had no true right to bear. We hear of apocryphal books of Adam, Moses, and so forth. The pretence was that these had lately been brought to light, after ages of concealment by pious disciples. I do not intend to write a history of the gradual degradation of the words: I need only say that the falsity of the attributions was soon recognized: and so (to pass over three centuries of transition), in the parlance of Jerome, who has influenced posterity more than any one else in this matter, apocryphal means spurious, false, to be rejected and, probably, disliked.
The application of the word Apocrypha to that Appendix to the Old Testament which we have in our Bibles is a new departure, due to the reformers of the sixteenth century, and it is not consistent either with the original sense of the word or with Jerome’s usage of it, for that Appendix contains no books of secret lore (unless 2 Esdras be so reckoned), but several books which are not spurious, besides some that are. There is, then, some confusion here, and the existence of that confusion has led scholars in recent years to use the long word pseudepigraphic (= falsely entitled) when they wish to describe a really spurious book, as distinct from those contained in our ‘Apocrypha’.
But, though all the writings in the present collection could be called pseudepigrapha, the old word apocrypha is good enough for my purpose, and I employ it here in the sense of false and spurious, even when I am dealing with writings which may contain ancient and truthful elements. This book, then, I call the Apocryphal New Testament.
It is not the first of its name. Just over a hundred years ago, in 1820, an Apocryphal New Testament was issued by William Hone, best remembered as the author of the Everyday Book, the Year Book, the Table Book, Ancient Mysteries Explained.
Hone’s book has long held the field: it is constantly being
