Apocrypha: Outside the Canon

Arcadia

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About this app

Apokrifi is a reader for the books that most Bibles leave out: the Book of Enoch, Jubilees, Tobit, Judith, the Maccabees, the Protevangelium of James, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Didache and more. Twenty-two works in full, in old public-domain translations, each with its translator and the year of the translation named beside it.

None of these books is lost. They were copied, read and printed. They are simply outside the canon that most Bibles use, and which canon that is depends on the Bible you hold. That is what this app shows.

WHICH BIBLE ARE YOU HOLDING
A matrix of every book against four canons: Protestant, Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Ethiopian Tewahedo. Tap any mark and you get its source and the quotation it stands on: the Westminster Confession, the Council of Carthage, the Apostolic Canons and the letter of Athanasius confirmed at Trullo, and James Bruce's report that Enoch stands before Job in the Abyssinian canon. Where the lists disagree, the cell says "disputed". Where no source speaks, the cell is left empty rather than guessed.

FOUR KINDS OF BOOK
Every work carries its label beside the title:
• Deuterocanonical: in the Catholic and Orthodox Old Testament, outside the Protestant one
• Pseudepigrapha: old writings under a great name, as was common
• New Testament apocrypha: read early, never canonical
• Late forgery: shown by its own language to be later than it claims, and kept, with the label

THE TEXTS
• Douay-Rheims (Challoner revision) for the deuterocanonical books
• R. H. Charles for Enoch and Jubilees
• The Ante-Nicene Fathers for the Protevangelium, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Nicodemus, Paul and Thecla, the Gospel and the Apocalypse of Peter, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, the Testament of Abraham, the Shepherd of Hermas and the Epistle of Barnabas
• C. H. Hoole for the Didache
Each is cut from its edition, chapter and verse as that edition numbers them. Nothing is modernised, and nothing is renumbered.

A READER FOR LONG TEXTS
• Size, line height, column width and a serif or sans face
• Your place kept in every book separately
• Marks: press and hold a paragraph
• Search across the texts, every result named by book and place

AND AROUND THEM
• A timeline of lists and councils, from Athanasius in 367 to Westminster, and of the moments these books came back into view: Enoch reaching Europe in 1773, the Didache found in 1873, Akhmim in 1886
• Passages set beside the canonical text they echo, in the Douay-Rheims
• Short articles: why "lost" is the wrong word, how a list becomes a canon, why a book written under a great name is not a forgery, and why some books are missing
• A home-screen widget with a passage a day, its book and its kind

WHAT IT DOES NOT DO
It does not interpret, and it does not say which canon is right. It describes how the lists were drawn up and shows the texts. Every text is bundled and works offline; the only connections are the ad and analytics libraries.

Everything is free: every work in full, the canon matrix, the timeline, search, the parallel passages, marks and the articles. The app shows ads; a single one-time purchase removes them, and that is all it does.

What’s new

Prod v1.0