apocrypha
- n 14 books of the Old Testament included in the Vulgate (except for II Esdras) but omitted in Jewish and Protestant versions of the Bible; eastern Christian churches (except the Coptic Church) accept all these books as canonical; the Russian Orthodox Church accepts these texts as divinely inspired but does not grant them the same status
- Its source material is seed-small: the four Gospels, the New Testament apocrypha, the histories of Josephus, the pseudepigrapha.
- The author assiduously shovels away dime-novel apocrypha and discovers, surprisingly enough, an authentic and often amazing frontiersman.
- The convention of Joseph as an old man dates back to early non-Biblical Christan books called the apocrypha, which placed his age as high as 91, presumably so that Mary's .