The Apocrypha of the Bible: The History of the Ancient Apocryphal Texts Left Out of the Old Testament and New Testament

The study of the apocryphal gospels, documents about the life or sayings of Jesus that did not become part of the New Testament, is a popular discipline among scholars that now fills several shelves of any respectable library. Despite the growing secularization of society, there seems to be an appetite for the historical figure of Jesus. However, few consider the question of whether the Old Testament, also known as the Hebrew Bible, is "complete", and whether in antiquity there were other books besides Genesis, the Exodus or Judges, with different histories and unknown characters, that were excluded from the canon and got lost in the sands of time.

Recent archaeological and textual discoveries have revealed that literary production among the people of Israel before the life of Jesus was much more extensive and varied than previously supposed. The earliest Christian and Jewish exegetes were aware of some texts whose status was imprecise.