He didn’t move or speak for several moments; then he turned to me and said, “Peripherally. It’s from 2 Esdras, which is part of the Apocrypha.” “Which is . . . ?” “A group of religious writings that are considered important, but not an official part of either the Old Testament or the New. The issues surrounding the Apocrypha—which writings are a part of it, and which aren’t, their relative importance, and so on—are complex, and were debated for centuries. Our own Church recognizes many books of the Apocrypha as deuterocanonical—they belong to a second level of the canon, although that is not
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