Words

Apocrypha

uh-POK-rih-fuh
The books outside the canon, from Greek apokryphos, hidden away, a compliment that became an accusation.
Documented

The hidden things

Greek apokryphos: hidden, concealed, from apo (away) plus kryptein (to hide). Early usage praised esoteric books for the initiated; patristic usage turned it pejorative, spurious, doubtful. The Deuterocanonical books Catholics keep and Protestants dropped are the neutral sense; Enoch and friends are the full exile.

Assessment: Documented: the semantic flip is traceable in the church fathers' usage.
Stories

The suppression narrative

The video's frame: councils suppressed Enoch, catalogers deprioritized it, librarians restricted it. The real history is messier, Enoch fell from Western use through disuse more than decree, and its quotes survive embedded in Jude, which made it awkwardly semi-canonical forever.

Assessment: Stories: disuse and quotation, not bonfires, did most of the work.
Interesting claims

The crypt family

Kryptein's family is the modern English shadow-lexicon of concealment: crypt, cryptic, cryptography, encrypt. Apocrypha and cryptography are siblings: one hides books, one hides messages, and the internet's entire security stack runs on the same root as the excluded books.

Assessment: Interesting: the root family is standard; the symmetry is the archive's kind of joke.
Sources and further reading
  1. Liddell-Scott-Jones, 'apokryphos'
  2. Patristic usage shift, Origen and Jerome on hidden books
  3. Deuterocanonical canon lists, Trent vs. the Reformers
Worth asking

Who decided which books hid, and did they hide them or delete them?

Open in the interactive archive
GR8YFILES · competing origin stories, labeled by the strength of their evidence · readers 14+