Beside the Bible sits a library. The Book of Enoch, quoted by name inside the New Testament. Jubilees, kept in Hebrew among the Dead Sea Scrolls. The story of Adam and Eve after the angel closed the gate. For most of the last two thousand years these books were read, copied, and treasured — and then, outside a few ancient churches, they drifted out of print. All ten are here, complete and free, in their classic public-domain translations.
Looking for the books that stayed in some Bibles? The fourteen books of the Apocrypha — Tobit, the Maccabees, Wisdom, and more — are on this site as well, in the original 1611 KJV and in the modern-spelling RV.
Jude quotes it by name. In the New Testament's second-to-last page, the letter of Jude cites a prophecy of 'Enoch, the seventh from Adam' — and that prophecy comes from this book.
Read The Book of Enoch →Genesis, retold on a calendar. At Sinai, the Angel of the Presence dictates to Moses the whole story of creation and the patriarchs — divided into 'jubilees' of forty-nine years — filling…
Read The Book of Jubilees →What happened after the angel closed the gate? This book answers with the raw human sequel to Eden: Adam and Eve outside the garden, doing penance — he standing in the Jordan up to his neck…
Read The Life of Adam and Eve →The boy Jesus at five years old, making sparrows from river clay on the Sabbath — then clapping his hands, and the birds flying away.
Read The Infancy Gospel of Thomas →Before the Christmas story, the story of Christmas's grandparents. Joachim and Anne are childless and shamed; their prayer is answered with a daughter, Mary, dedicated to the Temple at…
Read The Gospel of James →Jerusalem has burned again — and Baruch asks the question that will not go away. The secretary of Jeremiah, who once watched Babylon destroy the city, now speaks for the generation that…
Read The Second Book of Baruch →Prayers from the street the day the wall broke. In 63 BC Pompey's legions breached Jerusalem's defenses and entered the Temple itself — and these eighteen psalms are the first-person…
Read The Psalms of Solomon →The trial, the verdict — and what happened next. The book opens as the fullest ancient retelling of Jesus' trial before Pilate: witnesses called by name, the Roman standard bowing, Pilate's…
Read The Gospel of Nicodemus →Twelve dying fathers, twelve final words. Jacob's sons each gather their children at the end of their lives and leave a testament — modeled on Genesis 49, but expanded into full chapters of…
Read The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs →The prophet's death and his journey through seven heavens — in one small book. First comes the martyrdom the New Testament hints at: Isaiah, fleeing Manasseh's persecution, hides in a…
Read The Ascension of Isaiah →It's the most widely repeated story about the canon — and it isn't true. The Council of Nicaea met in AD 325 to answer one burning question: who is Christ? Arius taught the Son was created; the Council answered with the Nicene Creed. It also settled the date of Easter. The canon of Scripture was never on the agenda — no book was voted in, and none was voted out. The canon took shape over centuries instead: the Muratorian fragment (c. AD 170) lists most of the New Testament, Athanasius' Easter letter of AD 367 is the first to name all twenty-seven, and regional councils at Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) confirmed the list. The books on this site were not expelled from anywhere — they simply were never part of the mainstream canon at any recorded point. What actually happened is more interesting: they were read beside the Bible, sometimes as scripture and sometimes as edifying literature, until the printing age left them behind.
The name is a publisher's coinage. In 1926 The World Publishing Company printed 'The Lost Books of the Bible' — a collection of New Testament-era writings — and followed it in 1927 with 'The Forgotten Books of Eden' for the Old Testament-era ones, edited by Rutherford H. Platt. The titles caught on because they say something true: these books had genuinely vanished from common knowledge. The books themselves are anything but lost — every one survives in ancient manuscripts, and several were known continuously for two thousand years. The translations presented here are those same public-domain editions, newly typeset for the web.
The Apocrypha — Tobit, Maccabees, Wisdom, the rest — sit inside some Bibles: the original 1611 King James carried them, and this site's KJV and Revised Version editions still do. The books here are one step further out. Scholars call the Old Testament ones the Pseudepigrapha, meaning they bear the names of revered figures like Enoch, Baruch, and the twelve sons of Jacob — a common practice in ancient writing. They were never part of most Bibles at any point, though the Ethiopian Orthodox Church includes Enoch and Jubilees in its canon to this day. The New Testament ones — the gospels of Thomas, James, and Nicodemus — retell the story of Jesus and his family from outside the four. Read them as the conversations the ancient world was actually having: companion volumes, debates, devotions, and histories that grew up around the Bible's edges. Our companion hub, the Apocrypha, covers the books that stayed inside some Bibles.
Not in most Bibles — but the New Testament quotes it. Jude 14–15 cites a prophecy of 'Enoch, the seventh from Adam,' drawn from 1 Enoch 1:9. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church includes the book in its Old Testament to this day, and complete copies survive in the Ethiopic (Ge'ez) language, with older Aramaic fragments found among the Dead Sea Scrolls.
No. Nicaea (AD 325) addressed the divinity of Christ and the date of Easter; the canon was not discussed and no book was added or removed. The New Testament canon emerged over centuries of use — the first complete twenty-seven-book list is Athanasius' Easter letter of AD 367, and regional councils at Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) confirmed it.
The Apocrypha are books printed inside some Bibles — the 1611 King James Version included them, and Silver Letter Edition's KJV and Revised Version carry them today. The books on this site were never part of mainstream Bibles. They circulated beside the canon, quoted and copied by ancient readers, and are known to scholars as the Pseudepigrapha (Old Testament era) and New Testament Apocrypha.
No — different category of books entirely. The 1611 King James Bible included the Apocrypha between the Testaments; those were the books later printings dropped. The books on this site were never in the King James or any mainstream Bible. Both collections are readable free on this site: the Apocrypha in the reader, and these ten books here.
Right here. This site carries the complete Book of Enoch in R. H. Charles's classic English translation, all 108 chapters, free and without registration — along with Jubilees, the Life of Adam and Eve, and seven more of the most-searched books outside the Bible.
Every one of these books was copied by hand for a thousand years and more. They are here because people never stopped reading them — and now neither will you.