ocryphal books, which have never been bound up in our Bibles, but
in older times, before Bibles were printed, were (some of them at
least) read in churches and thought to be sacred books. There are a
great many of these: perhaps, if they were all put together, they
would make up a volume as large as the Old Testament itself; but at
present there is no book in which they are all printed together. Some
are stories, others are visions like those in the Revelation of St.
John, others are psalms and prophecies. But all of them, I think, may
fairly be called either fabulous or spurious, or both.

I can give you an example from the Bible itself to show that there
were such books as long ago as the times of the Apostles, and that
they were read and valued. In the 9th verse of the Epistle of Jude,
you read something very curious about Satan contending with Michael
about the body of Moses. Ancient writers whom we may trust tell us
that this is taken from a book called The Assumption of Moses (that
is, the story of Moses being taken up out of this world at the end of
his life).

We have pieces of this book still, but we have not got the whole
story of the dispute between Satan and Michael. However, we know that
it was represented as having taken place when Michael and the other
angels were burying the body of Moses among the mountains in a place
which was kept secret from all men, and that Satan said that though
the soul of Moses might belong to God, the body belonged to him; and,
moreover, that Moses was a murderer, because, long before, he had
killed an Egyptian (as we read in Exodus ii. 12); whereupon Michael
answered Satan in the words, "The Lord rebuke thee," and Satan fled.
That is one example. Another is in the 14th verse of the same
Epistle, where it is said that Enoch, the seventh from Adam,
prophesied of the coming of the Lord to judge sinners. This verse is
taken out of a long book of prophecies and visions called The Book of
Enoch, which still exists, and we may read the very words in it.

In this present book, I am only concerned with the apocryphal
stories; with the prophecies and visions and psalms I have nothing to
do. Now, how and why did the stories come to be written?

It is likely enough that after reading some history in the Bible you
may have wondered whether there was anything more to be known about
the people of whom it told you. You would have liked to find out what
happened to Adam, or Joseph, or Davi