Esdras, BOOKS OF. The word Esdras is the Greek form of Ezra, and indicates that the books so named do not exist in Hebrew or Chaldee. What is now usually called 1st Esdras is in the oldest Greek texts also called 1st Esdras; what is there 2d Esdras being our canonical Ezra. The oldest form of our 2d Esdras, though originally written in Greek, is in Latin only. Hence it has been proposed to call our 1st Esdras the Greek Esdras, and our 2d the Latin Esdras. The Council of Trent, though recognising most of the Apocrypha as canonical, did not so regard either 1st or 2d Esdras of the Apocrypha (their 1st Esdras being Ezra, and their 2d, Nehemiah). Yet in the authoritative Roman Septuagint of 1587 1st Esdras stands before the canonical Ezra; and modern Vulgates print 1st and 2d Esdras along with the Prayer of Manasseh as a kind of separate appendix. In all the earlier editions of the English Bible the order of the Vulgate is followed. The Geneva Bible was the first to adopt the classification now used, according to which Ezra and Nehemiah give their names to two canonical books, and the two apocryphal become 1st and 2d Esdras; and in the sixth article of the Church of England 1st Esdras is called the 3d book of Esdras. As regards the first book of Esdras, it is for the most part a transcript—and not a very accurate one—of Ezra and a portion of Nehemiah, together with the last two chapters of 2d Chronicles. Josephus quotes it extensively in his Antiquities, even when it contradicts Ezra proper, a fact which indicates that it was highly valued by the Jews. The book seems to have been written rather with a hortatory than a purely historical aim, in order to stimulate to the more zealous keeping of the law. The author was probably a Jew, writing in Egypt possibly as early as 146 B.C., and certainly a century before Christ. The familiar phrase, Magna est veritas et prevalebit ('Truth is great, and will prevail'), is taken from the 41st verse of the 4th chapter of this book, where, however, the text reads prevaleat. The second book of Esdras, or Revelation of Esdras, is wholly different in character from the first. It consists of a series of angelic visions and revelations made to Ezra regarding the mysteries of the moral world and the final triumph of the righteous. It might fairly be called the apocalypse of Ezra, had not Tischendorf published a later and inferior work under this title in 1866. The book is not all by one hand. The oldest part—chaps. iii.-xiv.—seems to have been written by a non-Christian Jew of Alexandria about 81-96 A.D.; chaps. i. ii. xv. xvi. are by a Christian Jew there about 263.
See works on the Apocrypha by Fritzsche (1860) and Volkmar (1867). Seventy verses of Esdras were wanting, but found by Prof. Bensley at Amiens in a 9th-century MS.; they are translated in Churton's Apocryphal Scriptures (1884), The Speaker's Commentary (by Lupton, 1888), and in the Revised Version (1895).