Annette Yoshiko Reed, “Canon,” in The Jewish Annotated Apocrypha, edited by Jonathan Klawans and Lawrence M. Mills (Oxford University Press, 2020), 573-574.
When canonical consciousness first arose among early Christians in the second and third centuries CE, it was sparked largely by a concern to control the variety of early Christian writings claiming apostolic authority to promote competing images of Jesus. It is in this context that the Greek term “apocrypha” (lit. “hidden”) was first used to describe writings that are similar to scripture but deemed improper to be included therein (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.20.1; ca. 170 CE). By the third century CE, some Christians also grew concerned with the question of how the Jewish scriptures that the knew in Greek compared to what Jews preserved in Hebrew. Even when Jews seemed largely unconcerned to make lists of the precise contents of scripture, Christians did so, and the secondhand reports of Jewish biblical books made by Christians are the earliest lists known to us. The reports from the third century CE point to some continued fluidity in the texts that Jews treated as scripture, perhaps consisted with the relative lack of concern for canon in the Mishna and the continued debate over what does and does not “defile the hands.”
The Amateur Exegete 