The four evangelists tell us little about our Lord's early years- the "hidden life" - or about our Lady. In the first centuries of the Church's existence Christians felt the need to know more about the Holy Family and the Apostles and there grew up out of oral tradition and-speculation a series of accounts now termed apocrypha from the Greek for "hidden things". This book describes these writings and shows how they relate to the four canonical Gospels and why they have not been accepted by the Church as part of sacred Scripture. Beginning with the early apocrypha produced by the Jewish Christian milieu, it goes on to provide a critical survey of the stories about Mary and the corpus of legends about the early life of Jesus. Later chapters describe the apocalypses attributed to Peter and Paul and the acts of various Apostles. Also discussed are the Jewish literary conventions of tile haggada and midrash with their bearing upon the relationship between legend and history in the apocrypha, the value of apocryphal writings as expressions of a popular Christianity which persisted long after the Church's rejection of them.