1 Esdras

1 Esdras is substantially similar to the standard Hebrew version of Ezra–Nehemiah, with the passages specific to the career of Nehemiah removed or re-attributed to Ezra, and some additional material.

As part of the Septuagint translation, it is now regarded as canonical in the churches of the East, but apocryphal in the West; either presented in a separate section, or excluded altogether.

[4] This section forms the core of 1 Esdras with Ezra 5, which together are arranged in a literary chiasm around the celebration in Jerusalem at the exiles' return.

This chiastic core forms 1 Esdras into a complete literary unit, allowing it to stand independently from the book of Nehemiah.

[8] The text contains similarities to the vocabulary in the Book of Daniel and II Maccabees, and it is presumed that the authors came either from Lower Egypt or Palestine and wrote during the Seleucid period.

In the current Greek texts, the book breaks off in the middle of a sentence; that particular verse thus had to be reconstructed from an early Latin translation.

The Semitic chiasm is corrected in at least one manuscript of Josephus in the Antiquities of the Jews, Book 11, chapter 2 where we find that the name of the above-mentioned Artaxerxes is called Cambyses.

[3][14] As Jerome's Vulgate version of the Bible gradually achieved dominance in Western Christianity, III Esdras no longer circulated.

From the 13th century onwards, Vulgate Bibles produced in Paris reintroduced a Latin text of 1 Esdras, in response to commercial demand.

In the Roman rite liturgy, 1 Esdras is cited once in the Extraordinary Missal of 1962 in the Offertory of the votive Mass for the election of a Pope.

[a] Non participentur sancta, donec exsurgat póntifex in ostensiónem et veritátem ("Let them not take part in the holy things, until there arise a priest unto showing and truth.")