I am not sure why the Roman Catholic church views them as Apocrypha seeing as they also were in the Greek Septuagint which the Vulgate was translated from, but I have heard it was because St. Jerome translated a copy which had these books missing.
A few things.
(1) When talking about the Greek ‘Septuagint’ (I won’t go to the various nuances of that term here), it’s really best not to talk of canon.
The Greek translations that make up the ‘Septuagint’ were originally really separate translations made at different times and places by different people. Heck, properly speaking, the term ‘Septuagint’ would really only apply to the Greek translation of the Torah/Pentateuch (if we’re going by the original version of the legend of the seventy-two translators). It’s pretty much the fault of the early Christians that the term ‘Septuagint’ (which was actually their invention) got extended to mean ‘the Old Testament in Greek’ in general.
In other words: the canon of books you see in old manuscripts and codices, those are really made by those who compiled said manuscripts (i.e. early Christians). At the time, the canon was still loose, which is why people could insert more books that others wouldn’t really include (3 and 4 Maccabees would come under this category).
(2) The Vulgate was
not translated from the Greek. St. Jerome did translate the Greek version of the Psalms and the extra bits of Daniel and Esther that are not in Hebrew, but the rest of his translations of the Old Testament were really made from the Hebrew, and in the case of Tobit and Judith, late Aramaic versions of those works.
Jerome didn’t translate all of the OT books; he really only translated the 39 protocanonical books plus Tobit and Judith. The rest of the Old Testament were actually translations that were made before Jerome, the so-called
Vetus Latina versions. They were only added to Jerome’s Latin translations to complete the set. In fact, the only books we can be sure Jerome worked on were the protocanonical books and Tobit-Judith for the OT (we know that
because he wrote prologues for them), plus the gospels for the NT. The other books are either
Vetus Latina versions or revised versions of those translations.
Here’s the key thing to remember: St. Jerome was not out to make a translation of the whole Bible, certainly not an ‘official’ translation. Pope Damasus only ordered Jerome to revise the translation of the gospels and Psalms used in Rome, and his OT translations (made after Damasus died) was a separate, private project made at the request of various friends. IMHO it’s pretty much only due to the accidents of history that his translations and revisions (at this point gathered in a single collection and supplemented with the books Jerome never worked on) became the
de facto standard.
(3) Re. 1 and 2 Esdras:
Greek 1 and 2 Esdras = Greek 1 Esdras is a pastiche of Ezra-Nehemiah and some original material (some of which comes from 2 Chronicles); Greek 2 Esdras, on the other hand, is a mechanical translation of Ezra-Nehemiah.
Latin 1 and 2 Esdras = Just an alternate name for Ezra and Nehemiah, respectively. (They are called 1 and 2 Esdras probably because in Hebrew, Ezra-Nehemiah is treated as a single book.) Meanwhile, Greek 1 Esdras is the Latin 3 Esdras. (There is also a
4 Esdras - aka Latin Ezra - by the way; a Christianized 1st-century Jewish apocalyptic work that only survived in Latin. This book became called ‘2 Esdras’ in English Bibles under the influence of the KJV, I think.)
In other words:
Ezra-Nehemiah = Greek 2 Esdras
Greek 1 Esdras = Latin 3 Esdras
Latin 4 Esdras (Latin Ezra) = English (KJV) 2 Esdras
