By the way the only reason I always refer to them as 1(3) Esdras and 2(4) Esdras instead of one or the other, which in modern times people just call them 1 and 2 Esdras, but it’s because in the past theres always some wiseguy on here being like what are you talking about 1 and 2 Esdras are in my Douay Rheims Bible. It’s so annoying. They know exactly what I’m talking about.
The Hebrew name “Ezra” is transcribed as “Esdras” in the Greek versions of the Bible, and it was this latter form which then passed into the Latin versions. The canonical book of Ezra was designated by St Jerome as “Liber Esdrae,” and that of Nehemiah as “Liber Nehemiae, qui et Esdrae secundus – the book of Nehemiah, which is also called the second of Ezra.” The apocryphal books named above were therefore designated in Latin Bibles as Third and Fourth Esdras, and so they remained until the Reformation.
The early Protestant English Bibles changed a great many proper names, including those of some Biblical books, away from the traditional Latin versions found in the Vulgate, which is partly filtered though the Septuagint, to a more direct transcription of the Hebrew. Hence the prophet “Sophonias” became “Zephaniah” and “Nabuchodonosor” became “Nebuchadnezzar”; likewise, “Esdras” was changed to “Ezra.” The book of Nehemiah was no longer designated as “also called Second of Ezra.”
The editors of the King James Bible then made the extremely silly and confusing decision to use “Esdras”, the Greek version of “Ezra”, as the name of the two apocryphal books which had hitherto been known as Third and Fourth Esdras, while also renumbering them. Thus, the books known in the Vulgate as First to Fourth Esdras became “Ezra, Nehemiah, First Esdras and Second Esdras.” The matter is rendered more complex still by the fact that the Greek and Old Church Slavonic Bibles each have yet another different system for naming and numbering these books.
