Heidegger's Bible Handbook: OT Apocrypha: Proto- vs. Deutero-canonical Books

6.  The fictitious distinction between Protocanonical and Deuterocanonical Books is exploded.

The distinction between the Protocanonical books, concerning which there was never any doubt in the Church, and the Deuterocanonical books, concerning which, although Canonical, there were sometimes doubts, so that it was necessary that the doubt be removed by the Church, brought in by Sixtus Senensis, and recently by others, for the purpose of palliating the error, and disguising the temerity of the Tridentine Church, is altogether trifling, and a ἐπικουρία συκίνη, garment of fig-leaves.  For, the books that they call Deuterocanonical, the ancients simply call ἀκανονίστους/acanonical, as the Council of Laodicea did, and Apocryphal, as Jerome, Ruffinus, and Damascenus called them.  Neither was there any doubt concerning them among the ancients, whether they were properly and κατ᾽ ἐξοχὴν, par excellence, Canonical, or not; but rather without any doubt they were set aside and rejected as ἀκανονίστοι/acanonical, which it was unlawful ἐν τῇ ἐκκλησίᾳ λέγεσθαι ἤτοι ἀναγινώσκεσθαι, to read or to mention in the Church (as the Council of Laodicea expressly states).  But, if they call them Deuterocanonical, because at a later time they were referred by the Church to the Canon, we deny such a thing to be lawful to the later Church, especially the Tridentine Church; and so we affirm that the authority after its accustomed manner called it into question without suffrages, dispensed Divinity according to its own will, and so seized upon the right of God Himself.  Therefore, the books that the Tridentine men nefariously crammed into the Canon are not Deuterocanonical, but ἀκανονίστοι/acanonical and οὐδενοκανονίκοι/non-canonical, remaining that which they were previously.