2 Esdras

God is very chatty in this one, and there is a startling but garbled prophecy where God talks about his son Jesus Christ coming down, living for 400 years and then the world ending. Is the disparity with the gospels the reason that Esdras is stuck in the Apocrypha, I wonder?

Of course the alternative reason could be the genocidal mania and the batty stuff about three-headed eagles, a “Sodomitish sea” (5:7) and the suggestion that “menstruous women shall bring forth monsters” (5:8). Although such loopiness didn’t disqualify some of the other books, I suppose.