I'm a new Christian, and thus new to the Bible. I often hear mentions of these, but I don't know what they are, and to my understanding are not in all Bibles.
Are they all the same thing? What are they? What Bibles include them?
The "Deuterocanonical" books are those that are considered scripture by the Roman church, but not by Protestants. These are 1 and 2 Maccabees, Wisdom, the Wisdom of ben-Sira (Ecclesiasticus), Baruch, Tobit, Judith, and the Greek additions to the books of Daniel and Esther. If I've left any out, others on-list will fill in the missing titles.
"Apocrypha" is a more general word for books that are related to the Hebrew Scriptures and Deuterocanonicals. Modern editions of the Apocrypha sometimes include, beside the Deuterocanonicals listed above, additional books that are printed in Bibles approved by the Greek and Russian churches but not considered canonical by the Roman church. These include 3 and 4 Maccabees, Two additional books of Ezra (called sometimes 1 and 2 Esdras, sometimes 2 and 3 Esdras, and sometimes 3 and 4 Ezra), the Prayer of Manasseh, and Psalm 151. The word "apocrypha" can be applied more broadly to other works, such as the books of Enoch, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, the Psalms of Solomon, and so on, but the word "pseudepigrapha" is more normally applied to these, rather than "apocrpypha."
The Dead Sea Scrolls are scrolls that were found in caves near the Dead Sea. Many of these are biblical books. But the ones that are often discussed in the newspapers and debated on-line are the ones that describe the life of a Jewish sect, which most scholars have agreed to identify with the sect of the Essenes that were written of by Josephus, Philo, and Pliny the Elder, though the word "Essene" nowhere occurs in the sectarian scrolls. This sect, at least for part of its history, had a strongly apocalyptic outlook and a unique 364-day solar calendar described in the Book of Jubilees and the Book of Enoch, two books that the sect considered authoritative, though they seem to have circulated more widely than just within the sect. (Enoch was used by the early Christians, for example.)
Note that a 364-day solar calendar is not completely crazy. The Western Christian liturgical year, which always begins on Advent Sunday, has 364 days most years, although about 6 years of every 28 have 371 days. But there is no evidence the Dead Sea sect ever intercalated their calendar in this way, leading many scholars to suspect that the 364-day year was never used in practice at all--it was an ideal for the Messianic age, perhaps, or a device for long-distance chronological computations--or was abandoned when it was found to have slipped too far relative to the agricultural seasons.
Whether printed Bibles will include any of the books mentioned above varies from publisher to publisher.
