Chapter 30

From Westminster to the Bible Societies

How the Deuterocanon Disappeared from Protestant Bibles

Here is one of the strangest stories in all of Christian history. Books that were read by the apostles, quoted by the church fathers, affirmed by ecumenical councils, and retained by the Protestant Reformers themselves were ultimately removed from the Bible — not by a great theological council, not by a careful scholarly assessment, not by an ecumenical gathering of bishops and theologians — but by a publishing society's cost-cutting measure. The deuterocanonical books vanished from Protestant Bibles because it was cheaper to print a shorter Bible.

I wish I were exaggerating. I am not.

In the previous chapter, we traced the story of how Martin Luther, John Calvin, and the other Reformers handled the deuterocanonical books. The key takeaway was this: even though the Reformers denied the deuterocanon's full canonical authority, they did not remove these books from the Bible. Luther placed them in an appendix between the Old and New Testaments with a note calling them "useful and good to read." Calvin cited them freely in his own theological writings. The original King James Bible of 1611 included them. For over two centuries after the Reformation, Protestant Bibles still contained the deuterocanonical books.¹

So what happened? How did we get from Luther's Bible — which had eighty books — to today's Protestant Bible, which has sixty-six? How did books that had been part of the Christian Bible for over 1,800 years simply disappear?

The answer involves Puritans, politics, money, anti-Catholic prejudice, Scottish Presbyterians, a powerful Bible society, and — at the very end — a business committee's vote on printing costs. It is a story that almost no Protestant has ever been told. And once you hear it, you will never look at your sixty-six-book Bible the same way again.

The Westminster Confession: A Radical Break

To understand how the deuterocanon vanished from Protestant Bibles, we need to begin with a document that most Presbyterians and many Reformed Christians hold in very high regard: the Westminster Confession of Faith, adopted in 1646.

As we noted in Chapter 29, the Reformers themselves held a range of views on the deuterocanonical books. Luther called them "useful and good to read" but denied they could be used to establish doctrine. Calvin was similarly nuanced — he rejected their canonical authority but freely used them in his own theology. The Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles (1562) said the deuterocanonical books could be "read for example of life and instruction of manners" but not used "to establish any doctrine." These were all, in various ways, compromise positions. They denied the full authority of the deuterocanon but still recognized the books as having real spiritual value — enough value to keep them in the Bible.

The Westminster Confession changed all of that.

In 1643, the Long Parliament — convened under heavy Puritan influence during the English Civil War — resolved to clarify the liturgy and doctrines of the Church of England. A new confession of faith was drafted that would serve as the standard for the entire United Kingdom. This became the Westminster Confession. On the subject of the deuterocanon, it declared:

"The books commonly called apocrypha, not being of divine inspiration, are no part of the canon of Scripture; and therefore are of no authority in the Church of God, nor to be any otherwise approved, or made use of, than other human writing."²

Read that again carefully. The Westminster Confession does not merely say the deuterocanonical books are of lesser authority. It says they are "no part of the canon of Scripture." It says they have "no authority in the Church of God." It says they should not be treated any differently than "other human writing." In other words, according to Westminster, the Wisdom of Solomon has exactly the same authority as Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress — or any other ordinary book written by a mere human being.

This is a point that deserves emphasis. The loss of the deuterocanon from Protestant Bibles can be traced not to the Reformers themselves but to a group of radical Puritans who had seized control of the English government under Oliver Cromwell. Luther and Calvin would not have gone this far. The Westminster Confession was the product of a specific political and theological moment — the English Civil War, during which the Puritans held temporary power — and it reflected the most extreme wing of Protestant thinking on the canon.⁴

Yet the Westminster Confession became enormously influential. It became the confessional standard for Presbyterianism worldwide. It shaped Reformed theology for centuries. And its dismissive language about the deuterocanon — "no part of the canon," "no authority," "other human writing" — provided the theological ammunition that would eventually be used to justify removing these books from the Bible altogether.

The Puritan "Persecution" of the Apocrypha

Even before the Westminster Confession, the Puritans had been agitating to remove the deuterocanonical books from English Bibles. The great biblical scholar Frederic Kenyon called this campaign "the Puritan persecution of the Apocrypha" — and it is an apt phrase.⁵

The modern claim that Protestants universally and cheerfully accepted the removal of these books is flatly contradicted by the historical record. The first attempts to remove the deuterocanon met with stiff resistance, most notably from the Anglican Archbishop John Whitgift. When the Puritan John Pentry challenged Whitgift to remove the deuterocanonical books from English Bibles, the archbishop's response was fierce:

"The Scripture here called apocrypha, abusively and improperly, are holy writings, void of error, part of the Bible, and so accounted of in the purest time of the Church and by the best writers; ever read in the Church of Christ, and shall never be forbidden by me, or by my consent."⁶

Whitgift went even further. He demanded to know who in the entire history of Christianity had ever separated these books from the rest of the Bible. He called those who wanted to remove them "giddy heads" and warned that such speeches were "enough to cause ignorant people to discredit the whole Bible."⁷

Despite this opposition, the Puritans scored an early victory when the deuterocanonical books were excluded from the 1599 edition of the Geneva Bible. Interestingly, the books were removed but the pages were left blank and unnumbered between the Old and New Testaments — as if the printers themselves could not quite bring themselves to close the gap completely.⁸

Why were the Puritans so determined to exclude these books? After all, Luther had already separated them from the rest of the Bible and placed them in an appendix. In that position, they could not be used to contradict Protestant theology. What was the danger of simply leaving them there?

The Protestant scholar Edgar J. Goodspeed believed the Puritans' objection had less to do with scholarship and more to do with the "grim or sensational character" of certain passages within these books — passages that did not suit Puritan tastes.⁹ But there was a deeper motivation as well: anti-Catholic prejudice. The Puritans saw the deuterocanonical books as a last vestige of "popery" within Protestantism. The Council of Trent (1546) had solemnly affirmed the deuterocanon as canonical Scripture. In the Puritan mind, any book that Rome affirmed was a book that true Protestants must reject.

The King James Bible and Its Cross-References

It is a fact that astonishes many Protestants today: the original King James Bible of 1611 — the very Bible that many conservative Christians regard as the gold standard of English translations — included the deuterocanonical books. The KJV was not a sixty-six-book Bible. It was an eighty-book Bible, with the deuterocanon placed in an appendix between the Testaments, just as Luther had done in his German Bible a century earlier.¹⁰

The forty-seven scholars who produced the KJV not only included the deuterocanonical books in their translation — they also included cross-references linking the Old and New Testament text to the deuterocanon. Bruce Metzger counted 113 such cross-references in the original 1611 edition: 102 in the Old Testament and 11 in the New Testament.¹¹ These cross-references told the reader that the deuterocanonical books were relevant for understanding the rest of Scripture — that they illuminated passages in both Testaments.

As later editions of the KJV began appearing without the deuterocanon, those cross-references were quietly removed. Metzger suggested this was simply because the margins were too crowded. But the Anglican scholar William Daubney offered a more pointed explanation:

"Plainly, the references to the Apocrypha told an inconvenient tale of the use which the Church intended should be made of it; so, either from dissenting influence without, or from prejudice within the Church, these references disappeared from the margin."¹²

Daubney also noted that among the removed cross-references was the one linking Hebrews 11:35 — "Women received back their dead by resurrection. Some were tortured, refusing to accept release, so that they might rise again to a better life" — to the story of the Maccabean martyrs in 2 Maccabees 7. That cross-reference was, in Daubney's words, "illicitly suppressed."¹³ The KJV translators themselves had seen the connection between Hebrews and 2 Maccabees. Later editors removed that connection, severing a link that the church had recognized for centuries (as we discussed at length in Chapter 20).

Many advocates of the King James Bible today contend that an essential reason it is the true Word of God is that it omits the "Apocrypha." As S. Douglas Woodward notes, this constitutes yet another place where King-James-Bible-only proponents misunderstand their own history. The KJV they claim to champion originally included the very books they now despise.¹⁴

Goodspeed put it perfectly: "Whatever may be our personal opinions of the Apocrypha, it is a historical fact that they formed an integral part of the King James Version, and any Bible claiming to represent that version should either include the Apocrypha, or state that it is omitting them. Otherwise, a false impression is created."¹⁵

The Almighty and the Almighty Dollar

Puritan theology was not the only force driving the deuterocanon out of Protestant Bibles. There was a second force at work — one that had nothing to do with theology at all. It was economics.

In an era when printing was laborious and expensive, smaller Bibles were significantly cheaper to produce. A printer who omitted the deuterocanon could save considerable money on paper, ink, and binding. The resulting Bible would be lighter, cheaper, and easier to sell. The prospect of higher profit margins attracted printers who cared more about their ledger books than about the canon of Scripture.¹⁶

At first, these shorter Bibles were considered unauthorized — even illegal. In 1615, George Abbott, the Archbishop of Canterbury, went so far as to employ the power of the law to punish any publisher who printed the Bible without the deuterocanon as prescribed by the Thirty-Nine Articles. Violators faced up to a year in prison.¹⁷

But economic incentives proved stronger than the threats of the archbishop. Editions without the deuterocanon were sporadically produced, and they became something of a fashionable novelty. These Bibles were nicknamed "the new cut," and they slowly grew in vogue among English Protestants. In a sense, they were unauthorized Authorized Versions.¹⁸

Despite this trend, Bibles that included the deuterocanon still remained the norm for a long time. These books were too well known and too deeply woven into European Christian thought to be easily discarded. Puritan influence continued after the Restoration under Charles II, and the tide gradually turned against the deuterocanon. Of the 227 printings of the Bible between 1632 and 1826, only about 40 percent included the deuterocanonical books.¹⁹ Anti-apocryphal tracts and pamphlets began to circulate. In 1740, some even proposed a law to force printers to remove the "Apocrypha" appendix from between the two Testaments.²⁰

As Woodward summarizes, Protestants abandoned the deuterocanon because of "cost, convenience, and Catholics." Anti-Catholic hatred and the financial advantages of printing smaller Bibles combined into a potent force. Once Luther had partitioned the deuterocanon into an appendix, it was only a matter of time before someone decided to remove the appendix entirely. The physical separation Luther created made the theological separation inevitable.²¹

The Continental Confessions and the Synod of Dort

Before we get to the Bible societies and the decisive moment of the 1820s, it is worth noting that the trajectory of decline was not limited to England. The Continental Protestant confessions also steadily eroded the deuterocanon's standing — though most of them stopped short of the Westminster Confession's absolute rejection.

The Belgic Confession (1561), one of the oldest Reformed confessions, listed the deuterocanonical books and acknowledged that "the Church may read and take instruction from" them, "so far as they agree with the canonical books." But it added that "they are far from having such power and efficacy as that we may from their testimony confirm any point of faith or of the Christian religion."²² This was essentially the position of the Thirty-Nine Articles — the deuterocanon could be read for edification but not used to establish doctrine.

The French (Gallican) Confession (1559), composed by the first national Protestant synod in Paris, went further. It introduced the novel idea that the "testimony and inward illumination of the Holy Spirit" enabled believers to distinguish the canonical books from "other ecclesiastical books upon which, however useful, we cannot found any articles of faith."²³ This was an important innovation. The Reformer Wilhelm Neuser has argued that Calvin's original teaching about the inner testimony of the Spirit was about confirming the believer's faith in Scripture — not about testing which books are canonical. It was the French Confession, not Calvin himself, that turned the Spirit's inner witness into a canonicity test.²⁴

The Synod of Dort (1618–1619) represented another step in the downward spiral. Several members demanded that the synod insist on removing the deuterocanonical books from the Geneva Bible entirely. That motion failed — even in 1619, outright removal was still too radical for many Reformed Protestants. But the dissenting party won significant concessions. Dort adopted the sixth article of the Belgic Confession, which inveighed against these books. It recommended that the deuterocanon be printed in smaller type to distinguish it visually from the canonical books. It recommended that derogatory notes be added in the margins, pointing out places where these books allegedly contradicted the protocanon. And it recommended that the appendix be moved from between the Testaments to the very back of the Bible — creating an even greater physical distance from the rest of Scripture.²⁵

The Dutch Bible of 1637 faithfully carried out all of Dort's recommendations. It printed the deuterocanon in smaller type at the back of the Bible, complete with a critical preface and marginal notes designed to undermine the reader's confidence in these books.²⁶

As Michuta observes, the trajectory was clear and tragic. At the beginning, during his early confrontations with Rome, Luther was willing to use the deuterocanon to establish doctrine. When cornered in debate, he suddenly denied it that authority. Still, he hesitated to remove the books entirely. He gathered them into an appendix — part of the Bible somehow, but not really. The Synod of Dort took Luther's innovation a step further. A set of books once proclaimed by the church fathers as divine Scripture was now reduced to fighting for space in the part of the Bible usually reserved for maps and baptismal records.²⁷ The next step — total exclusion — was only a matter of time.

The Contradiction Within the Thirty-Nine Articles

Before moving on to the Bible societies, I want to pause and draw attention to an important contradiction within the Anglican tradition itself — a contradiction that reveals just how uncomfortable early Protestants were with their own position on the deuterocanon.

The sixth of the Thirty-Nine Articles stated that the deuterocanonical books could not be used "to establish any doctrine." But the thirty-fifth article endorsed the Book of Homilies — a set of official sermons to be read in churches — as containing "a godly and wholesome doctrine." The problem? The Book of Homilies used the deuterocanon extensively to establish its doctrines. The Anglican scholar William Daubney counted no fewer than seventy-five quotations from the deuterocanonical books in the Homilies — and many of these quotations treated the deuterocanon as fully inspired Scripture.²⁸

Daubney catalogued the evidence. In the homily against swearing, a passage from Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) is introduced with the words, "Almighty God by the wise man says." In the homily against excess of apparel, Judith and the deuterocanonical additions to Esther are cited as "Scripture." In the homily against idolatry, the canonical and deuterocanonical books are lumped together under the common title "the scriptures." The tenth homily urges readers to learn from the Wisdom of Solomon, calling it "the infallible and undeceivable word of God." The final homily refers to Wisdom as "holy Scripture" and urges readers to hear Baruch "as a prophet."²⁹

Think about that. The same church that said these books "cannot establish any doctrine" also officially endorsed homilies that called them "the infallible and undeceivable word of God." This is not a minor inconsistency. It is a flat contradiction. And it reveals the theological tension at the heart of early Protestant thinking about the canon. As Michuta observes, "Doctrinally, the deuterocanon could not be admitted to the same authority as the protocanon, yet a vast majority of the early Protestants, including the Reformers, would not dare remove these books because the simplest peasants knew they were part of the Bible."³⁰

The Rise of the Bible Societies

In the early 1700s, a new kind of organization appeared on the Christian scene: the Bible society. These were philanthropic groups dedicated to producing inexpensive copies of the Bible for the widest possible distribution, especially among the poor. The first was the Von Canstein Bible Society, founded in Germany in 1710. It produced Protestant Bibles that included the deuterocanon, following Luther's example. It even produced stand-alone pocket editions of individual biblical books — and one of those pocket editions was the book of Sirach.³¹

In London in 1804, a similar group was formed: the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS). This organization would become the largest Bible distribution society in the world. Because of its interdenominational, non-sectarian mission, it received broad-based support and grew rapidly. Within a decade, the BFBS had founded dozens of auxiliary Bible societies throughout England and Continental Europe, providing financial and technical aid to partners working along the same lines.³²

The BFBS had a simple, noble mission: to distribute Bibles as widely and cheaply as possible. And in its early years, the Bibles it distributed included the deuterocanonical books — just as the King James Bible had always included them. But a controversy was brewing. And it would ultimately reshape the Protestant Bible forever.

Robert Haldane and the First Rumblings

The trouble began in 1813, when several foreign Bible societies — auxiliaries of the BFBS in Continental Europe — prepared to print Bibles with the deuterocanon, as had been their custom since the time of Luther. The inclusion of these books offended some BFBS members, who demanded that the parent organization cut funding to any foreign society that printed Bibles with the "Apocrypha." Cutting the funds would have destroyed these fledgling societies. But the board of the BFBS ruled that printing Bibles in different formats would be permitted, since its bylaws had never explicitly prohibited the inclusion of the deuterocanon.³³

This pragmatic act of tolerance did not sit well with many Reformed Protestants — especially the Presbyterian preacher Robert Haldane. Haldane had been a supporter of the BFBS until he learned, almost by accident, that the society had committed funds to print Bibles with the deuterocanon. The German historian Wilhelm Gundert describes Haldane's response:

"[Haldane] taught a doctrine of verbal inspiration, applied exclusively to the canonical books of the Bible, and dismissed the Apocrypha as a human word. Like others convinced that God has given them a mission, he found it hard to understand that other Christians could have a different view. So he came back in 1819 from an evangelistic campaign in France to press the committee to reverse its resolution of 1813."³⁴

Haldane launched a speaking crusade against the BFBS. He found willing allies among the Scottish Bible societies, particularly in Edinburgh and Glasgow. Scottish Presbyterianism was deeply shaped by the Westminster Confession, which — as we have seen — denied the deuterocanon any authority whatsoever. For the Scots, the idea of spending money to print books that Westminster had declared to be "no part of the canon" was intolerable.

Under pressure from Haldane and the Scottish contingent, the BFBS passed a tougher resolution in 1822. This new resolution provided full funding only to societies that produced Bibles without the deuterocanon. Foreign societies that wanted to continue including the "Apocrypha" would have to pay for the printing of that section with their own funds. Most of the Continental societies were glad to do so. For a time, an uneasy peace held.³⁵

The Edinburgh Crusade

Compromises sometimes alienate the parties they try to appease. In this case, the 1822 resolution satisfied no one. On one side were members who believed the BFBS's mission was to promote the widest possible distribution of the Bible. If that meant contributing to the printing of Bibles with the deuterocanon for communities that considered these books Scripture, so be it. They argued that no Protestant community had the right to dictate to other Protestant communities what constitutes the Bible.³⁶ On the other side were those who felt the 1822 compromise was a mistake and that all funding should be cut to discourage the printing of Bibles containing the "Apocrypha."

The uneasy peace collapsed when the boards of the Edinburgh Bible Society and the Glasgow Bible Society resolved to withhold all support from the BFBS until every penny of funding for deuterocanon-inclusive Bibles was eliminated.

The Edinburgh Bible Society's committee statements from this period are remarkable documents. They make for sobering reading — not because their arguments are compelling, but because they reveal the depth of anti-Catholic hostility that drove the campaign. The Edinburgh committee made no effort to establish the legitimacy of the shorter canon from history or scholarship. It simply assumed the shorter canon was self-evidently true. Its primary concern was not historical or textual evidence but the danger that printing the deuterocanon would aid the cause of Roman Catholicism.³⁷

The committee's statements are worth examining in some detail, because they reveal the real motivations behind the removal of the deuterocanon — motivations that had far more to do with anti-Catholic politics than with careful biblical scholarship.

The Edinburgh committee argued that even learned scholars had difficulty distinguishing truth from error in the deuterocanon. If the educated could not do it, the uneducated certainly could not. Therefore, the safest course was to remove the books entirely — to protect the unlearned from being led astray.³⁸

But the committee's real concern emerged in another passage, where it openly stated that distributing Bibles with the "Apocrypha" was "in fact, abetting the Church of Rome in an impious attempt to establish the inspiration of that spurious document and seconding her efforts to compel those who acknowledge her spiritual dominion, to listen to its lying wonders as to the voice of the Almighty."³⁹

The language grew even more intense. The Edinburgh committee described the BFBS's willingness to print Bibles with the deuterocanon as "countenancing and supporting the Church of Rome in her system of imposition." It warned that Rome could point to Protestant Bibles that included the deuterocanon as evidence that "the Protestants themselves believe in the divinity of those passages which she brings from the Apocrypha to establish the doctrine of purgatory and of the saving merit of good works." The committee described the "Apocrypha" as an instrument of "popish error and superstition" and warned that the BFBS was in danger of becoming "not an instrument of Protestant benevolence, but an engine of popish error."⁴⁰

The Edinburgh committee even made an interesting admission — one that many Protestant apologists today deny. It acknowledged that the deuterocanonical books actually present themselves as Scripture. The committee complained that the "Apocrypha" is especially dangerous because "it pretends to a divine original" and "affects to have the sanction of heaven." Its declarations, the committee noted, are "sometimes represented as proceeding immediately from God himself, and sometimes as conveyed through the medium of angels." It mimics "the phraseology of inspiration," frequently introducing its declarations with "Thus says the Lord."⁴²

This is a remarkable admission. The Edinburgh committee was saying, in effect: "These books claim to be Scripture, and that claim is so convincing that even educated readers might be taken in. Therefore, we must remove them." The irony is stunning. Instead of considering the possibility that these books might actually be what they claim to be — Scripture inspired by God — the committee concluded that their very persuasiveness made them dangerous.

The Edinburgh committee also tried to paint its campaign as the fulfillment of the Reformers' wishes:

"It was a great step when the Apocrypha books were taken out of the Bible, and placed by themselves, with the apocryphal title. But it was only a step; and it still remained a desideratum to get quit of them, altogether, and to keep the pure word of God detached in every respect from their contaminating fellowship."⁴³

Notice the language: "contaminating fellowship." The deuterocanonical books — books that the church fathers had quoted as divine Scripture, that the apostles had alluded to in the New Testament, that the early councils had affirmed — were now described as contamination. This is the endpoint of a trajectory that began with Luther's cautious appendix and ended with the Edinburgh committee's crusade for total eradication.

The BFBS Capitulates: 1826–1827

Faced with the Scottish societies' threat to permanently break away and to wage a public campaign against the BFBS, the board of the British and Foreign Bible Society capitulated. In 1826, after a conference with a deputation from the Edinburgh Bible Society on April 4 of that year, the BFBS moved toward its fateful decision. In 1827, it adopted a resolution that no financial aid of any kind would be given to any Bible society that produced Bibles containing the "Apocrypha."⁴⁴

This was the decisive moment. The BFBS was the largest Bible distribution organization in the world. Its decision meant that the vast majority of Bibles printed in the English-speaking world would henceforth omit the deuterocanonical books. Within a few years, as commercial publishers saw that the Bible-buying public would accept Bibles without the deuterocanon, they too stopped printing them — for "obvious reasons of economy," as Metzger noted.⁴⁵

Let me state as clearly as I can what happened here. The books that the apostles read, that the church fathers quoted, that the ecumenical councils affirmed, that even the Protestant Reformers retained — these books were removed from the Bible not by a theological council, not by a careful scholarly assessment, not by an ecumenical gathering of the church, but by a publishing society's business decision. The vote was taken by a committee of laypeople and clergy whose primary concern was reducing printing costs and appeasing donors. The deuterocanon was removed from the Bible not because of a careful weighing of evidence but because it was cheaper to print a shorter Bible.

This is arguably one of the most consequential publishing decisions in the history of Christianity — and one of the least theologically informed.

Not Everyone Was Happy

Evangelical accounts of this controversy often suggest that all Protestants gratefully embraced the BFBS's decision. F.F. Bruce, for instance, wrote that "when the British and Foreign Bible Society began to distribute exclusively editions lacking the Apocrypha, the Bible-buying public seemed quite content with such editions."⁴⁶

This is misleading at best. In reality, the decision was deeply divisive. It widened the existing rift between British and Continental Protestantism. Many European Bible societies — including those of Germany, Switzerland, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Denmark — broke with the BFBS over what they regarded as a Puritan-led coup. They refused to distribute Bibles without the deuterocanon. They were grateful for London's help in the past, but they were willing to go it alone rather than abandon these books.

The Lutheran response was especially sharp. The historian Howorth records that "the Lutheran authorities decided that they could have no part in such a movement and refused to countenance the issuing of mutilated bibles or to depart from Luther's example in such a critical matter, and they have since remained staunch to that decision."⁴⁷ Note the word "mutilated." That is how the Lutherans — the heirs of the very man who started the Protestant Reformation — described a Bible without the deuterocanon.

Nor did the decision succeed in placating the Scots for long. Despite the BFBS's complete capitulation to their demands, the Scottish societies eventually broke off and went their own ways anyway.⁴⁸

As Michuta observes, "The story of the suppression and removal of the deuterocanon by the British and Foreign Bible Society is rarely told, yet there are many interesting lessons to be learned from it: not least, that a deutero-free Bible was still seen to be, as late as 1827, a departure from traditional Christian practice — even as practiced by Protestants."⁴⁹

The Protestant Crusade in America

In the United States, the American Bible Society (founded in 1816) was far more willing to adopt the BFBS's decision than the European societies had been. American Protestantism is deeply rooted in English Puritanism, and Bibles with the "Apocrypha" were not part of the American Protestant heritage. Lutherans and Catholics were likely the only sizable Christian communities in America that used Bibles containing the deuterocanon.⁵⁰

The timing was significant. In the early nineteenth century, American Protestantism was in the midst of the Second Great Awakening — a period of intense religious fervor. Unfortunately, this revival also carried with it a powerful undertow of anti-Catholic sentiment. The combination of Protestant anti-Catholic prejudice and the distribution of Bibles without the deuterocanon led to some deeply troubling consequences.

When Protestant missionaries offered copies of their Bibles to Catholics, the Catholics predictably refused them. The translation itself (invariably the King James Version) contained anti-Catholic bias, and the absence of the deuterocanon made the Bible unacceptable to Catholic readers. But this refusal was badly misunderstood. Protestant missionaries interpreted the Catholic rejection of their truncated Bibles as hostility to the Bible itself — as proof that Rome was an enemy of Scripture.

The American historian Ray Allen Billington documented this dynamic in his important study The Protestant Crusade:

"A clash developed as soon as the American Bible Society attempted to spread the Protestant version of the Bible among Catholics. The indignation of the Catholic hierarchy and papal letters denouncing the society all were interpreted by Protestants as an attack on the Bible rather than on one version of the Bible. Thus the illusion was created that papists were hostile to the scriptures and that their Church rested not on divine but on man-made authority."⁵¹

This misunderstanding fueled the growing anti-Catholic movement in America. It gave ammunition to the "No-Popery" crusade and later the Nativist movements that swept the United States in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s. The consequences were not merely intellectual. Anti-Catholic sentiment in this period led to violent assaults against Catholic communities and church property. The "Bible Riots" of Philadelphia in 1844, in which multiple churches were burned and at least twenty people were killed, were connected in part to the controversy over which Bible — Protestant or Catholic — should be read in public schools.⁵²

The deuterocanon debate did not cause American anti-Catholicism single-handedly. But the propagation of Bibles without the deuterocanon contributed to a cultural dynamic in which Catholics and Protestants could not even agree on what the Bible was — and in which each side's Bible was used as evidence that the other side was unfaithful to God's Word. The ripple effects of the BFBS's cost-cutting decision extended far beyond the world of book publishing.

Books in Exile

Within a generation of the BFBS decision, most English-speaking Protestants had never seen a Bible with the deuterocanonical books. By the late nineteenth century, most Protestants had no idea these books had ever been part of the Christian Bible. The ignorance became self-perpetuating. Because Protestants did not know about the deuterocanonical books, they never asked why they were removed. Because they never asked, no one ever told them the history. A veil of forgetfulness descended over the Protestant world, and behind that veil, one of the most important chapters in the history of the Bible was quietly erased from collective memory.

The myth that "the Catholic Church added these books" arose precisely in this environment of ignorance. Protestants who had never seen a Bible with the deuterocanon naturally assumed that the sixty-six-book Bible was the original Bible — that it had always been this way. When they encountered a Catholic Bible with its additional books, the obvious (but entirely wrong) conclusion was that the Catholics had added books to the Bible. In reality, it was Protestants who had removed books from the Bible that had been there for eighteen centuries.

But not everyone forgot. On Bible Sunday, December 6, 1915, the Episcopal minister Rev. Milo H. Gates rose to his pulpit in Manhattan and preached a sermon about the exile of the "Apocrypha" from Protestant Bibles. Gates urged his congregation:

"The time has come when all real Protestants should demand from the Bible societies the whole Bible. The day was, and it was not long ago, when every true Protestant had as the motto on his banner, 'The Bible and the Bible only; our rule of faith and practice.' Therefore the true Protestants should now make a fight for the restoration of the Bible. One of the greatest libraries of sacred writings is contained in what is known as the Apocrypha . . . [I]t is the fault of Bible societies that this wonderful part of holy writ has been stolen from the Bible."⁵³

Gates's sermon was noticed. An Anglican scholar, William Daubney, echoed the sentiment. But their voices were crying in the wilderness. The damage was done. The deuterocanon had been exiled from Protestant Bibles, and most Protestants did not even know what they had lost.

Goodspeed's lament remains true a century later: "Very few people nowadays know what the Apocrypha are, much less what they have to say."⁵⁴

The Revised Version and the Final Nail

The English Revised Version (1885) — the first major revision of the King James Bible — was produced without the deuterocanonical books. This was another milestone in the marginalization process. The KJV, for all the controversy surrounding its deuterocanonical appendix, had at least included these books in its original form. The RV did not even bother. A separate edition of the Apocrypha was eventually published in 1895, but it was a standalone volume, not part of the Bible itself.⁵⁵

As Woodward notes, the 1885 edition effectively made the removal official. From that point on, the standard Protestant Bible in English was a sixty-six-book Bible. The Revised Standard Version (1952) later produced an edition with the "Apocrypha," but this was the exception rather than the rule. Most Protestants who purchased Bibles in the twentieth century never saw the deuterocanonical books at all.⁵⁶

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1940s renewed scholarly interest in the intertestamental literature and spawned several new Protestant translations that included the deuterocanon. But as Michuta observes, "despite this renewed interest, the anti-Catholic winds of the last century and a half have eradicated the place these books formerly held in Protestant devotion. Today, practically no one (Protestant or Catholic) is aware that an Apocrypha controversy existed in Protestantism, much less that these books were once part of the Protestant Bible."⁵⁷

The De-Evolution of the Deuterocanon in Protestantism

It is helpful to step back and see the entire trajectory at a glance. Michuta traces what he calls the "de-evolution" of the deuterocanon within Protestantism — and it is a story of steady, accelerating decline:⁵⁸

At the earliest stage of the Reformation, during Luther's initial debates with Rome, the Reformer was willing to use the deuterocanon to confirm doctrine. He treated it as authoritative Scripture. Then, when he was cornered by Johann Eck at the Leipzig Disputation in 1519 over 2 Maccabees 12 and the doctrine of purgatory, Luther suddenly appealed to Jerome and declared the entire deuterocanon non-canonical (as we discussed in Chapter 29).⁵⁹

Even then, Luther still considered the deuterocanon as a kind of "non-canonical Scripture" that was "good and useful to read." Calvin was similarly nuanced — he rejected the deuterocanon's authority to establish doctrine but freely cited these books in his own theological writings. The various early Protestant confessions echoed this compromise position: the deuterocanon was not canonical, but it was still worthy of being read and could instruct the faithful, so long as its teachings agreed with the canonical books.

The Westminster Confession (1646) marked the decisive break. The deuterocanon was now declared to have "no authority in the Church of God" — no more authority than any "other human writing." This was far more radical than anything Luther or Calvin had said.

The Edinburgh Bible Society and the BFBS controversy (1813–1827) carried the logic to its conclusion. If the deuterocanon has no authority whatsoever, why include it in the Bible at all? It was "contaminating fellowship." It was "abetting the Church of Rome." It had to go.

And so it went. When Protestantism was young, the deuterocanon was seen as a kind of non-canonical Scripture that was good and useful to read. Today, the "Apocrypha" has been exiled from nearly all Protestant Bibles, neglected, and largely forgotten. As Michuta notes, "That's quite a change."⁶⁰

Three Factors Behind the Removal

When we look at the full history, three factors converge to explain how the deuterocanon disappeared from Protestant Bibles. None of them, I would suggest, constitutes a legitimate theological reason for removing books from the Bible.

1. Anti-Catholic Prejudice

This was the most powerful force driving the removal. The Edinburgh Bible Society's committee statements make this crystal clear. The deuterocanon was removed not because the Edinburgh committee had carefully studied the historical evidence and concluded these books were uninspired. It was removed because the Council of Trent had affirmed these books as canonical, and anything that Trent affirmed must be opposed. The committee explicitly described the deuterocanon's presence in Protestant Bibles as an instrument of "popish error and superstition."⁶¹

We should be honest about what this means. The deuterocanon was removed from the Bible not because the evidence demanded it but because of hatred for Catholicism. The same anti-Catholic sentiment that led to the "No-Popery" crusade in America, to the burning of Catholic churches in Philadelphia, and to generations of mutual suspicion between Catholics and Protestants — that same sentiment was the primary force behind the removal of the deuterocanon.

As a Protestant, I find this deeply troubling. We should never determine the canon of Scripture based on which church happens to affirm which books. The question is not whether Catholics accept these books. The question is whether the apostles and the early church accepted them — and as we have argued throughout this book, the evidence overwhelmingly says they did.

2. Economic Incentives

Shorter Bibles were cheaper to print. This is not a theological argument. It is a business calculation. Yet it was one of the decisive factors in the removal of the deuterocanon. From the early printers who produced "the new cut" Bibles without the Apocrypha to the BFBS's cost-cutting resolution, economics played a consistent role. As Woodward succinctly summarizes, Protestants abandoned the deuterocanon because of "cost, convenience, and Catholics."⁶²

Think about the implications. Books that the apostles read, that the church fathers quoted as Scripture, that the great ecumenical councils affirmed as canonical — these books were removed from the Bible to save money on paper and ink. I struggle to imagine a less theological reason for altering the canon of Scripture.

3. The Theological Momentum of the Westminster Confession

Westminster provided the theological framework that justified the removal. Its declaration that the deuterocanon is "no part of the canon" and has "no authority in the Church of God" made the removal seem not only permissible but obligatory. If these books truly have no more authority than any other piece of human writing, then why clutter the Bible with them?

But as we have shown, the Westminster Confession's position was itself a radical innovation — a departure not only from the Catholic and Orthodox traditions but from the earlier Protestant tradition as well. Luther, Calvin, and even the Thirty-Nine Articles had all acknowledged that the deuterocanon had some spiritual value. Westminster stripped it of everything. And once the theological ground had been prepared by Westminster, the economic and anti-Catholic forces could finish the job.

What the Reformers Would Have Thought

I think it is worth asking: what would Luther and Calvin have made of the BFBS decision?

Luther, whatever his reservations about the deuterocanon's canonical status, had never wanted to remove these books from the Bible. He thought they were "useful and good to read." He included them in his German Bible. He would have been horrified at the idea that a publishing society had decided to remove them entirely — especially a publishing society that claimed to be distributing the Bible as widely as possible while actually distributing a Bible that was missing a significant portion of what had always been included.

Calvin, too, would have been uncomfortable. He may have denied the deuterocanon's authority to confirm doctrine, but he had freely cited Sirach, Baruch, and other deuterocanonical books in his own Institutes of the Christian Religion. He would not have endorsed the idea that these books were merely "human writing" with no spiritual value whatsoever.

The irony is that the Reformers' compromise position — keeping the deuterocanon in the Bible but denying its authority — was unstable. Once you tell people that certain books have "no authority," it is only a matter of time before someone asks why those books are in the Bible at all. Luther's appendix was a halfway measure, and halfway measures tend not to last. The Reformers opened the door; the Puritans and the Bible societies walked through it.

The Self-Perpetuating Myth

Perhaps the most damaging consequence of the removal is the myth it created — a myth so widely believed among Protestants today that it has almost achieved the status of common knowledge.

The myth is this: "The Catholic Church added books to the Bible at the Council of Trent in 1546."

This claim is completely false, as we demonstrated in Chapter 28. Trent did not add anything. It merely reaffirmed the canon that the church had been using for over a millennium — the same canon that the councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397, 419) had ratified a thousand years before Trent. But the myth persists because most Protestants have no memory of a time when their own Bibles included these books. When a modern Protestant picks up a Catholic Bible and sees books that are unfamiliar — Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, 1 and 2 Maccabees — the natural conclusion is that these books must have been added. After all, they are not in the Protestant Bible, so they must not belong there. Right?

Wrong. They were removed — first by Luther (who placed them in an appendix), then by the Westminster Confession (which denied them any authority), and finally by the BFBS (which stopped printing them). But because that history has been forgotten, the myth of Catholic addition has replaced the reality of Protestant removal.

The ignorance is self-perpetuating. Because Protestants do not know about the deuterocanonical books, they never ask why these books are missing. Because they never ask, no one ever tells them the history. Because no one tells them the history, the myth goes unchallenged. And because the myth goes unchallenged, it becomes ever more deeply entrenched.

This is why a book like this one matters. The story needs to be told. Protestants need to know what happened to their Bible — who removed the books, when they were removed, and why. Only then can they make an informed decision about whether the removal was justified.

The Theological Implications

I want to close this chapter by drawing out the theological implications of the history we have traced. I believe they are profound.

First, the removal of the deuterocanon was not a theological decision. It was driven by anti-Catholic prejudice, economic incentives, and the political influence of Scottish Presbyterians within the BFBS. None of these constitutes a valid reason for altering the canon of Scripture. If we believe that the canon is a matter of deep theological importance — as every Protestant who appeals to sola Scriptura must believe — then the canon should be determined by evidence, not by prejudice, profit margins, or denominational politics.

Second, the removal had no ecumenical authority. The Council of Hippo (393), the Council of Carthage (397, 419), the Council of Florence (1442), and the Council of Trent (1546) all affirmed the deuterocanon as canonical Scripture. These were formal actions taken by duly constituted councils of the church — councils that included bishops, theologians, and scholars. The BFBS decision was made by a publishing society's board of directors. These two things are not even in the same category. Whatever one thinks of the authority of ecumenical councils, a business committee's vote on printing costs is not a legitimate basis for redefining the canon of Scripture.

Third, the removal contradicts the practice of the apostles and the early church. As we have argued throughout this book — especially in Chapters 6, 19, 20, and 26 — the apostles used the Septuagint as their Bible, and the Septuagint included the deuterocanonical books. The early church fathers quoted these books as Scripture. The councils affirmed them. If we want our Bible to reflect the Bible of the apostles and the early church, we need to restore the deuterocanon.

Fourth, the removal was unstable from the beginning. The Reformers' compromise — keeping the deuterocanon in the Bible while denying its authority — was inherently contradictory. If these books have no authority, why put them in the Bible? If they are "useful and good to read" (Luther), why remove them? If the Book of Homilies can call them "the infallible and undeceivable word of God" while the Thirty-Nine Articles say they cannot establish doctrine, something is seriously wrong with the theological framework. The instability of the Protestant position on the deuterocanon was a sign that the position itself was flawed.

Fifth, and most importantly, the removal impoverished the Protestant Bible. As we will argue in detail in the next chapter, the sixty-six-book Protestant Old Testament is missing crucial theological content — content that the New Testament presupposes. Without the Wisdom of Solomon, we lack the Old Testament's clearest teaching on the immortality of the soul and the conscious intermediate state. Without 2 Maccabees, we lack the developed theology of bodily resurrection and the most explicit Old Testament-era testimony to creation from nothing. Without 1 and 2 Maccabees, we have a four-hundred-year gap between Malachi and Matthew with no scriptural narrative. Without the deuterocanon, the bridge between the Testaments is missing several crucial spans.

The books that were removed to save money on paper were books that the church needed. The question is whether we have the courage to restore them.

Fair Hearing for the Other Side

In fairness, I should acknowledge the strongest arguments offered by those who defend the BFBS decision and the removal of the deuterocanon from Protestant Bibles.

Some argue that the BFBS was simply following the logic of the Reformation. If the deuterocanon is not inspired Scripture — as Luther, Calvin, and the Westminster Confession all affirmed — then there is no reason to include it in the Bible. The BFBS was simply being consistent where the Reformers had been inconsistent.

This argument has a certain logical force. But it assumes the very thing that needs to be proved — namely, that the deuterocanon is not inspired Scripture. As we have argued throughout this book, the evidence for the deuterocanon's inspiration is substantial. The apostles used these books. The church fathers quoted them as Scripture. The councils affirmed them. The New Testament contains numerous allusions to them. The fact that a group of sixteenth-century Reformers disagreed does not settle the question — especially when those Reformers were responding to polemical pressures (particularly the dispute over purgatory) rather than carefully weighing the full historical evidence.

Others argue that the BFBS decision was pragmatically justified. The mission of the Bible societies was to distribute Bibles as widely and cheaply as possible. Removing the deuterocanon reduced costs and made more Bibles available to more people. Isn't getting the Bible into more hands a good thing?

Yes, getting the Bible into more hands is a good thing. But getting an incomplete Bible into more hands raises serious questions. If the deuterocanon is part of God's inspired Word — as I believe the evidence strongly suggests — then distributing Bibles without these books is distributing an incomplete Bible. The mission of making Bibles widely available is not well served by making them incomplete.

Still others point to the genuine theological difficulties within the deuterocanon — the apparent historical inaccuracies in Judith, the use of 2 Maccabees 12 to support the doctrine of purgatory, and so on. These are legitimate concerns, and I have addressed them in the appropriate chapters (see especially Chapters 23 and 24). My response, in brief, is this: theological difficulties exist in the protocanonical books too. We do not reject Ecclesiastes because it seems to deny the afterlife (Eccl. 9:5), or Joshua because it records divine commands to annihilate entire populations, or the Psalms because they call for the dashing of babies against rocks (Ps. 137:9). Every book of the Bible contains passages that challenge us. The standard for canon cannot be "only books that present no theological difficulties" — because by that standard, no book of the Bible would survive.

Conclusion: Recovering the Lost Books

The story we have traced in this chapter is a story of loss. It is the story of how books that had been part of the Christian Bible for over eighteen centuries were gradually marginalized, stigmatized, and ultimately removed — driven out by a combination of anti-Catholic prejudice, Puritan theology, economic incentives, and institutional politics.

It is a story that most Protestants have never heard. And that silence is itself part of the problem. As long as Protestants remain ignorant of this history, they will continue to assume that their sixty-six-book Bible is the original Bible — the Bible of the apostles, the Bible of the early church, the Bible of all time. They will continue to believe the myth that "the Catholic Church added books at Trent." They will continue to miss the theological riches that the deuterocanon contains.

But the story can also be read as a story of hope. Because if these books were removed — if they were taken out of the Bible not by divine command but by human decision, driven by motives that were more political and economic than theological — then they can be restored. The deuterocanon was not lost because God withdrew it. It was lost because human beings removed it, for reasons that had nothing to do with its inspiration or its truth.

If the evidence shows that these books were part of the apostolic Bible — and I believe it does — then we who claim to follow the apostles should be willing to follow them here too. We should be willing to reconsider what the Reformers reconsidered, to question what the Puritans assumed, and to challenge the decisions that a Bible society's business committee made two hundred years ago.

In the next chapter, we will look at what we have lost — the theological gaps that the removal of the deuterocanon has left in the Protestant Old Testament. The cost of the BFBS's cost-cutting measure has been far greater than anyone imagined.

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