If I may add however, if I remember correctly, this wasn’t so much wanting to get rid of the books, but publishing companies wanting to save space and paper in the late 19th century. Also, I do not prefer to buy my Bibles with those books omitted, it is just the way it is nowadays. If i could have them in my protestant Bibles I would. In my opinion most protestants just simply don’t know about them.
That’s part of that. However, the Apocrypha section of both the Geneva Bible and the KJV were already being omitted by printers in the 17th century. There’s really been a disagreement between different denominations over the deuterocanonical books: the Church of England, while stressing in the Thirty-Nine Articles that “the other Books (as Hierome [St. Jerome] saith) the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine,” insisted that the ‘Apocrypha’ be at least retained in Bibles and be read in public liturgy. Puritans, however, such as the Hebraist Hugh Broughton (who is notably absent from the list of the translators of the KJV - he in fact became a harsh critic of the translation) inveighed against their very inclusion in Bibles. Broughton argued that “all who make the Apocrypha part of the Holy Bible make God the author of lying fables and vain speech.” John Rainolds, who was one of the translators, had given a series of 250 lectures in which he argued that the Apocrypha were uncanonical. That being said, the books were apparently still being widely read as popular literature even in Puritan circles.
The Geneva Bible (1560) did include an Apocrypha section as all Protestant Bibles at the time did, noting that they were useful “for knowledge of history and instruction of godly manners.” However, in 1630, volumes of the Geneva Bible were occasionally bound with the pages of the Apocrypha section excluded. Which is not surprising, given how that Bible was Puritan in character. In fact, the King James Version was commissioned
precisely because the ruling pro-government Anglicans, such as James I himself, disliked the Geneva Bible. It was because of the Geneva’s heavily-Calvinist and anti-monarchical supplementary material that he explicitly ordered the translators of the KJV to include no marginal interpretation of any kind, although that did not stop the translators from including some marginal notes limited to giving some useful information such as cross-references, possible alternative (usually more literal) ways of rendering a given word or passage, and clarifying some Biblical names or units of measurement or currency.
So basically the inclusion of the Apocrypha section on the KJV is itself a move against Puritans who protest their being in the Bible at all. Under the Puritan ascendancy of the 1640s, however, the Westminster Confession asserted that the Apocrypha were not “to be otherwise approved or made use of than other human writings.” In 1644 the Long Parliament forbade the reading of the Apocrypha in Church and in 1666 the first editions of the KJV without Apocrypha were bound. When the monarchy was restored, however, the Apocrypha had a comeback: it was printed in Bibles used for reading in churches and in some Bibles produced for private study.
The standardization of the text after 1769 together with the technological development of Stereotype printing made it possible to produce Bibles in large-print runs at very low unit prices. For commercial and charitable publishers, editions of the KJV without the Apocrypha reduced the cost, while having increased market appeal to non-Anglican Protestant readers. With the rise of Bible societies (which were after all at first, Protestant affairs), most editions have chosen to simply omit the Apocrypha section wholesale. In February 10, 1826, the British and Foreign Bible Society withdrew of subsidies for bible printing and dissemination, under the following resolution:
We beg leave to inform you that important reasons have induced the Committee of the British and Foreign Bible society to adopt the subjoined Resolution:—
“That the funds of the Society be applied to the printing and circulation of the Canonical Books of Scripture,** to the exclusion of those books, and parts of books, which are usually termed Apocryphal;** and that all copies printed, either entirely or in part, at the expense of the Society; and whether such copies consist of the whole or of any one or more of such books, be invariably issued bound; no other books whatever being bound with them: and further, that all money grants to societies or individuals be made only in conformity with the principle of this regulation.”
While the Committee of the British and Foreign Bible Society have adopted this Regulation for their own guidance, nothing is further from their intention than to interfere, in the smallest degree, with the religious views and opinions, or with the rites and usages, of foreign churches; —they respect that liberty of conscience in others which they themselves so happily enjoy.
The Committee of the British and Foreign Bible Society embrace this opportunity of assuring all their continental brethren of their most unfeigned Christian regard, and of their anxious desire to contribute as liberally as possible to the Foreign Societies consistently with their present Resolution; and they shall deem it their privilege and happiness invariably to maintain that pleasing bond of harmony and union which has so long and so beneficially subsisted between the British and Foreign Bible Society and the kindred Institutions of the Continent.
This decision really dealt a mortal blow to the inclusion of the deuterocanonical books, and thereafter the Apocrypha section disappeared from most Bibles on sale to the general public.
