KJV Bible with Deuterocanonicals

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Without getting into the long history of the deutero-canonicals, I can say that they were finally canonized by the Council of Trent. Unsurprisingly, the “reformers” of the time rejected them.

It is very convenient for Protestants and other Evangelicals to reject them, because they support specifically Catholic doctrine such as praying for the dead. In their minds, we are “adding books” to the Bible.
 
And I would retort:
“Hard to ‘add’ books that were written and have been in use by the Hebrews since long before Christ. Books that were in use by the early Christian community. Books that were part of a collection which our Lord and the Apostles quoted from and which make up 91% of the OT quotes in the NT.”
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Pretty hard to do that.

For those who remain obstinately unconvinced:

 
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Thanks for the article. Not all Protestants avoid the Apocrypha/Deuterocanon however.

The Church of England has always used the Apocrypha. Lectionaries from all Books of Common Prayer from 1549 to the current 1662 BCP and the modern Common Worship Lectionary contain readings from it.

The BCP canticle ‘Benedicite omnia opera’ sung at Morning Prayer is taken from The Song of the Three Holy Children. CofE Canons are clear that Bibles used in its churches must contain the Apocrypha.

Just recently I attended a service held at a Methodist/United Reformed ecumenical partnership church and one of the readings was from the Deuterocanon.
 
As I have already mentioned somewhere on the board, I am a converted Methodist. The pulpit Bible of the United Methodist Church of my youth (in the 1960s and 1970s) contained the deuterocanonical books. I can’t remember for sure if they were in a separate “Apocrypha” section, but I think they were.
 
Already a LOT of good answers here. 😀

I own several KJV bibles (all fairly old) and I can tell you, my opinion, is that like was already said by po18guy, it is a good translation: The RSV-CE is based on it. However, like he says, the language is kind of TOO archaic. The D/R bible by contrast, which predates the KJV by a few years, went through some updates (in 1750) then again in the later editions, so that the text, when compared to the KJV, is easier to follow and read. But how can you improve on the KJV Psalm 23? And there are other passages that will live on as English classics. (like all of the KJV bible passages found in Handel’s Messiah.)

Regarding the Deuterocanon; I have made a bit of a study on why it suddenly went missing from Protestant Bibles. The main culprit was the Bible Societies of both England and the USA, in the early 1800’s taking hard line, anti-Catholic stand which struck them from their bibles, not just for commercial reasons (which itself was a good argument in their view,) but also for the sake of various fundamentalist sects which the Bible Societies catered too. But oddly, because the KJV was the “authorized” Bible in English, THAT was the Bible which all of the Bible Societies printed in super-abundance back then, minus the deuterocanon. Eventually it became controversial to even include them in the KJV bible, despite the fact, that it had ALWAYS been included historically speaking before.

Interestingly enough, the original KJV, at least for the first couple of hundred years, had even MORE books in its deuterocanon (Apocrypha) than even Catholics recognize, like Esdras 3 & 4, which used to be included with Latin Vulgate Bibles! 😀

My own feeling is that the KJV bible is a little too archaic for devotional reading (since I wasn’t brought up with that text) so I prefer the D/R bible.
 
The first consideration when translating the Bible is what text to translate from. The Catholic Church at the time chose the Latin text of the Vulgate, which does not exactly say “original text.”

The Reformers tried to go back to the original texts. That meant the Greek NT and the Hebrew OT. The Hebrew OT, known as the Masoretic text, did not have the deuterocanonicals. So a decision had to be made about including them because their Hebrew original did not have them. They did not remove those books ever, just did not find them in their original Hebrew.

They did find them in standard Bibles, particularly the Greek Septuagint and the Latin Vulgate. (though St Jerome was wary of them, they were included). So they added these texts from a different source to their translation of the Masoretic text, and kept them separate in part to show they were not from the same source.
 
Dovekin said:
They did not remove those books ever, just did not find them in their original Hebrew.
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I think it must also be remembered that Protestants considered the deuterocanon to be Holy, just not inspired, and therefore not proper for proving points of religion. So they were always on shaky ground with Protestants.

But the KJV bible’s notes were mainly restricted to alternate readings of words, and cross references. The idea of heavily annotated Bibles was mainly a Catholic thing (with the first D/R Bible,) because English speaking Catholics were a tiny minority in a surging sea of Protestant propaganda. Anyway, those KJV cross references often refer back to the Deuterocanon books! So in the “high church” Anglican religion, they remained integral to the Bible, at least up until the early 19th c.

The Bible Societies’ bibles were published without any notes or cross references (as well as omitting the deuterocanon,) in order to be as free from controversy as possible to satisfy the greatest percentage of Chrisitian Protestants. That is not to say that there weren’t still plenty of publishers of Protestant Bibles, that still felt free to include the deuterocanon, and even copious notes. Mathew Carey in the US was one major bible publisher, whose early 19th century bibles from the Jeffersonian period always included the deuterocanon, and the standard KJV notes.
 
AmbroseSJ said:
But the KJV bible’s notes were mainly restricted to alternate readings of words, and cross references.
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The Archbishop of Canterbury, Richard Bancroft, sent out a concise set of instructions to the “companies” of translators, including these two:
  1. No marginal notes at all to be affixed, but only for the explanation of the Hebrew or Greek words, which cannot without some circumlocution so briefly and fitly be expressed in the text.
  2. Such quotations of places to be marginally set down, as shall serve for the fit reference of one Scripture to another.
 
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