I’d like to point something out right quick…Protestants are extremely consistent in affirming the same 27 books of the NT canon, but we’re also awfully consistent in excluding the deuterocanon and maintaining that all that mess is apocryphal.
Your protestant grandfathers also wanted to remove some NT books. But later changed their minds.
As for the protestant OT, both protestant and catholic bibles were generally the same till about 1820 or so. The exclusion of the DC books came about because of the desire to save money on printing costs, starting with the KJV:
forum.chnetwork.org/index.php/topic,11538.0.html
The deletion of the Deuterocanonical books in the King James Version (which originally included them) was not the work of any denominational authorities. Instead, it came about because the printers contracted to print copies of the Authorized Version were restricted in the amount they could charge for a Bible. The printers noted that Protestants generally, and the majority of Church of England adherents in particular, following the lead of Martin Luther and the Lutherans in Germany, did not seem to consider the Deuterocanonicals (which non-Catholics preferred to call Apocrypha, or “doubtful”) divinely inspired. They then proceeded to cut those pages out of the copies they printed, thereby reducing the amount of material and labor required and increasing their profit. Few complaints were registered, and the custom of leaving the “Apocryphal books” out of the King James Version was de facto established.
handsonapologetics.com/King_James_Bible.htm
Of the 227 printings of the Bible between 1632 and 1826, about 40% of Protestant Bibles contained the “Apocrypha.” The Apocrypha Controversy of the early 1800’s enabled English Bible Societies to flood the bible-buying market with Apocrypha-less Protestant Bibles and in 1885 the “Apocrypha” was officially removed with the advent of the Revised Standard Version, which replaced the King James Version.
It is hard to pin point the exact date where the King James Bible no longer contained the “Apocrypha.” It is clear that later editions of the KJV removed the “Apocrypha” appendix, but they continued to include cross-references to the “Apocrypha” until they too (like the Geneva Bible) were removed as well. Why were they removed? Was it do to over-crowded margins? The Anglican scholar William H. Daubney points out the obvious:
“These objectionable omissions [of the cross-references] were made after the custom arose of publishing Bibles without the Apocrypha. These apparently profess to be what they are not, entire copies of the Authorized Version … 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.” [The Use of the Apocrypha In the Christian Church (London: C. J. Clay and Sons, 1900), 17]
What was the inconvenient tale these cross-references told? They showed that the so-called Apocrypha actually plays a much greater role that most modern Protestants are willing to admit. Moreover, the cross-references showed that the church believed that knowledge of the so-called “Apocrypha” and their use in the New Testament benefited Christians who wished to understand the Bible. Sadly today, many Protestants use the King James Bible have been handed on to them in an unaltered and uncompromised form. The reality is that its contents had undergone several substantial changes beginning with Martin Luther’s gathering together the Deuterocanon and placing it in an “Apocrypha” appendix and later when that appendix (and its cross-references) were removed altogether from Protestant Bibles.
