I’m in the middle of doing some personal research on this topic. I’m curious to know exactly what is in the books, and why the protestants removed them. I assume there are Catholic teachings that come from specifically from those books and the teachings didn’t agree with protestant teaching so the protestants removed them. If I had to guess.
Well there’s really a couple of things I think you need to distinguish there to understand.
First, the reformers like Luther and Calvin didn’t remove them, though they moved them, though they weren’t the first to do so.
Luther labelled them for instance as not scripture but good to read. He continued to read from them after his bible came out.
The separate section was useful if you were going to put bibles in a lot of people’s hands that didn’t have a lot of education. Those in the Catholic Church with a lot of education distinguished them quite easily.
For instance in Luther’s Glossa ordiaria which he received from his Bishop, a book used for hundreds of years by the Catholic Church to help in interpretation, it made the clear statement, at the beginning of each such book that it was not authoritative scripture.
The Vulgate called the apocryphal books.
The Latin translations that came out at the time of Luther varied in their treatment, either putting them in a separate section, or labelling them as the glossa ordinaria did as not scripture. One Italian translation went so far as to exclude them entirely.
So anyway, the reformers kept them, but put them in a separate section to help distinguish them.
The removal came years later, the groups that seemed really opposed to them were the Puritans and the Baptists. But in any case, most bibles included them until in the 1800’s the Bible societies with the excuse of needing to keep the cost low in printing bibles took them out.
Marketing today is probably still a big reason they are usually left out. It’s difficult to print a good bible of solid construction in a study bible format and include them and get it to fit inside the popular size and price ranges.
So anyway, it’s hard to cut through the rhetoric and the motivated history sometimes. But the source of the reformers treatment of the deuteros really was the Catholic Church. One may argue they were wrong, but it actually was the dominant position among the learned of the time. A small group of bishops, many who got their bishophrics by simony, supposedly overruled the learned at Trent.
But even that is actually in dispute. If you get ahold of Jedin’s History of the Council of Trent, you will find that early in Trent’s proceedings they voted not to decide the authority of the deuterocanoncals. Later they decided what to include in the canon. So you end up with the books decided, but with the authority of them still an open question.
If you think being included automatically means same authority, I would direct you to examine Orthodoxy where even though they are insistent they are in the canon of scripture, they are not used for doctrine. So you see for instance Orthodoxy repeatedly condemn Catholicism for some of their doctrines like purgatory.
In any case, the idea that the books were removed because they back up Catholic doctrines really doesn’t hold much water. Catholicism only gets some support for a couple of doctrines from them. Most of what they teach are still ignored for doctrine even in Catholicism.
