A Printer's Decision

The Bible Is Not What You Think It Is — Part 3

It came up casually, the way these things often do. We were talking about Scripture, about the richness of the biblical witness, when someone in the room made a dismissive comment about “those Catholics and all those extra books they added.” She said it with confidence, the way you say something you have always known to be true and never thought to question. She meant no harm. She was simply repeating what she had been told, what her tradition had passed down to her as settled fact.

I had to stop her gently. Not because the Apocrypha needs defending. But because the history she had inherited was wrong, and she deserved to know the truth of it.

Here is what your great-great-grandfather’s Bible looked like.

The King James Bible, first printed in 1611, contained eighty books. Not sixty-six. Eighty. Tucked between the Old and New Testaments was a collection of writings known as the Apocrypha, books like Tobit, Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon, and First and Second Maccabees. These were not Catholic additions. They were not smuggled in by Rome. They were simply part of the Bible as English-speaking Protestants received it, read it, and passed it down for generation after generation.

For two hundred and seventy-four years, the King James Bible included these books. The Pilgrims who crossed the Atlantic carried them. The Puritans who shaped early American religious life read them. The great-great-grandparents of the woman in my congregation owned a Bible that contained every one of them. This was not a Catholic Bible. It was the Protestant Bible, the only Bible most English-speaking believers had ever known.

So what happened?

In 1826, the National Bible Society of Scotland sent a petition to the British and Foreign Bible Society. The request was straightforward and entirely practical: stop printing the Apocrypha. The reasoning had nothing to do with theology. It had nothing to do with the authority of the texts, their inspiration, or their doctrinal content. The reasoning was this: printing fewer pages made Bibles cheaper to produce, and cheaper Bibles could reach more people.

It was a cost-benefit analysis. A ledger decision. The British and Foreign Bible Society agreed, and from that point forward their funds would no longer support the printing of Apocryphal books anywhere. By 1885, the Apocrypha had been formally removed from English Bible printings. Two hundred and seventy-four years after the original King James Bible had included them, they were gone.

Not because a council of theologians had studied the question and reached a considered conclusion. Not because new evidence had emerged about the texts themselves. Not because the Church had discerned, after careful prayer and reflection, that these books did not belong. They were removed because binding and printing one hundred extra pages cost money, and the societies distributing Bibles needed to keep costs down.

A printer’s financial decision became, within a generation or two, evangelical doctrine.

Here is how quickly myth hardens into certainty. Within decades of the removal, Protestants had begun calling these books “Catholic additions.” The accident became tradition. The tradition became conviction. The conviction became the kind of settled, unquestioned assumption that gets passed down in congregations without anyone ever stopping to ask where it came from. By the time the woman in my congregation made her comment, she was not expressing a theological position she had studied and embraced. She was repeating a story that had been told to her as fact, a story that had its roots not in Scripture, not in Church history, not in theological discernment, but in a nineteenth-century printing budget.

This is worth sitting with. Not because the Apocrypha’s place in the canon needs to be relitigated here. That is a genuine and complex question, and it is not the point of this post. The point is something simpler and more unsettling: how much of what we hold as ancient and settled turns out, under examination, to be surprisingly recent and surprisingly accidental?

The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, as we have been exploring over at Arrow Song, was written in 1978. The Apocrypha was removed from Protestant Bibles in 1885. The doctrine that every home should have a Bible, and that Christianity depends on access to one, is a twentieth-century invention born of the printing press. Layer by layer, what feels like the eternal and unchanging shape of the faith turns out to have a history, a specific, dateable, often quite mundane history.

None of this should shake your faith. If anything, it should deepen it. Because the foundation was never the canon as currently printed, never the doctrinal statement signed in a Chicago hotel, never the edition of the Bible on your nightstand. The foundation is Christ. And Christ was the foundation long before any of these decisions were made, and He will remain the foundation long after every human institution that has gathered around His name has come and gone.

What the woman in my congregation needed to hear was not a lecture on the Apocrypha. It was a reminder that our tradition is human, that human things have human histories, and that knowing those histories honestly is not a threat to the faith. It is a gift to it.

The book has a story. It is a remarkable story, full of faithful transmission and providential preservation across the centuries. But it is a human story, carried by human hands, shaped by human decisions, some of them theological and some of them financial. Knowing that does not diminish Scripture. It restores it to its proper place, as the sacred, Spirit-carried witness to the One who stands behind it, before it, and infinitely beyond it.

Hold the book humbly. And hold the One it points to with everything you have.

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