"Readers may wonder why there are 80 books in the King James Bible instead of the conventional 66 in modern translations. The King James of 1611 included the 14 Apocryphal books for the first 274 years of its publication. There were exeptions to including the Apocrypha but those were few in number. In fact Bishop Abbot, a member of the original translation commitee, worried that some popular publisher may exclude the Apocrypha. In 1615 he warned of a penalty of one year in jail to any who printed the King James Bible without the Apocrypha. The 14 Apocryphal books were part of the Greek Sebtuagint, a greek translation of the 2nd century B.C. that the New Testement Writers and Jesus quoted. The early church for 360 years considered it inspired. Jerome questioned it's inspiration because it was not originally written in hebrew but it was part of the bible until 1885 when the British and Foreign Bible Society excluded it from the Revised Version. Its only been in the past 110 years that the 14 Apocryphal books were excluded from the Bible. Some may question the credentials of well intentioned men who took that record of history from the church..."
|
