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The King James Bible Had 80 Books · Theology Made Podcast

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  [music]
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  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Theology Made Podcast.
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  SPEAKER_00: I'm Jordan Vale.
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  SPEAKER_00: In today's episode, we're going to look at how the King James Bible had 80 books.
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  SPEAKER_00: More than likely, somewhere in your family, there's a King James Bible.
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  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's yours,
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  SPEAKER_00: or maybe it was your grandmother's,
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  SPEAKER_00: the black leather's gone soft at the corners,
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  SPEAKER_00: and if you open it up,
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  SPEAKER_00: there's a family tree inked inside the front cover in three different hands.
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  SPEAKER_00: For millions of Christians all over the world, this book is the fixed point.
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  SPEAKER_00: Translations come and go.
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  SPEAKER_00: The NIV updates itself.
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  SPEAKER_00: Somebody's always publishing a new study Bible.
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  SPEAKER_00: But the King James is the one that doesn't move.
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  SPEAKER_00: The 66 books, Genesis, Revelation, the Bible as it's always been.
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  SPEAKER_00: But open the cover of the original.
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  SPEAKER_00: Not your grandma's copy.
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  SPEAKER_00: The 1611.
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  SPEAKER_00: The actual first edition that came off the press with the king's authority on the title page.
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  SPEAKER_00: The one the 54 translators sweated over for seven years.
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  SPEAKER_00: Count the books.
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  SPEAKER_00: 80.
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  SPEAKER_00: Sitting between Malachi and Matthew,
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  SPEAKER_00: right where your copy jumps from the Old Testament to the New,
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  SPEAKER_00: the original King James Bible has a third section.
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  SPEAKER_00: Fourteen books,
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  SPEAKER_00: roughly 150 pages, books with names most Protestants have never heard read out loud.
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  SPEAKER_00: Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Syrac, the Maccabees.
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  SPEAKER_00: The translators put them there on purpose.
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  SPEAKER_00: Cross referenced them in the margins,
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  SPEAKER_00: and the Church of England scheduled them to be read in worship.
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  SPEAKER_00: For over 200 years, that's what a King James Bible was.
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  SPEAKER_00: Then in the 1820s, a committee in London voted, and the books vanished from the print.
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  SPEAKER_00: Nobody tore a page out of your grandmother's Bible.
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  SPEAKER_00: They just stopped printing a third of an inch of it.
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  SPEAKER_00: And within a generation, most people forgot that inch had ever existed.
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  SPEAKER_00: Today, we're going to look at what those books are,
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  SPEAKER_00: how they got there,
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  SPEAKER_00: the prison sentence once attached to leaving them out,
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  SPEAKER_00: and the businesslike decision that edited the most famous book in history.
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  SPEAKER_00: The missing section is called the Apocrypha.
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  SPEAKER_00: And before anything else, let's just meet the books.
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  SPEAKER_00: Because for a lot of Protestant listeners, you may not be that familiar with what they are.
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  SPEAKER_00: First, there's Tobit,
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  SPEAKER_00: and it's a road trip story with an angel in disguise and a demon and a faithful dog.
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  SPEAKER_00: It is one of the most charming tales in ancient Jewish literature.
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  SPEAKER_00: There's Judith,
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  SPEAKER_00: in which an Israelite widow talks her way into an enemy general's tent and leaves
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  SPEAKER_00: with his head in a doggy bag.
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  SPEAKER_00: There's the Wisdom of Solomon,
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  SPEAKER_00: which contains a passage describing the torture and execution of a righteous man
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  SPEAKER_00: who calls himself God's son.
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  SPEAKER_00: Written maybe a century before the crucifixion and which early Christians read with
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  SPEAKER_00: the hair standing up on their arms.
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  SPEAKER_00: There's Sirach also called Ecclesiasticus, 51 chapters of Proverbs from a Jerusalem sage.
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  SPEAKER_00: And there are additions to Daniel including the story of Susanna.
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  SPEAKER_00: Where the young Daniel conducts history's first recorded cross-examination
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  SPEAKER_00: and catches two lying witnesses contradicting each other.
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  SPEAKER_00: And there are the books of the Maccabees,
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  SPEAKER_00: which tells the story of the Jewish revolt against the Greek Empire.
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  SPEAKER_00: The desecration of the temple,
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  SPEAKER_00: its rededication, and the origin of the festival Jews still celebrate as Hanukkah.
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  SPEAKER_00: Hold on to that one.
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  SPEAKER_00: We're going to come back to that at the end.
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  SPEAKER_00: And these books were written by Jews mostly in the last few centuries before Christ.
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  SPEAKER_00: And they traveled inside the Septuagint,
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  SPEAKER_00: the Greek Old Testament that was the Bible of the Apostles and the early church.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Hebrew Bible that the rabbis standardized did not include them.
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  SPEAKER_00: So from the beginning,
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  SPEAKER_00: the church held a library with a seam in it,
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  SPEAKER_00: and Christians argued about that seam for 1,500 years.
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  SPEAKER_00: Jerome, translating the Vulgate around the year 400,
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  SPEAKER_00: he drew the line that we would hear forever.
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  SPEAKER_00: These books are read in the church,
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  SPEAKER_00: as he said,
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  SPEAKER_00: for edification of the people,
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  SPEAKER_00: but they're outside the Hebrew canon and shouldn't settle doctrine on their own.
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  SPEAKER_00: Augustine counted them in,
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  SPEAKER_00: church councils listed them,
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  SPEAKER_00: the Vulgate carried them to every corner of Europe for a thousand years.
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  SPEAKER_00: Whatever the arguments,
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  SPEAKER_00: no Christian Bible anyone actually held in the early years admitted them.
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  SPEAKER_00: Ever.
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  SPEAKER_00: And here's where the story might surprise you.
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  SPEAKER_00: Because a lot of people assumed the Reformation threw the Apocrypha out.
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  SPEAKER_00: It didn't.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Reformation relocated it.
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  SPEAKER_00: When Luther published his complete German Bible in 1534,
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  SPEAKER_00: he gathered these books out of their scattered Old Testament positions
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  SPEAKER_00: and he set them in a section of their own between the Testaments under a heading
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  SPEAKER_00: that you could say is a masterpiece of theological precision, Apocrypha.
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  SPEAKER_00: These books are not held equal to the Holy Scriptures and yet are profitable and good to read.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's almost like Luther was going to become a lawyer beforehand.
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  SPEAKER_00: They're not canon, but they're not garbage.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's a third category and a bound in one.
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  SPEAKER_00: And that became the Protestant signature.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Geneva Bible, the Puritan's own beloved translation, included the Apocrypha.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Church of England wrote the position into its doctrinal charter,
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  SPEAKER_00: The Church reads these books for examples of life and instruction of manners,
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  SPEAKER_00: yet doesn't use them to establish doctrine.
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  SPEAKER_00: That's Jerome's ancient distinction carried out.
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  SPEAKER_00: So when King James commissioned his translation in 1604,
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  SPEAKER_00: there was no question about the Apocrypha's inclusion.
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  SPEAKER_00: A whole company of translators,
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  SPEAKER_00: the Second Cambridge Company,
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  SPEAKER_00: seven scholars, was assigned to it as their entire job.
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  SPEAKER_00: The 1611 verse edition presented 80 books and the original margins stitched
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  SPEAKER_00: the sections together with cross-references pointing readers from Hebrews 11,
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  SPEAKER_00: the heroes of faith, to the martyrdom in Maccabees.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Church of England's lectionary appointed passages from Wisdom and Sirach
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  SPEAKER_00: to be read in October services.
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  SPEAKER_00: This wasn't an appendix tolerated through gritted teeth.
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  SPEAKER_00: They had it as a part of the formation of God's people.
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  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
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  SPEAKER_00: That means that in 1611,
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  SPEAKER_00: omitting the section that your current copy omits was a jailable offense.
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  SPEAKER_00: Now you want to see the books working in a real Protestant soul?
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  SPEAKER_00: Here's one.
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  SPEAKER_00: John Bunyan.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Puritan's Puritan,
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  SPEAKER_00: author of Pilgrim's Progress,
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  SPEAKER_00: records in his autobiography,
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  SPEAKER_00: the darkest season of his life,
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  SPEAKER_00: when he was nearly drowning in despair about his salvation,
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  SPEAKER_00: a sentence dropped into his mind with saving force.
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  SPEAKER_00: Consider the generations of old.
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  SPEAKER_00: Did ever any trust in God and was confounded.
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  SPEAKER_00: The words held him up for a year.
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  SPEAKER_00: And he tore through his Bible, hunting for them, but he couldn't find them.
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  SPEAKER_00: But finally he found the verse,
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  SPEAKER_00: and it was in Sirach, in the Apocrypha, and Bunyan admits it somewhat daunted him.
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  SPEAKER_00: But then he reasoned through it,
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  SPEAKER_00: the sentence was the sum and substance of the promise anyway,
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  SPEAKER_00: and it had done him good, and he blessed God for it.
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  SPEAKER_00: The rope that pulled Bunyan out of the pit was anchored in the section your Bible no longer has.
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  SPEAKER_00: So what happened?
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  SPEAKER_00: Well, there were two pressures.
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  SPEAKER_00: One was slow, and one was sudden.
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  SPEAKER_00: The slow one was the Puritan conviction.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Westminster Confession of 1646.
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  SPEAKER_00: It hardened the line past Jerome and past Luther.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Apocrypha, declared, is of no other authority than any other human writings.
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  SPEAKER_00: On that view, binding it inside the Bible's cover wasn't a gracious middle option.
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  SPEAKER_00: It was contamination.
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  SPEAKER_00: Puritan-leaning printers began producing Bibles without it.
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  SPEAKER_00: Regardless of the prison threats.
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  SPEAKER_00: And through the 1700s,
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  SPEAKER_00: the 66 book edition became more common,
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  SPEAKER_00: though the 80 book Bible remained the standard church edition.
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  SPEAKER_00: So both existed.
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  SPEAKER_00: The question was which one the future would mass produce.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the sudden pressure answered that.
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  SPEAKER_00: And it came from a very unlikely space.
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  SPEAKER_00: A charity.
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  SPEAKER_00: In 1804, the British and Foreign Bible Society was founded with a great goal.
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  SPEAKER_00: Cheap Bibles for the whole world.
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  SPEAKER_00: And it became the largest scripture printing operation on earth.
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  SPEAKER_00: When the Society funded Bibles for continental Europe where Lutherans
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  SPEAKER_00: and Catholic readers expected the Apocrypha,
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  SPEAKER_00: it included the Apocrypha, as the Bible had for 1800 years.
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  SPEAKER_00: But the Scottish supporters revolted.
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  SPEAKER_00: Led by Edinburgh's auxiliary and the formidable Robert Haldane,
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  SPEAKER_00: they argued that a Bible Society had no business spending a shilling
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  SPEAKER_00: of sacred donations printing what Westminster called merely human writings.
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  SPEAKER_00: Pamphlets flew back and forth for years.
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  SPEAKER_00: The dispute even got a name, the Apocrypha Controversy.
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  SPEAKER_00: And it nearly tore the society apart.
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  SPEAKER_00: So, in 1826 and 1827,
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  SPEAKER_00: the London Committee adopted the policy that re-edited the world's bookshelf.
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  SPEAKER_00: The society's funds would never again print, bind, or distribute the Apocrypha anywhere.
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  SPEAKER_00: The American Bible Society matched the policy in 1828.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Edinburgh Committee seceded anyway, on the principle that London had been too slow about it.
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  SPEAKER_00: Now, think about what those committees controlled.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Bible Societies were the industrial engine of 19th century scripture.
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  SPEAKER_00: Stamping out Bibles by the millions for parlors, schoolrooms, missionaries, hotel nightstands.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then commercial printers followed the same idea, but for their own reasons.
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  SPEAKER_00: 14 fewer books meant cheaper paper, lighter shipping, fatter margins.
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  SPEAKER_00: And within a generation or two,
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  SPEAKER_00: the 66 book King James wasn't a variant, it was simply the Bible.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the 80 book original became a curiosity for rare book rooms.
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  SPEAKER_00: No council ruled, no doctrine was debated and decided.
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  SPEAKER_00: The most consequential edit in the history of the English Bible was,
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  SPEAKER_00: at its bottom, a funding policy.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then, as it does, cultural amnesia did the rest.
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  SPEAKER_00: So thoroughly that today,
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  SPEAKER_00: when a Protestant encounters a Catholic Bible,
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  SPEAKER_00: the instinctive reaction is that Rome added books.
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  SPEAKER_00: The publishing history, though, shows it was the other way around.
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  SPEAKER_00: Nothing was added in 1546 or any other year of Catholic counting.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Apocrypha or the Deuterocanon had been writing inside Christian Bibles,
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  SPEAKER_00: including Protestant ones, all along.
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  SPEAKER_00: The subtraction was the recent event and it happened in London and New York in
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  SPEAKER_00: the age of the steam press.
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  SPEAKER_00: Let me be straight about what I'm arguing for and what I'm not.
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  SPEAKER_00: Because this episode, it walks a canon line, and I want to keep that line as clean as I can.
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  SPEAKER_00: I'm not telling you the Apocrypha of Scripture.
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  SPEAKER_00: I'm not telling you it isn't.
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  SPEAKER_00: That question divides Rome, Constantinople, and Geneva to this day.
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  SPEAKER_00: Catholics and Orthodox receive these books as Deuterocanotical Scripture.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the Reformation churches confessed otherwise.
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  SPEAKER_00: I'm not going to settle in 15 minutes what they couldn't settle in 500 years.
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  SPEAKER_00: Every tradition has its reasons and those reasons matter.
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  SPEAKER_00: But here's what I am saying.
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  SPEAKER_00: There were three historic positions and only two survived.
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  SPEAKER_00: Canon, says Rome.
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  SPEAKER_00: Merely human, says Westminster.
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  SPEAKER_00: And in between is to the position that owned English Christianity for two centuries,
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  SPEAKER_00: the position of Jerome and Luther and the King James translators himself.
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  SPEAKER_00: Not canon,
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  SPEAKER_00: and yet profitable and good to read,
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  SPEAKER_00: bound into the family Bible where you'd actually read it.
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  SPEAKER_00: The middle shelf is the thing the 1820s demolished.
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  SPEAKER_00: And as modern Protestants,
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  SPEAKER_00: we didn't inherit a verdict against these books,
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  SPEAKER_00: We inherited a blank where the books used to be,
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  SPEAKER_00: and blanks don't teach you anything.
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  SPEAKER_00: And I think that blank has a cost you can measure in reading comprehension.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Apocrypha covers the 400 years between Malachi and Matthew,
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  SPEAKER_00: the years that built the world Jesus walked into.
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  SPEAKER_00: Why are there Pharisees?
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  SPEAKER_00: Why is there a synagogue in every corner and a Greek-speaking empire and Herod?
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  SPEAKER_00: Why in John chapter 10 is Jesus at the temple for something called the Feast
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  SPEAKER_00: of Dedication in winter?
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  SPEAKER_00: The feast is Hanukkah and its origin story is told in 1 Maccabees in
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  SPEAKER_00: the temple re-education of 164 BC.
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  SPEAKER_00: Jesus kept a holiday whose backstory the Bible society's unbound.
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  SPEAKER_00: A Protestant reader hits John 10.22 with no way to know what the festival is while
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  SPEAKER_00: the explanation sat between Malachi and Matthew in every English Bible
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  SPEAKER_00: from Tyndale's successors to your grandmother's grandmother.
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  SPEAKER_00: The translators of 1611 never intended that blindfold.
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  SPEAKER_00: They cross-referenced these books because they assumed their readers would have them.
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  SPEAKER_00: We kept the translators every comma in the 66, but discarded the middle shelf.
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  SPEAKER_00: The 80 book King James still exists, by the way.
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  SPEAKER_00: You could buy one tonight, probably on Amazon or from Cambridge or Oxford.
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  SPEAKER_00: These same presses that have printed it since the beginning.
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  SPEAKER_00: They never stopped.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's usually labeled with Apocrypha.
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  SPEAKER_00: So here's a proposal for those of you who are curious.
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  SPEAKER_00: Why not fill the missing shelf?
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  SPEAKER_00: Start where the King James Translators' own church calendar started people.
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  SPEAKER_00: Read Sirach for the Proverbs,
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  SPEAKER_00: or Tobit for the story, or 1 Maccabees for the history under John 10.
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  SPEAKER_00: Read them the way Luther's heading invited,
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  SPEAKER_00: and the 39 articles invited,
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  SPEAKER_00: and, after a little push and pull, Bunyan finally decided to.
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  SPEAKER_00: Profitable, good to read, weighed against the canon, rather than inside it.
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  SPEAKER_00: Because whatever you conclude about those 14 books, one thing is now on the record.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Bible that has never changed,
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  SPEAKER_00: the fixed point,
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  SPEAKER_00: the one your family swore by,
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  SPEAKER_00: is itself the product of an edit and a recent one made by a committee for reasons
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  SPEAKER_00: that has much to do with pamphlets and printing budgets as with the Word of God.
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  SPEAKER_00: So it turns out even the King James has a history.
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  SPEAKER_00: Everything does.
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  SPEAKER_00: If you found this helpful or encouraging,
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  SPEAKER_00: please like and subscribe on whatever platform you're listening on and share it with
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: a friend.