Publisher's Synopsis
Apocrypha comes from the Greek and means "hidden." The books of the Apocrypha were not available to St. Jerome in Hebrew when he created the Latin Vulgate for the Roman Church in the late 4th century. Thus he was the first to call them Apocryphal. Martin Luther refered to these texts as "Aprocrypha, that is books which are not to be esteemed like the holy Scriptures, and yet which are useful and good to read." In 1546 at the Council of Trent, the Catholic Church reaffirmed these texts which were part of the Latin Vulgate with a decree concerning the canonical scriptures. In the 19th century, these books were completely dropped from Protestant Bibles but remain in Catholic Scripture. Here are the books of the Apocrypha originally included in the King James Bible of 1611 printed with modernized spellings and a historical introduction.
