The books removed from the Bible are, in the most common sense, the fourteen books of the Apocrypha — Tobit, Judith, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, Baruch, 1 and 2 Maccabees, 1 and 2 Esdras, and several shorter works — which were printed in the original 1611 King James Version but dropped from most Protestant Bibles during the nineteenth century. They were never destroyed or outlawed; they were set aside in stages, as early lists such as the Council of Laodicea (c. 363 AD) and Athanasius’ Easter letter of 367 AD drew narrower boundaries, and as Protestant publishers eventually stopped printing them. Other traditions kept them: Catholic and Orthodox Bibles still contain most of these books, and the Ethiopian Orthodox canon traditionally counts 81 books — including 1 Enoch and Jubilees.
When people ask which books were “removed,” they almost always mean the Apocrypha — called the deuterocanonical books in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles. These fourteen works sat between the Old and New Testaments in the 1611 King James Version, exactly where English readers had found them for generations. Here is the complete list.
| Book | What it is |
|---|---|
| 1 Esdras | A Greek retelling of Ezra’s story, famous for the contest before King Darius over what is strongest — wine, the king, women, or truth. |
| 2 Esdras | A haunting apocalypse of seven visions, written after Jerusalem’s fall, that asks why God allows the righteous to suffer. |
| Tobit | A family adventure in which young Tobias travels with the archangel Raphael — in disguise — to heal his blind father. |
| Judith | The story of a widow who walks into an enemy camp and beheads the general Holofernes to save her people. |
| Additions to Esther | Six Greek passages that add prayers — and the name of God, absent from the Hebrew text — to the book of Esther. |
| Wisdom of Solomon | A Greek-era meditation on justice, immortality, and Lady Wisdom, written in Solomon’s voice. |
| Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) | The longest surviving wisdom book of ancient Israel — practical counsel from the Jerusalem sage Jesus ben Sirach, c. 180 BC. |
| Baruch (with the Letter of Jeremiah) | Confession, consolation, and a sharp satire against idols, attributed to the prophet Jeremiah’s scribe. |
| Prayer of Azariah & Song of the Three | The hymn the three young men sing inside Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace — an addition to Daniel 3. |
| Susanna | A courtroom drama in which young Daniel cross-examines two false accusers and saves an innocent woman. |
| Bel and the Dragon | Daniel as detective, exposing the priests of Bel and the serpent-idol of Babylon as frauds. |
| Prayer of Manasseh | A short, moving prayer of repentance placed in the mouth of Judah’s most notorious king. |
| 1 Maccabees | The sober war chronicle of the Maccabean revolt — the events behind Hanukkah. |
| 2 Maccabees | A theological retelling of the same revolt, with the era’s most vivid accounts of martyrdom and resurrection hope. |
Strictly speaking, “removed” compresses a long story. These books belonged to the Septuagint — the Greek translation of the Jewish scriptures that the earliest Christians read and quoted — but not to the Hebrew Bible as it was later standardized. That gap between the Greek and Hebrew collections is the fault line running beneath every canon debate since.
The fourteen books above are only the best-known layer. Other ancient Jewish and Christian works were treated as scripture in some churches and never entered Western Bibles at all:
One caution for collectors: the Book of Baruch of the Gnostics — a lost second-century work that survives in quotations by the church father Hippolytus — shares a name with the biblical Baruch but belongs to an entirely different, Gnostic world of thought. Reading them side by side is one of the fastest ways to feel how wide the ancient religious landscape really was.
Nearly all of these works were written in the Second Temple period — roughly the six centuries between the return from Babylonian exile and the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD. It was one of the most creative eras in religious history: Jewish writers produced wisdom collections, court tales, war chronicles, and sweeping apocalypses, many of which circulated in the Septuagint alongside Genesis and Isaiah.
For a long time skeptics dismissed these books as late Christian inventions. The Dead Sea Scrolls ended that argument. Among the scrolls, scholars identified Tobit in both Aramaic and Hebrew, Sirach in Hebrew, the Letter of Jeremiah in Greek, and numerous copies of 1 Enoch and Jubilees — physical proof that Jewish communities were copying and reading these texts as living scripture generations before Christianity began.
The complete 88-book Ethiopian canon — every excluded book, restored into clear modern English.
Get The Complete 88-Book Ethiopian Bible →30-day money-back guarantee · Instant digital deliveryThere was no single meeting where church leaders voted books out of the Bible. The canon formed slowly, over centuries, through regional councils, influential letters, and — in the final act — publishing decisions.
The Council of Laodicea (c. 363 AD) was a regional council in Asia Minor that ruled only canonical books should be read aloud in church. The list preserved with its canons is one of the earliest surviving attempts at a fixed table of contents — and it left out nearly all of the books above. It did not ban private reading; it drew a line around the liturgy.
Athanasius’ festal letter (367 AD) is the first surviving document to list exactly the 27 New Testament books used today. For the Old Testament, the bishop of Alexandria named a narrow canon and then created a second tier: books like Wisdom, Sirach, Judith, and Tobit were “appointed to be read” by new believers — valued, but not canon. Sorting, not burning.
The councils of Hippo (393 AD) and Carthage (397 AD) pulled in the other direction, affirming an Old Testament that included Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, and the Maccabees. Around the same time, Jerome, translating the Latin Vulgate from the Hebrew, argued that books absent from the Hebrew Bible should be read “for edification” rather than to establish doctrine. The church kept them in the Vulgate anyway, and there they stayed for over a thousand years.
The Reformation reopened Jerome’s question. In his 1534 German Bible, Martin Luther gathered these books into a separate section labeled Apocrypha — “books not held equal to the Scriptures, but useful and good to read.” The Catholic Church answered at the Council of Trent (1546) by defining the deuterocanonical books — Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, 1 and 2 Maccabees, and the additions to Esther and Daniel — as fully canonical, which they remain in Catholic Bibles today. Notably, Trent did not canonize 1 and 2 Esdras or the Prayer of Manasseh; those were later printed in an appendix to the official Vulgate.
The 1611 King James Version followed Luther’s arrangement and printed all fourteen books between the testaments. The final step came quietly: in 1826, the British and Foreign Bible Society resolved to stop funding the printing of the Apocrypha, and cheaper, thinner Bibles without it gradually became the standard. By the end of the nineteenth century, the ordinary English Bible had lost fourteen books — not by decree, but by economics and conviction.
While Western churches narrowed their lists, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church — geographically removed from the Mediterranean canon debates — kept a much broader Bible. Its canon traditionally counts 81 books, including 1 Enoch, Jubilees, 4 Baruch, and the three Meqabyan books alongside the familiar scriptures. The exact enumeration varies between manuscripts and traditions — several books are combined in some lists and divided in others — which is why modern collected editions of the Ethiopian scriptures can run to as many as 88 books.
That preservation matters far beyond Ethiopia. 1 Enoch and Jubilees were effectively lost to European readers for centuries, surviving complete only in Ge’ez manuscripts copied by Ethiopian scribes. When the Scottish explorer James Bruce carried Ge’ez copies of 1 Enoch back to Europe in 1773, scholars could finally read in full a book the New Testament itself quotes. Without the Ethiopian church, two of the most influential books of the ancient world would survive only in fragments.
The fourteen books are: 1 Esdras, 2 Esdras, Tobit, Judith, the Additions to Esther, the Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiasticus (also called Sirach), Baruch with the Letter of Jeremiah, the Prayer of Azariah and Song of the Three, Susanna, Bel and the Dragon, the Prayer of Manasseh, and 1 and 2 Maccabees. All fourteen were printed in the 1611 King James Version and were dropped from most Protestant editions during the nineteenth century.
Psalm 151 — a short psalm in David’s voice about his anointing and his defeat of Goliath — is missing from most Bibles because the Hebrew Psalter was fixed at 150 psalms, and Western Bibles follow that count. The Septuagint includes it with the frank label “outside the number,” and a Hebrew copy was discovered in the Great Psalms Scroll among the Dead Sea Scrolls, showing it was genuinely ancient. Eastern Orthodox Bibles still include Psalm 151; Catholic and Protestant Bibles, built on the Hebrew numbering, do not.
No single person or council decided alone. Jewish communities gradually settled the Hebrew canon in the centuries after the Temple fell in 70 AD. On the Christian side, the boundaries emerged through overlapping steps: the Council of Laodicea (c. 363 AD) restricted church reading to canonical books, Athanasius’ festal letter (367 AD) listed the 27 New Testament books, and the councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) affirmed the longer Old Testament. Much later, the Council of Trent (1546) fixed the Catholic canon, Protestant confessions fixed the shorter one, and the Orthodox and Ethiopian churches drew their own, broader lines. The Bible’s table of contents is the result of this long conversation — not one vote.
More than most readers expect. Catholic Bibles contain Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, 1–2 Maccabees, and the additions to Esther and Daniel. Eastern Orthodox Bibles add 1 Esdras, the Prayer of Manasseh, Psalm 151, and 3 Maccabees, while the Slavonic and Russian traditions also print 2 Esdras. The Ethiopian Orthodox Bible goes furthest, with its traditional 81 books including 1 Enoch and Jubilees. And any “with Apocrypha” edition of the King James or other study Bibles restores the original 1611 arrangement.
The best entry point is story. Tobit is short, warm, and reads like a folk tale; Judith moves like a thriller. From there, try the wisdom books — Sirach for practical, grounded counsel and the Wisdom of Solomon for something more soaring — then the Maccabees for history with real stakes. Save the apocalypses (2 Esdras, 2 Baruch, Jubilees) for when you want the strange, visionary end of the shelf. One practical note: translation matters enormously. In archaic English these books feel like homework; in clear modern English, they read the way they were meant to — as stories, counsel, and visions written for ordinary readers.
The complete 88-book Ethiopian canon — every excluded book, restored into clear modern English.
Get The Complete 88-Book Ethiopian Bible →30-day money-back guarantee · Instant digital deliveryRead them for yourself: every book linked on this page is available in clear modern English from Library of Alexandria Press. Browse the full collection at The Forbidden Library, preview any volume, and begin with whichever story pulls at you first.