Who took the Apocrypha out of the Bible?

Originally it was effectively against the law to print the Bible in America, because the Crown held the copyright on the King James Version (it still does in England) but did not license any printers in their American colonies. The American Revolution made the United States an independent country. Since there were no international copyright treaties at the time, it was possible to print an English Bible in the United States. Shortly after the Revolution, the First Great Awakening created a big demand for Bibles.

For the first time, it was both profitable and legal to print English-language Bibles in America.

American printers discovered that they could leave out the Apocrypha and sell the Bible for the same price, and no one would care because it wasn’t used much. So they left out the Apocrypha to increase their profits. Some of the homegrown religious groups naïvely assumed that whatever was not in their Bible was not in the canon. Later, when Catholics became a significant segment of the population, a non-Catholic would say, “That’s not in my Bible” to a Catholic, completely unaware that it was the printer who left it out. A Lutheran pastor told me that one of his parishioners was insistent that the Lutheran Church did not recognize the Apocrypha as Scripture. The parishioner was astonished when he saw the church by-law that says it is. The parishioner had assumed that his copy of the Bible was complete when it wasn’t.

Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox Christians use the Apocrypha and it is part of the Bible for them. Many independent churches and low-church denominations are only aware that it is not in their printing of the Bible, and think it is a Catholic addition when it is really a printer’s subtraction.

In other words, printers removed the Apocrypha from the Bible, not any church.

(Quoted by permission from author: http://www.kencollins.com/bible-p1.htm)