Unknown to almost all of the over two billion people who claim the Bible as their spiritual foundation is that there are several books and two sections missing from all but a few versions of that Bible. Perhaps one of the best kept secrets of the modern Protestant church is that the Bible used by that body is not the original King James Bible. That translation, completed in 1611, and the Bibles published for the use of the clergy and the church members until late in the 19th Century, contained 80 books. Although attempts to remove the 14 books known as the Apocrypha from the Bible began immediately after the King James translation was completed they remained in the Bible until the end of the 19th Century. There is no doubt that the 14 books of the Apocrypha were controversial, but it cannot be denied they were included in the original King James Bible.
The concept of the Protestant Church about the Apocrypha is virtually non-existent, with the general understanding that only the Catholic Church uses it. One would be hard-pressed to find any members of the clergy even aware that these books were ever included in the King James Bible. There are 155,683 words and over 5,700 verses contained in 168 chapters now missing from the King James translation of the Bible due to the exclusion of the Apocrypha. Although this only happened just over a hundred years ago, their existence as fully accepted scripture is virtually unknown.