Pick up almost any Bible printed today and you will find 66 books. Open a genuine first-edition King James Bible from 1611, and you would find 80.
The original King James Version, completed in 1611, contained the 39 books of the Old Testament, the 27 books of the New Testament, and 14 additional books known as the Apocrypha, printed as a separate section between the two testaments. This was not an accident or an early draft. King James himself issued a decree that anyone printing the Bible without the Apocrypha could face a fine and imprisonment. For roughly two and a half centuries, an English Bible without those 14 books would have looked incomplete to most readers.
The shift away from that came gradually, not in a single decision. In 1826, the British and Foreign Bible Society, one of the largest funders and distributors of English Bibles at the time, voted to stop supporting editions that included the Apocrypha. Other publishers followed the trend over the following decades, and by the 1880s, Bibles printed without the Apocrypha had become the standard in most English-speaking Protestant churches. The 66-book Bible familiar today is largely the result of that 19th-century publishing shift, not a decision made by the original translators or by any single early church council.
Those 14 books, Tobit, Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, Baruch, and others, are still read as scripture today. The Catholic Church retains seven of them as deuterocanonical books. The Eastern Orthodox Church keeps a similar set. And the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church never removed anything at all, maintaining an 88-book canon that includes these texts alongside Enoch, Jubilees, and more.
Knowing this changes how you might read your own King James Bible. The text you hold today is the product of choices made long after 1611, by publishers responding to funding and market pressures rather than councils weighing scripture.
The Complete Ethiopian Bible restores what those printing decisions left out, all 88 books in one English edition. See what was in the original King James here.