Yes — the original 1611 King James Bible contained fourteen books known today as the Apocrypha, printed between the Old and New Testaments. Later editions slowly dropped them, which is why many readers have never seen them. All fourteen are here, in the KJV text, free and without ads. Pick a book below and start reading.
A retelling of Israel's return from exile, including the famous contest of the three bodyguards — and the answer that won the king's crown: "Truth is strongest."
Read 1 Esdras →Seven visions given to a grieving scribe, asking the hardest questions in scripture about suffering, endings, and hope.
Read 2 Esdras →A journey with an angel in disguise, a fish that saves two families, and the origin of the wedding blessing you may have heard at a marriage.
Read Tobit →One woman's courage faces down an invading army — a story so dramatic it filled the canvases of the great painters.
Read Judith →The Greek Esther adds the prayers, dreams, and dramatic moments the shorter Hebrew version leaves out.
Read Esther (Greek) →Known fully as the Wisdom of Solomon — written for rulers, and full of lines the New Testament echoes. Read chapter 2 and hear the Gospels approaching.
Read Wisdom →Also called Ecclesiasticus — a grandfather's handbook for living: two thousand years of practical wisdom on friendship, money, speech, and family.
Read Sirach →A voice of comfort written for exiles, carrying one of scripture's great poems about where Wisdom is found.
Read Baruch →The Song of the Three Holy Children: step inside the fiery furnace and hear the song the three young men sang there.
Read Azariah →A courtroom drama in which a young woman's truth defeats two corrupt judges — young Daniel's first case.
Read Susanna →Bel and the Dragon — Daniel at his wittiest: two short detective stories that expose the "living" idols of Babylon.
Read Bel →The history behind Hanukkah: how one family's revolt reclaimed the temple.
Read 1 Maccabees →The same struggle told with the sky torn open: martyrdom, resurrection hope, and the defense of the temple.
Read 2 Maccabees →The Prayer of Manasseh: fifteen verses — a wicked king turning back, and scripture's most concentrated prayer of repentance.
Read Manasseh →The word Apocrypha comes from Greek for "hidden things." These fourteen books circulated with the Hebrew scriptures in Greek translation for centuries and appeared in most Christian Bibles for over a thousand years. Jerome, when he translated the Latin Vulgate around 400 AD, noted that some were not part of the Hebrew canon — but he translated them anyway, and they became part of the Bible most of Europe read.
In 1534, Martin Luther's German Bible moved the books to an appendix, describing them as "books not held equal to Holy Scripture, and yet profitable and good to read." English Bibles — including the Geneva Bible and the 1611 King James — kept them, and the Church of England's 39 Articles commended them for "example of life and instruction of manners."
The quiet end came in 1826, when the British and Foreign Bible Society — the era's dominant Bible publisher — decided to stop funding printings that included the Apocrypha. The motive was largely cost: the books added pages and expense to Bibles destined for mass distribution. An economy decision hardened into a tradition, and within a generation most English Bibles printed without them.
Today, Roman Catholic and Orthodox Bibles still contain most of these books (Catholics call them deuterocanon), while most Protestant editions omit them. What almost nobody tells you is that the King James Bible you know was, for its first two centuries, one of the Bibles that carried them.
Yes. The original 1611 edition contained fourteen Apocryphal books between the Testaments. Modern printings often omit them, but every one of the fourteen is available on this site in the KJV text, free.
They were never removed from the 1611 text itself — later editions stopped printing them. The shift began with Luther's appendix arrangement in 1534 and was sealed by the British and Foreign Bible Society's 1826 decision to stop funding printings that included them, chiefly for reasons of printing cost.
That depends on the tradition you ask. Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christians receive most of these books as canonical (the deuterocanon); most Protestant traditions value them as history, wisdom, and devotion without placing them on the level of the Hebrew canon. This site takes no side — it simply preserves the full 1611 King James reading experience.
The King James edition carries all fourteen. The other editions here (Geneva, LSV, Darby, YLT, ASV, RV, and YAH) are 66-book canonical editions — the Books menu on any of their pages will offer the apocryphal books through the KJV edition.
However you regard them, these are the books your great-great-grandparents' King James Bible contained — and they are one click away.