The Lost Books of the Bible and the Forgotten Books of Eden

The Lost Books of the Bible and the Forgotten Books of Eden (1926) is a collection of 17th-century and 18th-century English translations of some Old Testament Pseudepigrapha and New Testament Apocrypha, some of which were assembled in the 1820s, and then republished with the current title in 1926.

Rutherford Hayes Platt, in the preface to his 1963 reprint of The Lost Books of the Bible and the Forgotten Books of Eden states:

The translations were first published, under this title, by an unknown editor in The Lost Books of the Bible Cleveland 1926, but the translations had previously been published many times. The Lost Books of the Bible and the Forgotten Books of Eden is also published by A&B publishers group, with a black and white cover, and with black people as protagonists. This edition has an introduction to The Lost Books of the Bible by Dr. Frank Cane and is prefaced by R.H.P., Jr.(New York, January 1, 1926.) Also, at the front page of The Lost Book of the Bible, Dr. Talmage gives a commentary on this work.

The book is, essentially, a combined reprint of earlier works. The first half, Lost Books of the Bible, is an unimproved reprint of a book published by William Hone in 1820, titled The Apocryphal New Testament, itself a reprint of a translation of the Apostolic Fathers done in 1693 by William Wake, who later became the Archbishop of Canterbury, and a smattering of medieval embellishments on the New Testament, from a book by Jeremiah Jones (1693-1724), posthumously published in 1736. It must be conceded that, in the three centuries since these were originally published, a great deal more is known about the Apostolic Fathers (including a good deal of the original text that was not available in 1693) and New Testament apocrypha.

The second half of the book, The Forgotten Books of Eden, includes a translation originally published in 1882 of the "First and Second Books of Adam and Eve", translated first from ancient Ethiopic to German by Ernest Trumpp and then into English by Solomon Caesar Malan, and a number of items of Old Testament pseudepigrapha, such as reprinted in the second volume of R.H. Charles's Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (Oxford, 1913).

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