"The Lost Books of the Bible and the Forgotten Books of Eden (1926)" is a book that includes translations from the 17th and 18th centuries of some ancient religious writings from the Old and New Testaments. Some of these writings were gathered in the 1820s and later published again in 1926 with the title used today. The book "The Lost Books of the Bible" includes an introduction written by Dr. Frank Crane.
History of the translations
Rutherford Hayes Platt, in the preface to his 1964 reprint of The Lost Books of the Bible and the Forgotten Books of Eden, explains:
The translations were first published, under this title, by an unknown editor in The Lost Books of the Bible in Cleveland in 1926. However, these translations had been published many times before.
The book is a collection of earlier works. The first part, The Lost Books of the Bible, is a reprint of a book published by William Hone in 1820, titled The Apocryphal New Testament. This book is itself a reprint of a translation of the Apostolic Fathers done in 1693 by William Wake, who later became the Archbishop of Canterbury. It also includes some additions from medieval times, taken from a book by Jeremiah Jones (1693–1724), which was published after his death in 1736. Over the past three centuries, much more information about the Apostolic Fathers and New Testament Apocrypha has become available, including original texts that were not known in 1693.
The second part of the book, The Forgotten Books of Eden, includes a translation first published in 1882 of the "First and Second Books of Adam and Eve." This was translated first from ancient Ethiopic to German by Ernest Trumpp and then into English by Solomon Caesar Malan. It also includes several items from the Old Testament pseudepigrapha, such as those found in the second volume of R.H. Charles’s Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (Oxford, 1913).
More recent translations of these works include Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, edited by J. H. Charlesworth; New Testament Apocrypha, edited by W. Schneemelcher; and The Apocryphal New Testament by M. R. James.