The book The Lost Books of the Bible and the Forgotten Books of Eden (1926) is a collection of English translations from the 17th and 18th centuries of some Old Testament Pseudepigrapha and New Testament Apocrypha. Some of these texts were gathered in the 1820s and later republished with the current title in 1926.

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 (Cleveland, 1926). However, these translations had appeared in print many times before.

The book is, in essence, a collection of earlier works. The first part, Lost Books of the Bible, is a reprint of a book published by William Hone in 1820, titled The Apocryphal New Testament. This work itself is a reprint of a translation of the Apostolic Fathers made in 1693 by William Wake, who later became the Archbishop of Canterbury. It also includes some additional stories from medieval times about the New Testament, taken from a book by Jeremiah Jones (1693–1724), which was published after his death in 1736. Over the past three centuries, more information about the Apostolic Fathers and New Testament Apocrypha has become available, including original texts that were not accessible in 1693.

The second part 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." This translation was first made from ancient Ethiopic to German by Ernest Trumpp and then translated into English by Solomon Caesar Malan. It also includes several texts 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.