^
I personally wouldn't know, because I'm an atheist with a decided non-interest in most religion-affiliated subjects, but thankfully,
Wikipedia seems to Explain It All®, and you can thank your nation's separatist Puritan roots for it:
Quote:
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The British Puritan revolution of the 1600s brought a change in the way many British publishers handled the apocryphal material associated with the Bible. The Puritans used the standard of Sola Scriptura (Scripture Alone) to determine which books would be included in the canon. The Westminster Confession of Faith, composed during the British Civil Wars (1642–1651), excluded the Apocrypha from the canon. The Confession provided the rationale for the exclusion: 'The books commonly called Apocrypha, not being of divine inspiration, are no part of the canon of the Scripture, and therefore are of no authority in the church of God, nor to be any otherwise approved, or made use of, than other human writings' (1.3).[20] Thus, Bibles printed by English Protestants who separated from the Church of England began to exclude these books.
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