Europe and North America. As a result most Protestant Bibles in the last two centuries have been printed without the Apocrypha. However, the second half of the twentieth century has seen a renewed interest in the Apocrypha among Protestants due to an increasing emphasis on the critical scholarly study of biblical and apocryphal literature and a greater ecumenical interaction between the three major branches of Christianity: Protestantism, Catholicism, and the Orthodox churches. Consequently, while