why did Martin Luther removed them?
Well, he did not; when Lutherans here transitioned to English, the available translation was the "Protestant" KJV (which originally included these books as well) Here is some additional information (the whole article can be found here:
The Apocrypha, Early Church Councils, and Martin Luther - Shepherd of the Hills Lutheran Church ).
Luther (1480-1546)
During his lifetime, Luther translated the Bible into German. His translation did include the Apocrypha; so Luther did not reject the Apocrypha. What Luther did that was novel was his placement of the Apocrypha: he placed them between the two testaments. This tradition of placing the Apocrypha between the two testaments helped set in place two views of thought:
- Positive: The Apocrypha was a secondary category of books within the Bible. This was nothing new, and may, in truth, have helped better understand the Apocrypha as deuterocanon and/or anagignoskomena.
- Negative: By putting all the Apocrypha together instead of interspersing them as before, Luther helped set up a churchly culture that could later more-easily remove the Apocrypha altogether from the Bible. And this largely took place in the Bibles Protestant used in the 1800s (1900s for German Lutherans who were transitioning to English).
Luther’s most-famous quotation about the Apocrypha comes from his preface to the Apocrypha in his German translation of the Bible: “These books are not held equal to the Scriptures, but are useful and good to read.”
Yet, Luther’s view of Scripture is more complex than today’s simple yes-or-no approach. Luther’s view was more catholic than the average Christian has today. Ralph Bohlmann in Criteria of Biblical Canonicity, wrote:
In both Testaments Luther thus regarded a number of books to be of lesser authority than the chief books. But did inferiority mean non-canonicity? The answer is not simple, for in spite of Luther’s negative attitude toward such books, they were included in every edition of Luther’s Bible published during his lifetime (and for many years thereafter). If the disputed books were not in some sense “biblical,” it is difficult to understand why Luther neither eliminated them from his Bible nor added other useful apocryphal writings to each Testament. Moreover, his language at least occasionally suggests that these books remain “Scripture,” as, for example, when he contrasts them with “all other Scripture.” [pg. 120]
So we find that Luther included the apocryphal books in his Die Bibel. He did not consider them equal in authority to canonical Scripture, and held they should not be used to define Christian doctrine. In other words, Luther saw them as secondary, yet still worthy of being read, as anagignoskomena.
Although Luther’s denigration of the Apocrypha was atypical, his views were still within the norm of the Church catholic in that he treated the Apocrypha as biblical but not canonical, not for making or creating doctrine.
