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It's not too hard to interpret these passages to mean that hell exists, and is only for certain kinds of sins. There's a difference between rejecting God and never having heard of him, for instance.
I'm always astounded when Protestants do actually believe the Bible is not full of nonsense. The Catholic Church did a lot of editing / selection of what went in there, using "Sacred Tradition" as their primary justification. Given that Protestants reject Sacred Tradition, it should follow that they have no basis for choosing which apocrypha should have been included in the first place, and shouldn't just take the Catholics' word for it.
Protestant religions are mostly political constructs. They tried to make a few theological changes, but mostly on the cosmetic level only to justify the political independence from the Pope.
Even if it would not be the case, religions need something sacrosanct, which is the scripture in this case. It would have been politically very unwise to try to compromise the apparent sanctity of that source, especially since it was very easy to put their own interpretation to it. Even modern evangelical religions don't try to modify the wording of the actual script.
Additionally, since the language of religion has been latin for more than 1500 years, the actual text of the bible changed practically nothing since around 400. One could argue that the church and its ideology that time was more different from the current catholic ones than the current protestant churches and their teachings.
I'd agree with you there, but the period before 400ish was not negligible. Before that time the New Testament wasn't even a book, but rather a collection of different books, many of which did not make it into the canon. Clearly, people were actually concerned about the issue of canonicity at around the time of the Reformation; it was touched on at Trent, as well as various non-RC christian councils, in the 16th century or so.
That said, while your political explanation seems correct, it should not be comforting to Protestant theologians.
To be fair: One of the main cornerstones of a lot of christian religions, the divinity of Christ, was quite a political decision from the fourth century.
Theologians learned to live with it as well.
Some Protestant sects do, indeed, use a slightly different Bible than the Catholic one. (Or so I heard.)
That's correct; they drop some late-written Old Testament books, which they call the "Catholic Apocrypha".
Literary quality and coherence were actually optimized pretty well in the selection process; if you don't believe me, read an apocryphal gospel sometime. They're basically Jesus fanfic of various stripes, much more ridiculous than the ones deemed canonical, and the vast (secular) scholarly consensus has them all written in the second or third centuries (excepting the Gospel of Thomas).
Then again, since many apocryphal gospels were written to buttress theologies different from the mainline one, it was easy to have them rejected for that reason alone.