Bahai scripture reached English piecemeal, and the Aqdas came late. Unauthorised translations circulated, but the authorised full English text was not published until 1992, on the centenary of Bahaullah's death, more than a century after it was written.
The reasons given are institutional rather than defensive. Shoghi Effendi, head of the faith from 1921 to 1957, held that a codification of the laws had to precede any full translation, so that provisions written without headings or ordering would not be read as isolated rules stripped of context, and so that laws not yet applicable in the West would be understood as such. He was working on that codification when he died in 1957. The Synopsis and Codification was completed on the basis of his work and published in 1973. In 1986 the Universal House of Justice judged the time right and made the translation a goal of a six-year plan, completing it in 1992.
The published volume is mostly apparatus. The text itself occupies a minority of the pages; the rest is a supplement of Questions and Answers, being Bahaullah's own responses to queries put to him about the laws and treated as part of the book, together with the Synopsis and around two hundred explanatory notes. Bahai law also applies unevenly by design. A number of provisions are stated by the institutions to be binding only where conditions permit or where the Universal House of Justice has brought them into force, so the book as read is not a description of what every Bahai currently does.