The Pauline letters had been written in Greek, the Gospels in Greek or Aramaic. Other texts which now comprise the New Testament rapidly appeared in languages of the Holy Land and its environs. Few contemporary manuscripts in any language have survived. The oldest complete "Bibles" now known are the great uncial manuscripts of the 4th and 5th centuries, written in capital letters without breaks between words

The process of sifting from all the different writings of the 1st century was completed by the middle of the 5th as the New Testament was canonized in final form. As Latin supplanted Greek as the common language of the Roman Empire, of learning and commerce, the Bible began to be translated into Latin, often the corrupt Latin of the streets rather than the literary Latin of Cicero.

Hand-written manuscripts wore out, and had to be re-copied; without the careful scribe system of Old Testament scribes, errors and elisions occurred. Few bothered to save the tattered scraps of the originals, written in obscure languages when new copies could be made in "modern" Latin.

Jerome, at the close of the 4th century, took a papal commission to produce a uniform text of the New Testament. Fluent in Greek and Hebrew, he completed new versions of the Psalms and the Gospels, but Old Latin texts still circulated. His efforts became known as the Latin "Vulgate" version, and were the basis for further "evolution." In the 6th century, Cassiodorus finalized another version in Latin, but in doing so he simply added wholesale passages from Jerome's version (and Jerome himself had admitted that his translation was far from literal; he simply wanted to give the sense of any given passage).

The Latin versions used in England and Ireland (and which were used as the text for the Book of Kells and the Book of Durrow, among others; Station 37) were Old Latin versions owing little to Jerome's scholarship. The Council of Paris at the close of the 13th century finalized a version that became the model for Latin Bibles until another "final" revision, at the close of the 16th century, completed the revisions of the Latin Vulgate.

Through the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages, God's Word survived in many forms, and the reverence for it found expression in many ways, from spectacular illuminated manuscripts to the magnificent churches and church art, living monuments to the remarkable story contained in the Bible.

By the close of the Middle Ages, the established church had instituted a system of traditions in its practices and rituals that bore little resemblance to those of Paul's day. Upon little more foundation than the whims of the reigning clergy, sanctified by the "infallible" Pope, whole doctrines were spun and foisted upon Christendom.

In feudal times, the sons of a land-owner had an ordained course for their lives: the oldest would inherit the estates; the rest would go into the service of either God or the King. Thus, the top clergy throughout Europe were the sons of the ruling class, and were used to the exercise of power. They treated challenges as their noble relatives would, with brutality and force. Power was power, whether cloaked in ermine robes or cardinals' caps.

Thus, when John of Wycliffe in the 14th century became offended at the nonsense and evil done in God's name by the church authorities among whom he labored, and began to criticize the establishment, rubbing the Word of God in their faces, it is no wonder that the church councils branded him a heretic after his death and had his bones disinterred and thrown into a stream near his long-time home. His chief crime? He had long worked to translate the only Bible he knew, the Latin Vulgate, into English. Before and after his death, copies were made of his original and a similar revised version (by Purvey, one of his followers). They were mighty contraband; possession was often punished by death.

Though Wycliffe's Bible version was a "dead end" (based as it was upon the corrupt Latin text), the movement he started (his followers were known as "Lollards") spread throughout England, and would bear fruit little more than a century later in the life's work of William Tyndale.

The ferment in the church world was not confined to England; in Germany, in central Europe, in Spain and even in the halls of the Vatican, men and women were rising up who demanded that the church return to the pure fount of God's Word and to cease the excesses of penance and indulgences (among other problems) that were a pervasive source of corruption throughout Christendom.

Their justification? God's Word. And God Himself must have acted, because during the 15th century, Constantinople (the capital of the Byzantine world) fell to the Turks, and a flood of scholars, fluent in Greek and other classic languages, swept westward, bringing with them ancient manuscripts and the means to study them.

When in the middle of the 15th century, Gutenberg completed his Bible, and the age of printing dawned, scholars were already trying to assemble a text of the Bible based on ancient Greek and Hebrew manuscripts. The first complete Bible in Greek was printed in Venice in 1518. The scholar and churchman Erasmus produced his first Greek-Latin diglot New Testament in 1516; his 1522 third edition was used by both Luther and Tyndale for their vernacular versions.

So, at the opening of what became known as the Renaissance or Reformation, when all the sciences began to flourish, when art and politics began to loose their medieval bonds, the hand of God was seen at work. There could have been no Renaissance (i.e. a secular rebirth of knowledge) without a Reformation of the most vital institution in everyday life: the church.

That church, the dumping ground for the surplus sons of the nobility, where cardinals and bishops lived as well as kings, was more a secular institution than spiritual, in the eyes of the mass of people. Bishops often resented the devout scholars and monks whose poverty and devotion to God's Word put the church leaders to shame. Bishops and Archbishops were part of every royal court in Europe; their behavior, if not their doctrine, often made a mockery of their position.

But with the passion of lions defending their lairs, and with the full power of the State on their side, they were able to oppose (for a while) every movement to return the church to its roots in God's Word. By torture, by fire, by banishment or beheading, they fought the movements that sprang up around them.

Martin Luther took advantage of the fragmented nature of the German States (and an Empire that was neither Holy nor Roman) and managed to produce a Bible in German. In England, a crusty, devoted monk of humble origins, William Tyndale, wanted to do the same, and produce an English Bible so that "the common ploughboy" could know as much of the word of God as any Archbishop.

His ambition rejected by the Bishop of London, driven from England, he went to Germany. Hunted by the authorities all over Europe, he managed by 1525 to produce and to print the first English New Testament. Though he died a martyr, burned at the stake, his Testaments were smuggled into England in bales of cloth and other goods. When the Bishop of London offered a reward for such contraband, at ever- increasing prices, Tyndale's followers often turned in their Bibles, knowing that the reward money would enable them to print many times more.

The principal objection to Tyndale's version wasn't the language, but the marginal notes, which castigated the void traditions and evil behavior of the established church; he was particularly hard on Rome and the Pope, calling him the "whore" at every opportunity.

Tyndale to his dying day continued his project of translating the entire Bible into English. While scholars are sure that he completed some portions of the Old Testament, other parts are in doubt. One of the great prizes of this Collection is the only known example of Tyndale's "Joshua" discovered and annotated by 19th century Bible scholar Francis Fry. Tyndale died, shouting, "O Lord, open the King of England's eyes!"

Back in England, though such eminent scholars as Thomas More ddebated the need for reform and combatted the "pestylent secte" of Luther (of which Tyndale was considered a follower), the marital problems of Henry VIII led to a break with Rome. Our collection includes the only example of the first printing of the famous "Ten Articles" of King Henry VIII (the document that forever sundered the Church of England from the Church of Rome) in private hands, one of seven known in the world and one of two in America.

Miles Coverdale, a monk and scholar, learning that King Henry might at last look with favor on an English Bible, produced a complete version and had it printed on the Continent, probably at Zurich, in 1535 (the year of Tyndale's imprisonment). With no small apprehension, and wanting to take advantage of the huge demand for English Bibles without risking Tyndale's fate, he submitted it to approval of the King. Henry asked for the Bishops' opinion; they told him it was full of minor errors. Henry, under the influence of his current wife, Anne Boleyn (a secret admirer of Tyndale's works), asked them if "any heresies could be maintained thereby."

When the Bishops sheepishly replied in the negative, Henry gave his permission for publication, and Coverdale's Bible, based largely on Tyndale's but without Tyndale's problematic notes, was printed in England in 1537.

The same year saw the first publication of another version, Matthew's Bible, edited by John Rogers. Based on Tyndale's foundation, it included numerous notes. Taverner's version, based on Matthew's, accompanied the first Bible commentary in English. The establishment, though sundered from Rome, was still trying to counteract the substance of reform and in particular the perceived loss of control over God's Word. So Thomas Cromwell (soon to be one of Henry's martyrs) commissioned Coverdale to produce an "official" Bible, one that could be set up on a lectern in every church in England. This was the "Great" Bible, first published in 1539. It welded together the work of Tyndale and Coverdale with corrections based on the latest Greek and Hebrew scholarship. Archbishop Cranmer wrote a preface to the 2nd edition, so it is also called "Cranmer's Bible."

After Henry died, his successor King Edward allowed a veritable flood of English Bibles to come from the presses of England, including Tyndale's versions (though without his notes; anyone caught with a Tyndale Bible without the notes blacked out was in deep trouble). But Edward was succeeded after only seven years by Queen Mary (also known as "Bloody Mary" for the horrors of her reign) who had the Bibles removed from the churches and decreed that only a part of the Word could be read out on any given Sunday (ensuring that most would hear the complete Word but once in a lifetime). Besides managing to martyr such eminent men as John Rogers and Archbishop Cranmer, she succeeded in driving from England a group of devout scholars (Coverdale among them) who settled in Geneva, Switzerland (home base of John Calvin) and proceeded to produce another English version, the "Geneva" Bible in 1560.

Set in Roman type, divided for the first time in English into verses, easy to read and accurate, set forth with "bitter notes" after Calvin, this became (long after the King James Version had appeared), the favored version of the Puritans. For its notes, it was called "a Bible school in one volume," and this was the first English Bible in the New World. The first English edition is dated 1576, during the reign of Elizabeth I (who again allowed Bibles to flow from the presses). In all, some 140 different editions of the "Geneva" are recorded, and this collection shows a large proportion of them.

The establishment was quick to counterattack against this new edition. Besides the objectionable notes, the Geneva version was favored by believers who many considered little more than heretics. The text was scholarly and largely accurate and managed to preserve much of the language of Tyndale and Coverdale, while in many cases improving on it.

The Bishops' own version, the eponymous "Bishops' Bible", was a product of committee thinking (as in the old saw about a camel being a horse designed by committee). It was awkward and it was inaccurate (inasmuch as many sections were lifted straight from the old, obsolete "Great" Bible). And, to the chagrin of the Bishops, scholars throughout the land spotted error after error, and literary types found some of the new euphemisms and locutions highly questionable. Well, at least it didn't have "bitter notes."

With the reign of King James I, a new era began. James, a scholar himself who had published a book on demonology, convened the finest scholars in the land for a grand undertaking, to publish a new and accurate Bible in English. Starting in 1604, the King James Version was completed in 1610, and the first edition, in folio size, was published beginning in 1611. Its size and the mammoth nature of the undertaking meant the "First Edition" went through what may be considered seven "printings." Our collection has the only complete showing of all seven printings, as one of them is known only in two examples, and another in three, and no other library or institution has ever managed to assemble all seven!

As the King James Version has gone through literally thousands of printings over the centuries, it is not surprising that some of them had errors. Among the more spectacular in the collection are the regular and deluxe editions of the "Vinegar" Bible, with a headline in Luke given as "Parable of the Vinegar", and the so-called "Wicked Bible" whose 7th commandment states: "Thou shalt commit adultery."

Then the focus of the collection shifts to the New World. England treated her Colonies as a source of raw material and a market for finished goods. Printing of major books such as the Bible was an English monopoly, and no English Bible was printed in America until the American Revolution. However, permission was granted for printing parts of the Bible, and Bibles in other languages.

The first book printed in British America was the "Bay Psalm Book". The first Bible in any language printed in the New World was the late 17th century Eliot Indian Bible, in the now-extinct Massachusett language of the Algonquian Indians. The first European language Bible was Saur's German Bible, which went through three editions from 1743-1776; the last of these was captured by the British and largely used for cartridge paper.

The first English Bible produced in America was the Aitken Bible, issued with the blessing of the Continental Congress (the first and last to have Congressional approval). Printed in small size on inferior paper, it was soon supplanted by larger, more impressive Bibles once America had succeeded in wresting its independence. For this reason, not many examples of it have survived; fewer than ten are known in private hands (one of them is among the prize possessions of H. Ross Perot), and our collection has two!.

The story of the English Bible in America continues with early editions, "firsts" from various states, technical innovations, and a selection of the ornate "family Bibles" that were marketed throughout the 19th century in ever-fancier forms.

Dr. Gene Scott - his Webpage