by Timothy Beal
On the front page of Novum Instrumentum, Dr. Lupas pointed out a beautifully handwritten Latin inscription. Although written by a later owner of the book, I think it captures the spirit of Erasmus and other early Bible editors and translators of the age. It reads, “Ubi non est deus, ibi no lux: ubi non est lux, ibi non est Veritas: ubi non est Veritas, ibi sum variae opiniones, ubi sum variae opiniones, ibi est error.” I’m sure Dr. Lupas, a classics scholar, could translate it more faithfully than I, but I think this is its gist in English: “Where there is no God, there is no light: where there is no light, there is no truth: where there is no truth, there are various opinions: where there are various opinions, there is error.” Truth is enlightenment, and enlightenment is of God. Shedding light on what passes as truth is not only permitted; it is necessary, the highest calling.
It was in this spirit of enlightenment that what began with Erasmus had, in a little more than a century, given rise to massive, multiversion, multilanguage critical editions of biblical literature like the London Polyglot. These works were revolutionizing biblical criticism and translation, empowering scholars everywhere to study and compare all the available biblical manuscripts and variants for themselves, to assess the value of various ancient and modern translations, and to produce new ones. Translating from Hebrew and Greek manuscripts, they could claim that their translations were superior to the Vulgate, which had been corrupted over the centuries. They were doing essentially what Jerome had done, but translating into present-day vulgates. In the process, they were drawing greater and greater attention to the fact that there was no single original. In the centuries since, that problem has been exacerbated by the discovery of many, many more early manuscripts, which have turned the quest for originals into an endless, if not impossible, task.
Brian Walton’s six-volume masterpiece, the London Polyglot Bible (1657), includes thirteen different columns in eight different languages for every biblical verse of the Torah. Pictured here is the left-hand page of the full spread for the first fourteen verses of Genesis. It includes, from left to right, starting at the top: (1) the Hebrew, with an interlinear Latin translation; (2) the Latin Vulgate; (3) the Greek Septuagint, with variants from other versions of the Septuagint noted at the bottom; (4) a Latin translation of the Septuagint; (5) the Syriac version; and (6) a Latin translation of the Syriac. On the facing page (not pictured) are seven more versions of the same biblical verses: (7) the Aramaic Targum; (8) a Latin translation of the Targum; (9) the Samaritan Hebrew version; (10) the Samaritan Aramaic version (11) a Latin translation of the Samaritan Hebrew; (12) the Arabic version; and (13) a Latin translation of the Arabic.
Courtesy of the Special Collections Research Center, Kelvin Smith Library, Case Western Reserve University
Like Jerome, moreover, many of these scholars raised questions about the boundaries of the canon itself. Remember that Jerome had excluded the Apocryphal books from his Vulgate Bible because they did not appear in his Hebrew manuscripts, but only in the Greek Septuagint. After his death, others added them back in. Now many Protestants, also working from Hebrew versions in their translations of Jewish Scriptures, were pushing these Apocryphal books back out. Many seventeenth-century editions of English Bibles, for example, didn’t include the Apocrypha. The practice was common enough by 1615 that Archbishop Abbot prohibited stationers from publishing a Bible without it under penalty of a year in prison. Indeed, some more radical reformers were going so far as to question the canonical status of other, more central biblical books. Martin Luther himself said that he hated the book of Esther, that James was “an epistle of straw,” and that he saw no evidence of the Holy Spirit’s inspiration in Revelation. Although he did not dismiss them from the canon, later editions of his German Bible did exclude the Apocrypha.
In response to growing criticisms of the Vulgate as inaccurate and corrupt, the Roman Catholic Church under Pope Sixtus V (the same pope who erected the obelisk of Santa Maria Maggiore) commissioned a group of biblical scholars to produce a new standard edition of it based on careful comparison of many early manuscripts, the Codex Amiatinus prominent among them. First published in 1590 and then revised and republished in 1592, the “Sixtine Vulgate” became the Bible of Roman Catholicism for the next three and a half centuries. Of course, Roman Catholicism was by then one of many Christianities in the West, so its official Bible was but one of a great many others now being, to borrow Jerome’s image, “scattered throughout the whole world.”
The print revolution lent a sense of fixity, closure, and immutability to the idea of the book. As Walter J. Ong famously observed, the printed book “encloses thought in thousands of copies of a work of exactly the same visual and physical consistency.” And what was true of books in general was especially true of The Book of books, that is, the Bible. Yet the reality of the Bible in the age of Gutenberg has been quite the opposite: it has led to the proliferation of more Bibles in more forms and translations than ever.
Multiplying the Leaves
Many new translations of the Bible included extensive notes and commentaries intended to lead readers toward certain interpretations and away from others. These in turn led competitors to produce Bibles with alternative perspectives. Different Bibles were arguing with each other.
The very popular Geneva Bible (1560), for example, produced by English Puritan reformers who had fled to Switzerland to escape the persecutions of Queen Mary, often spun its translations and notes in a strongly antimonarchical direction, implying affinities between England’s rulers and those of Israel’s enemies like Babylon and Egypt. In its marginal notes on the story of the Exodus, for example, it takes pains to point out that the Hebrew midwives were being obedient to God by disobeying Pharaoh’s order to kill all newborn Hebrew baby boys, although they should have done so openly: “Their disobedience herein was lawful, but their dissembling was evil.” Commenting on Pharaoh’s subsequent command that any Hebrew boys be tossed into the river as soon as they’re born, another marginal note adds, “When tyrants can not prevaile by craft, they brast [burst] for the into open rage.” In fact, this sense of identification with the Israelites as God’s people oppressed by an ungodly monarch is clear from the moment one opens the book. On its title page is an illustration of the Israelites about to cross the Red Sea, with Egyptian cavalry (dressed very much like contemporary English military) hot on their heels. Around the engraving are the words of two biblical passages, each offering the promise of divine liberation from ungodly, oppressive powers: “Feare ye not, stand stil, and beholde the salvation of the Lord which he will shewe to you this day. The Lord shal fight for you: therefore holde you your peace” (Exodus 14:13–14), and “Great are the troubles of the righteous: but the Lord delivereth them out of all” (Psalms 34:19).
Other notes identified the enemy of God’s people as the Roman Catholic Church. A note in the book of Revelation, for example, explicitly identifies the beast that will rise from the bottomless pit as the pope. Later editions of the Geneva Bible added even more vehemently anti-Catholic commentary. The 1598 edition includes notes to Revelation that call Pope Gregory VII “a most monstrous Necromancer” and “a slave of the devil.” Talk about a values-added Bible! Creating the Bible in one’s own image appears to be as old as the Bible-publishing business itself.
The Geneva Bible was by far the most popular English Bible for more than a century, during which time about two hundred different editions of it were published. It was, moreover, what the Pilgrims and Puritans brought with them to America, and it was the Bible that Puritan-educated leaders like Benjamin Franklin and John Adams read. It was also the Bible of Shakespeare and John Bunyan, and no doubt helped inspire the anti-Royalists in the English Civil War. Still, some of its notes, especially those that supported disobedience against unjust laws and monarchs, concerned those in positions of power. King James I, for example. Although a Protestant, he complained that notes such as those found in Exodus were “very partiall, untrue, seditious, and savouring
too much of daungerous and trayterous conceites.”
Indeed, the King James Version, so often touted as the purest and holiest of all English Bibles, was born of the royal desire for a counterrevolutionary, unannotated alternative to the Geneva Bible. The work of fifty-four translators commissioned by King James and published in 1611, this “Authorized Version” was the officially sanctioned Bible of England. Given this vested interest, it’s not surprising that the government imposed strict copyright laws controlling who could publish it and how. Only certain publishers were licensed to print it, and there were requirements and restrictions on its appearance. Most significantly, no notes or illustrations were permitted.
Yet, as you might have guessed by now, unlicensed but ambitious printers soon found profitable ways around these copyright laws. Some purchased Bibles printed by licensed printers, took them apart, inserted illustrations and other value-adding content, and then rebound and resold them at higher costs. Early examples from the 1630s include the Gospel harmonies handmade by the well-known Anglican minister Nicholas Ferrar. These Bibles were actually made by cutting up pages of a printed Authorized Bible and pasting them, along with illustrations, onto blank pages in a new book. Still other printers sold as “commentaries” or “annotations” books that happened to include all or nearly all of the text of the King James Bible. Some included only scant notes, which were placed in such a way that they could then be easily cut out by binders before binding. Other printers added maps and illustrations that allowed them to categorize their Bibles as educational material, thereby avoiding copyright restrictions.
Still others imported English Bibles that were printed in other countries, often underselling the licensed printers. Not surprisingly, some protested that these imports suffered from a lack of quality control and were full of misprints. In an imported Bible from 1682, for example, a passage from Deuteronomy about divorce addresses a situation in which a husband “ate,” rather than “hate,” his wife. But such protests were undermined by errors in licensed Bibles. The most well known was the so-called Wicked Bible, published in 1631 by the King’s Printer, Robert Barker. It omitted a rather significant “not” in the Seventh Commandment: “Thou shalt commit adultery”!
We get a fascinating window onto this fiercely competitive early Bible market in an anonymous four-page tract called Scintilla; or A Light Broken into Darke Warehouses, published in 1641 by Michael Sparke, a Puritan bookseller, frequent copyright infringer, and strong critic of the aforementioned Robert Barker. In an attempt to break Barker’s monopoly on the Bible trade, Sparke had been importing and selling Bibles from Holland. Barker caught wind of it, got a warrant to search the seaports, confiscated all the Bibles he could find, and sold them himself. In the tract, Sparke gives account, in real numbers, of how the “Monopolists” in their “darke warehouses” have been profiting unfairly by jacking up the prices of Bibles and other books. “But a touch of this,” he concludes, “for it is too tart, and I verily beleeve picks the Subjects pockets, that eats brown bread to fill the sleeping Stationers belly with Venison and Sacke.” Yet Sparke’s own motives for trying to expose them are mixed to say the least. On the one hand, obviously, as a capitalist, he wants to compete in an open and fair market. On the other hand, as a Christian, he wants the Bible to be affordable, and therefore more widely available. The monopoly is making Bibles more expensive than they need to be, and thus holding back the Word. Then as now, the Bible business was both evangelistic and capitalistic, an uneasy mix of spreading the Word and selling it.
As this mixed business, whether authorized or not, continued to grow, so did the number and variety of value-added Bibles on the market. By 1800, at least one thousand different editions of the Bible in English had been published, displaying a stunning array of form and content. Here are just a few examples:
The Souldiers Pocket Bible (1643), a sixteen-page collection of brief passages, mostly from the Old Testament, used by Oliver Cromwell’s Parliamentary soldiers in the English Civil War. Its subtitle is surprisingly long, given the size of the Bible itself, promising to provide “most (if not all) those places contained in holy Scripture, which doe shew the qualifications of his inner man, that is a fit Souldier to fight the Lords Battels, both before the fight, in the fight, and after the fight; Which Scriptures are reduced to severall heads, and fitly applyed to the Souldiers severall occasions, and so may supply the want of the whole Bible, which a Souldier cannot conveniently carry about him: And may bee also usefull for any Christian to meditate upon, now in this miserable time of Warre.” It was revised and reprinted as The Christian Soldier’s Penny Bible in 1693 and then again for American soldiers during the Civil War (as many as fifty thousand copies).
Seventeenth-century dos-à-dos, or “back-to-back” Bibles, in which a New Testament and a book of Psalms were bound back to back but with their spines reversed so they would open in opposite directions, allowing a reader to flip one book over to read the other.
The very tiny Whole Book of Psalms in Meter According to the Art of Short-writing (1659), by Jeremiah Rich, one of the fathers of modern shorthand. As much a promotion of Rich’s method as a Bible for reading, it’s about one inch wide and two inches long. Rich created his own plates in order to print it. In 1687 another shorthand expert, William Addy, published a complete Bible in shorthand. It has 396 pages and measures about three inches wide and a little over four inches long.
The Whole Book of Psalms in Meter According to the Art of Short-writing (1659), by Jeremiah Rich, one of the fathers of modern shorthand.
Courtesy of the Scripture Collection, library of the American Bible Society
Solomons Proverbs (1666), a complete reshuffling of all the verses from the biblical books of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes by Anabaptist theologian and politician Henry Danvers. He organized them under an alphabetical list of subjects (“Adversity,” “Adultery,” and so on).
A multivolume Bible, “Paraphras’d: With Arguments to each Chapter, And Annotations thereupon,” by popular author and churchman Symon Patrick (d. 1707). Here the biblical text is integrated with Patrick’s own extended paraphrases, the only difference being that the biblical text is in italics. Thus it is almost impossible to read the biblical text on its own, separate from Patrick’s interpretive expansions.
The New Testament in Greek and English (1729), by William Mace, who created his own, otherwise unknown Greek edition, “corrected from the Authority of the most Authentic Manuscripts.”
Mr. Whiston’s Primitive New Testament (1745), a new translation by the well-known author and translator of the Jewish historian Josephus, William Whiston. Although apparently never completed, this New Testament was intended to include several noncanonical early Christian and Jewish scriptures, such as the Shepherd of Hermas, the Epistles of Ignatius and Polycarp, and a homily on Hades by Josephus.
The Family Testament, and Scholar’s Assistant (1767; first edition 1766), whose long subtitle explains that it is “calculated not only to promote the reading of the Holy Scriptures in families and schools, but also to remove that great uneasiness observable in children upon the appearance of hard words in their lessons, and by a method entirely new . . .” Significantly, this new method is not about understanding difficult meanings but pronouncing difficult spellings. Following a general introduction to spelling and reading, it offers “directions for reading with elegance and propriety.” Then, at the top of each chapter, it gives the accents and syllable breaks for unfamiliar words. It’s less concerned with reading comprehension than with sounding learned, not so much being biblically literate than appearing so.
Scotch preacher John Brown’s very popular Self-Interpreting Bible (first published in 1778 with several subsequent editions) was promoted as an Everyman’s Bible, offering the clear meaning of every passage “in a manner that might best comport with the ability and leisure of the poorer and labouring part of mankind, and especially to render the oracles of God their own interpreter.”
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bsp; Matthew Talbot’s completely rearranged Bible (1800), which takes all the verses of the Old and New Testaments out of their original contexts and puts them into thirty subjects, or “books” (e.g., “Deity,” “Christ,” “Holy Days“), which are then subdivided into 285 chapters and 4,144 sections, “whereby the dispersed rays of truth are concentrated, and every Scriptural subject defined and fully exhibited.”
So much for sola scriptura.
In many respects, the Bible society movement, in the form of the American Bible Society and its sister organization, the British and Foreign Bible Society, began in reaction to this expanding market of value-added Bibles. Both were nonprofit and both were committed to the widest possible circulation of the Bible in the Authorized Version “without note or comment”—“cheapening and multiplying the leaves of the Tree of Knowledge and of Life” in order to get the Bible into as many hands as possible, believing that doing so was the answer to all the world’s problems.
Throughout the nineteenth century, the ABS resisted adding content to its Bibles or printing them in innovative formats. Reading through the minutes from its annual meetings during its early decades, I found instances in which members made creative proposals for adding value to their Bibles and thereby making them more popular. One suggested that the ABS print the Bible as a series of newspaper issues. Another suggested that index tabs be inserted at the beginning of each biblical book for quicker searching. But these and other more or less flashy innovations were consistently rejected. In the age-old evangelical dilemma of preservation versus popularization, the ABS leaned hard toward preservation.