p. 35 | Facts About the Bible

Publishing Committee · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jun 17, 1858

Facts About the Bible.

The history of the English Bible includes a period of nine hundred years. The venerable Bede translated the Psalter and the Gospel into the Anglo-Saxon, by order of King Alfred. The price of a Bible in 1274, fairly written, with a Commentary, was from $150 to $250, though in 1840 two arches of the London Bridge were built for $123.

Richard Rolls was one of the first to attempt a translation of the Bible into the English language, as it was spoken after the conquest. He wrote a paraphrase in verse on the book of Job, and a gloss upon the Psalter, but the whole Bible, by Wickliffe, appeared between 1360 and 1380.

A bill, in 1490, was brought into the House of Lords, to forbid the use of English Bibles, but it did not pass. A decree of Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1403, forbade unauthorized persons to translate any text of the Holy Scriptures into English, as well as prohibited the reading of any translation, till approved of by the bishops, or a Council. Several persons were burned for reading the word of God.

In the reign of Henry the Fifth, a law was passed “That whoever should read the Scriptures, in their mother tongue, should forfeit land, cattle, body, life, and goods, from their heirs forever, and be condemned for heretics to God, enemies to the crown, and most arrant traitors to the land.” And between 1461 and 1493, Faust, or Faustus, who undertook the sale of Bibles at Paris, where printing was then unknown, narrowly escaped punishment. He was taken for a magician, because he produced them so rapidly, and because one copy was so much like another.

The Latin Vulgate, printed at Mayence, in 1462, was the very first printed edition of the whole Bible in any language, bearing the date and place of its execution, and the name of the printer. The first printed edition of the Holy Scriptures in any modern language, was in German, in the year 1467. The New Testament, by Luther, revised by Melancthon, appeared in 1521. William Tyndale, in 1526, printed his English Testament at Antwerp; but those who sold it in England, were condemned by Sir Thomas More, the Lord Chancellor, to ride with their faces to the horses’ tails, with papers on their heads, and to throw their books and themselves into the fire at Cheapside. Tyndale himself was strangled and burned. His dying prayer was, “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes.”