For most of its history, every copy of the Bible was unique. Each was written by hand, and each had its own small mistakes and corrections. The invention of printing with movable type in the fifteenth century changed that. For the first time, thousands of identical copies of one text could be made. That was a great gift, but it also brought a new problem: whatever text happened to be printed first could become fixed for centuries, mistakes and all.
This article tells the story of the printed Bible, from Gutenberg to the critical editions used by translators today.
Gutenberg and the Latin Bible
The first major book printed in Europe with movable type was a Bible: the Latin Vulgate, printed by Johannes Gutenberg in Mainz around 1455. The Vulgate was the translation made largely by Jerome around 400 CE, which had become the Bible of the Western church. Gutenberg’s Bible was a printed imitation of a manuscript, with two columns of forty-two lines and space left for hand-painted decoration.
The text of the Vulgate had itself been copied by hand for a thousand years and had many variations. Later, after the Council of Trent, the Catholic Church issued an official edition, the Sixto-Clementine Vulgate of 1592.
The first printed Hebrew Bibles
Jewish printers were quick to use the new technology. The first complete printed Hebrew Bible appeared at Soncino in Italy in 1488. The most influential early edition was the Second Rabbinic Bible, printed in Venice by the Christian printer Daniel Bomberg in 1524–25 and edited by Jacob ben Hayyim, a Jewish scholar who gathered and compared manuscripts and printed the Masoretic notes alongside the text, with Aramaic Targums and medieval commentaries.
Ben Hayyim’s edition became the standard Hebrew text for four centuries. It was the basis of the Old Testament in the King James Version, and of the first two editions of Kittel’s Biblia Hebraica (1906 and 1913). Only in 1937 did the third edition of Biblia Hebraica switch to the older and more authoritative Leningrad Codex (see The Aleppo and Leningrad codices).
Erasmus and the first Greek New Testament
The Greek New Testament came later. The first to be printed was part of the Complutensian Polyglot, a massive multilingual Bible produced in Spain under Cardinal Ximenes de Cisneros. Its New Testament volume was printed in 1514, but the whole work was not released until around 1520–22.
In the meantime, the Dutch scholar Desiderius Erasmus and the Basel printer Johann Froben raced to be first. Erasmus’s Novum Instrumentum omne, the Greek New Testament with his own Latin translation, appeared in March 1516. It was produced in a hurry. Erasmus used a handful of late medieval manuscripts available in Basel, mostly from the twelfth century, sometimes marking corrections directly on the manuscripts given to the printer. His only manuscript of Revelation lacked the last six verses, so he translated them back into Greek from the Latin Vulgate, creating a few Greek readings found in no manuscript. Erasmus himself later said that the first edition had been “rushed out rather than edited.”
Erasmus’s edition was nevertheless a landmark. It put the Greek New Testament into the hands of scholars across Europe, and it was used by Luther for his German translation (1522) and by Tyndale for his English New Testament (1526).
Erasmus revised his text several times. One famous change concerns 1 John 5:7–8. His first two editions omitted the words about “the Father, the Word and the Holy Spirit” in heaven, the so-called Comma Johanneum, because they were not in his Greek manuscripts. After criticism, he included them in his third edition (1522), when a Greek manuscript containing them was produced. That manuscript, now in Dublin and known as Codex Montfortianus, was probably made in the sixteenth century, and the words appear in no Greek manuscript before the late medieval period. Modern editions omit them.
The Received Text
Later editors built on Erasmus. The Paris printer Robert Estienne (Stephanus) published editions from 1546; his third edition of 1550 was the first printed Greek New Testament to include readings from other manuscripts in the margin, and his edition of 1551 was the first to number the verses, the system still used today. The Genevan reformer Theodore Beza published several editions later in the century.
In 1633, the preface to an edition by the Elzevir brothers of Leiden claimed that the reader now had “the text which is received by all.” From this phrase comes the name Textus Receptus, the “Received Text.” It was essentially the text of Erasmus, Stephanus and Beza, based on a small number of late Byzantine manuscripts.
The translators of the King James Version of 1611 worked mainly from Beza’s and Stephanus’s editions. The Textus Receptus remained the standard printed Greek New Testament for more than two hundred years.
Chapters and verses
The chapter and verse numbers in our Bibles are not original either. The modern chapter divisions are usually credited to Stephen Langton, a lecturer in Paris and later Archbishop of Canterbury, around 1200, working on the Latin Bible. The Masoretic manuscripts already marked the end of each verse in the Old Testament, and the numbering of those verses entered printed Bibles in the sixteenth century. Stephanus’s 1551 edition introduced New Testament verse numbers; the first English Bible to use verses throughout was the Geneva Bible of 1560. These divisions are useful for finding passages, but they sometimes break a sentence or a thought in an awkward place.
Back to the manuscripts
As described in How textual criticism recovers the text, scholars from the seventeenth century onwards gathered evidence from older manuscripts and found that the Textus Receptus differed from them in many places. In the nineteenth century, editions by Lachmann, Tischendorf, Tregelles, and Westcott and Hort (1881) replaced the Received Text with critical texts based on the oldest evidence. The English Revised Version of 1881 was the first major English translation to use such a text.
Most translations since then have followed the critical text: today, mainly the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece (28th edition, 2012) and the closely related United Bible Societies’ Greek New Testament (5th edition, 2014). A minority of scholars and churches prefer the Textus Receptus or the Byzantine majority of manuscripts; Maurice Robinson and William Pierpont, for example, have published an edition of the Byzantine text. The differences between these texts are real but are mostly small; their significance is discussed in How much do the manuscripts differ?.
For the Hebrew Bible, the standard editions are now based on the Leningrad Codex: Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (1967–77) and its successor, Biblia Hebraica Quinta, still in progress.
From print to digital
The latest change is digital. Critical editions are now produced with the help of databases and computer analysis. Manuscripts such as Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus, the Aleppo Codex and the Dead Sea Scrolls can be viewed online by anyone. And freely licensed electronic texts make it possible to build tools and translations that would once have required expensive permissions.
Open Word Bible depends on this. Its New Testament is translated from the SBL Greek New Testament (2010), a critical edition edited by Michael Holmes and released under a free licence, with word-by-word linguistic data from MACULA Greek. Its Old Testament is translated from the Westminster Leningrad Codex, a public domain transcription of the Leningrad Codex, with data from MACULA Hebrew and the Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible. Each source is pinned to an exact version, so that every word on this site can be checked against it, and no Greek or Hebrew is ever typed by hand (see Why we never type Greek or Hebrew by hand). In a sense it is the printing press’s promise taken one step further: not only identical copies of the text, but open access to the evidence behind it.
Sources
- Bentley, Jerry H. Humanists and Holy Writ: New Testament Scholarship in the Renaissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.
- de Hamel, Christopher. The Book: A History of the Bible. London: Phaidon, 2001.
- Krans, Jan. Beyond What Is Written: Erasmus and Beza as Conjectural Critics of the New Testament. Leiden: Brill, 2006.
- Metzger, Bruce M., and Bart D. Ehrman. The Text of the New Testament. 4th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Chapter 3.
- Norton, David. The King James Bible: A Short History from Tyndale to Today. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
- Robinson, Maurice A., and William G. Pierpont. The New Testament in the Original Greek: Byzantine Textform 2005. Southborough, MA: Chilton, 2005.
- Würthwein, Ernst, and Alexander Achilles Fischer. The Text of the Old Testament. 3rd ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014.
- Holmes, Michael W., ed. The Greek New Testament: SBL Edition. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2010.
- Bible quotations are from the World English Bible (public domain), except where the article gives its own literal rendering.