The Bible and the People

An exhibition in the MaryLou and George Boone Gallery

**September 4, 2004 - January 9, 2005 **

**NOTE EXTENDED DATE**

The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens

Inset: King David playing the harp in a detail of a capital “B”, from the Ellesmere Psalter.

Every day, a book written thousands of years ago is opened by millions of people around the world. They turn to it for spiritual and moral guidance, artistic inspiration, historical facts, and clues to their – and its – origin. How did this ancient text become the most widely read and influential work in the Western world? “The Bible and the People” seeks to answer that question, documenting the impact this complex book has made on society and culture and tracing the ways the Bible has become increasingly accessible in both form and content to readers from the Middle Ages to the present day. The exhibition is drawn almost entirely from The Huntington’s collection.

Our story begins in the eleventh century, when the Bible was available only in expensive, hand-copied manuscripts – the exclusive property of clerics and a small Latin-educated elite, nearly all male. Manuscript Bibles could be breathtakingly beautiful, but they could also be inaccurately transcribed and confusingly formatted, their constituent books in varying sequences, their chapters and verses unmarked. As active participants in a Bible-saturated culture, ordinary people were familiar with scripture, but not as a text to read or a book to own.

Our story ends, however, in a very different world: the current Bible marketplace, with its extraordinary number of translations, formats, and versions designed to appeal to readers of every age, race, native language, reading ability, and budget. Today the Bible is the best-selling and the most widely distributed book in the world.

Between the eleventh century and the twenty-first, the Bible was refashioned to meet the needs of religion, politics, and popular demand. It moved beyond the institutional worlds of Church and university to play a powerful role in everyday, private life. And yet, in every transformation, the Bible has remained a reassuringly stable and familiar text, at once beloved and bewildering, affecting and awe-inspiring.

Our story is the history of a book, and of the people who read it.

Above inset: The fourth edition of William Tyndale’s New Testament, clandestinely printed in Antwerp in 1534.
Background image: King Henry VIII presides over the giving of the Bible to his grateful subjects
on the title page of the “Great Bible” of 1539, the first edition of the first Bible printed legally in English.

The Middle Ages and Early Reformation

The Reverend John Eliot, who oversaw the production of the first Bible printed in America. Probably painted c. 1660.

In the Middle Ages, the Bible was not only a luxury item but also a book designed for the working use of an educated elite in Church, university, and state. Their labors ensured that the bible played a central role in Western medieval religion, political thought, and education. Religious authorities were not averse to laypeople learning from the Bible, but they insisted that they learn the scriptures filtered through the orthodox teachings of the clergy. By the fifteenth century, however, popular sermons, religious art, and mystery plays could not satisfy the increasingly insistent demand for lay access to the scriptures. Manuscript production had become a highly skilled, fairly standardized, and market-oriented enterprise, but it would ultimately take a new technology – and a new theology – to put Bibles into ordinary hands.

The rise of Protestantism, with its doctrine of the “priesthood of all believers,” provided a powerful inducement to social change. Protestant reformers called for the Bible to be translated from Latin, the language of a pan-European, university-educated ecclesiastical class, into national languages like German and English. The invention of movable type and the rapid development of the art of printing meant that these vernacular Bibles could be mass-produced effectively and broadly distributed for the first time.

The Gutenberg Bible, c. 1455; the first substantial book printed with movable type. It is one of 48 surviving copies and one of only 12 printed on vellum.

The translated and printed Bible’s popular success was something churchmen and monarchs often noted with dismay. The advent of Protestantism permanently shattered the unity of Western Christendom, sparking fierce, often violent controversy between and within every one of its states. Translating the Bible was thus not only a religious act but also a political one, as kings, emperors, and clerics struggled to control the new religion and, with it, the Bible itself. Protestant authorities could become as disturbed as their Catholic counterparts when their subjects’ biblical interpretations appeared to threaten the political and social order. The Roman Catholic Church repeatedly stated its opposition to vernacular Bibles, while Protestant monarchs tried to restrict distribution to “authorized” versions, putting their stamp on the Bible by fixing their images on its title page.

The Seventeenth & Eighteenth Centuries

The first Bible printed in the Western Hemisphere (in Cambridge, Massachusetts colony) was a 1663 translation by missionary John Eliot into a now-extinct language of the Algonquian Indians.

America was founded by people who chafed at such restrictions. The Pilgrims packed their Bibles for a transatlantic voyage, carrying them to the “new world” of the Americas. Initially the only Bibles published in America were in Native American languages. The first was produced in an Algonquian language, in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1661. The colonists continued to read their British-made Bibles (the Authorized, or “King James” version) for another century.

With American independence came calls for an “American” Bible. After some debate, the Continental Congress of the United States decided against state sponsorship of Bible publication. In 1782, the Philadelphia printer Robert Aitken raised money by subscription to print the first American Bible, a “King James” version stripped only of its opening address to James I. It was a money-losing venture. In 1790, Matthew Carey collected enough subscriptions to print the first Catholic version produced in America, although he could not recoup his losses with sales of that translation alone. Despite these fledgling financial woes, the U.S. Bible market grew quickly, proving itself more than able to supply a rapidly expanding nation, new missionary projects, and the ambitious energies of door-to-door salesmen.

The Nineteenth Century

Instructed in the latest selling techniques and armed with attractive sample books, Bible salesmen stormed the front porches of the country. The Bibles they sold were, generally speaking, the old familiar King James, but with new features to pique the interest of a broad variety of customers. Some Bibles, sporting red letters, large print, or flexible soft covers, were easy to carry and easy on the eye; others aspired to family heirloom status, resembling nothing so much as massive pieces of Victorian furniture. The innovative marketing instincts of Bible publishers both followed domestic tastes and shaped them.

Another important market, dating back to the era of manuscript Bibles, served those who needed extra help understanding the scriptures. The production of memorization manuals, concordances, dictionaries, and study guides kept pace with a rapidly accelerating Bible trade, encouraging the efforts of all diligent readers, from university professors and seminary scholars to Sunday-school teachers, curious children, and pious families.

By the nineteenth century, then, the Bible – once so rare – had become abundant and inexpensive. Bibles were available in hundreds of versions, so many that some enterprising hobbyists were inspired to pick up pen and scissors and engage the scriptures in some highly creative ways.


Ornate cover of a German language Bible printed in Philadelphia in the 1870's.	The extra-illustrated Kitto Bible, created in the mid-nineteenth century by printseller James Gibbs, who took apart a common Bible, underlined its key passages, assembled more than thirty thousand prints, drawings and watercolors, and rebound the whole in sixty giant volumes.

The Twentieth Century

The Old Testament according to D.W. Griffith in his 1916 film Intolerance.

Even as new translations of the Bible – for instance, the Revised Version of 1881 and the Revised Standard Version of 1952 – made their impact upon the modern age, the modern age made its impact on the Bible. Bible producers and Bible readers found intellectual and aesthetic inspiration in technologies old and new. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947, one of the great adventure stories of the twentieth century, brought never-before-seen versions of the scriptures to the attention of biblical scholars and, eventually, the public. The makers of fine-press Bibles paid tribute to the artisanal values of the past by producing typefaces and page formats that recalled the handcrafted beauty of medieval manuscript Bibles. And a new generation of artists used the medium of film to tell time-honored biblical stories.

The Present Day

Along with fashion and dating tips and suggestions on how to get along with Mom and Dad, this magazine also contains the complete text of the New Testament.

Today’s Bible comes in many different forms. Skillful market research has both discovered and created hundreds of new audiences for the scriptures. One can now find annotated Bibles designed for African-American women’s study groups, web-surfing ten-year-olds, people bashful about reading something that looks like a Bible in public, and teenage girls whose tastes usually run to fashion magazines. At the heart of all these brand-new formats is the same work so painstakingly copied by hand onto vellum almost two thousand years ago.

Lori Anne Ferrell, Guest Curator
Stephen Tabor, Co-Curator

Major support for this exhibition was provided by

The Dan Murphy Foundation

Additional financial support was provided by
The Myrtle Atkinson Foundation
The Ida Hull Lloyd Crotty Foundation
The William H. Hannon Foundation
The Thomas and Dorothy Leavey Foundation

The J.F. Shea Company Foundation

Still from D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance courtesy of
the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Lauren Tawa, Exhibit Design

Sandra G. Muleady, Guide Design

Suggested Bibliography

David Daniell,
The Bible in English
(New Haven, 2003)

Christopher De Hamel,
The Book: A History of the Bible
(London, 2001)

Adam Nicholson,
God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible
(New York, 2003)

The Cambridge History of the Bible
(Cambridge, 1963-70)

The Oxford Illustrated History of the Bible
(Oxford, 2001)

All images copyright: The Huntington Library

For more information publicinfo@huntington.org

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