University Libraries

By Owen Smith

Rare Bibles in the University of Dayton Archives range from the 15th century to the 19th century. As a history major, I found this extremely exciting. In order to understand the context of these Bibles, I have done a lot of research and reading. In this blog, I share some highlights from my internship this summer. 

The First Translations

One book I found immensely helpful was Christopher de Hamel’s Bibles: An Illustrated History from Papyrus to Print. It discusses how St. Jerome translated the Bible from the original Greek and Hebrew into Latin and how that became the official translation of the Western Catholic Church for centuries. Some of the earliest Bibles in the UD Archives are in Jerome’s Latin, including the beautifully illuminated Koberger Bible. 

De Hamel also explains the history of English translations of the Bible, which are also present at UD, including a 1611 first edition of the King James Bible. 

The Catholic Douay-Rheims Bible is also present; it was created earlier to rival Protestant English translations, all of which would be used by the scholars who translated the King James Bible. 

English Translations

In order to gain a better understanding of these English translations of the Scriptures, I read Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation. Prior to the English Reformation, Bible translations into English had to be explicitly approved by the Roman Catholic Church, making them rarer in England than in continental Europe. Predecessors to the King James Bible, like William Tyndale’s, were outlawed, and those who possessed them were liable for punishment. That all changed with the English Reformation; vernacular translations of the Bible into English exploded with the culmination of years of scholarship occurring in the King James Bible. 

A Bible in the Algonquin Language

Another important work I explored was a leaf from the Eliot Indian Bible. This Algonquin-language Bible was a translation for Puritan John Eliot’s missionary work that attempted to “civilize” and Christianize the Native Americans in the region of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Eliot saw a rejection of the Native Americans’ culture as a necessary prerequisite to becoming Christian. To this end, he established “praying towns” to convert the Natives to Christianity. However, colonial Puritans never saw Christian Natives as equals. King Philip’s War ended Eliot’s experiment and further curtailed the rights of Indigenous people, with many (even those loyal to the English) being deported. Others were killed or sold into slavery. It is unsurprising that the dialect of Algonquin that this Bible was translated into is now extinct.

Into the Vernacular

It is of the utmost importance to look at these rare books within the context of the historical moment they were present in. If one is ignorant of the origins of these translations, then they are merely looking at an old book and engaging in antiquarianism. If one is to engage in substantive research, they must research why the books exist and what they meant to those who created them, not merely their surface-level appearance. That is exactly the kind of work that I was able to do this summer at the UD Archives, and it has made me into a better scholar. 

Bibliography

De Hamel, Christopher. Bibles: An Illustrated History from Papyrus to Print. Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2011.

Marshall, Peter. Heretics and Believers. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017.

Salisbury, Neal. “Red Puritans: The ‘Praying Indians’ of Massachusetts Bay and John Eliot.” The William and Mary Quarterly 31, no. 1 (January 1974): 27–54.

— Owen Smith is a history major and senior at the University of Dayton.