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The
Holy Bible
A non-denominational, nonsectarian
work-in-progress; a chronological history of the book that is the world’s most
widely printed and published work; the focus here is historical, with no
attempt to judge theological superiority of one version over another;
Topics covered include:
-unique & significant editions
-historical milestones
-Bible Societies
-Bibliography
Pre-15th Century 15th Century 16th Century 17th Century
18th Century 19th Century 20th Century 21st Century
The Holy Bible
· comprised of sixty-six books, not counting the Apocrypha
· The word bible was first applied to the Hebrew scripture in the 2nd Century A.D.
· The word bible has been used for the combined Old and New Testaments since the fifth century A.D.
· The word bible does not occur
in the text of the Scriptures
· A Codex is a leaf book invented and used first by the Romans, as distinguished from a roll or scroll
· The Books of Moses are also known as the Pentatuech, or the Law, regarded as authoritative about 400 B.C.
· 200 A.D. The New Testament was generally accepted as scripture
· In 367 A.D. Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, listed the twenty-seven books which have been held as authoritative to this day
· The Apocrypha's fourteen books have
not been included in the Protestant Bible since the Nineteenth Century
· The Old Testament was first written
down in Hebrew and Aramaic; The New Testament in Greek
· The Old Testament’s 39 books are divided into 929 chapters of
23,214 verses (Apocrypha not included)
· The New Testament’s 27 books are divided
into 260 chapters of 7,959 verses
· The Bible was divided into chapters by Cardinal Hugo
de Sancto-Caro about 1250
· The Greek New Testament was divided into verses by
Robert Stephens, a French printer, in 1551
· Up to the end of 1961 the American Bible Society had
distributed over 592,000,000 copies of the scriptures
· Robert Aitken of Philadelphia
printed the first English Bible in America in 1782 with the approval of the
Congress
· Christopher Sauer of Germantown, Pa., printed the first Bible
in America in a European language (German) in 1743
· Glossing or a gloss refers to a literal word-by-word rendering into a
second language, preserving the order of the first.
· The first Bible in America was printed in 1663 – a translation into the Massachusetts Indian language by John Eliot
This website was originally conceived to celebrate the 550th anniversary of the printing of the 42-line Vulgate Bible by Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of movable type. The November 18, 1950 edition of the Antiquarian Bookman Magazine reported that by the end of 1950 (the 500th anniversary of Gutenberg's invention), over two billion Bibles and parts of bibles will have been printed, with 25 million more being added each year. At this rate, the total number of bibles printed by the year 2008 will exceed four billion copies, in thousands of languages and editions. This makes the Bible the first and undisputed best-seller of all time and no other book is likely to take its place.
Learn more about the Gutenberg Bible census.
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