SOME EARLY PRINTED BIBLES IN THE COLLECTION OF THE BIBLE SOCIETY IN NEW ZEALAND

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 10, Issue 2, 1 October 1977, Page 49

SOME EARLY PRINTED BIBLES IN THE COLLECTION OF THE BIBLE SOCIETY IN NEW ZEALAND

V. G. Elliott

The Bible Society in New Zealand has recently undertaken to deposit in the Library an important collection of Bibles and related works.* In its entirety the collection comprises manuscript and printed materials ranging from the twelfth to the twentieth century. To date, only works printed before 1801 have been transferred but already the wealth of the collection is evident. It follows closely on the bequest by Sir Arthur Howard of 50, mainly sixteenth-century, Bibles and prayer books, an exhibition of which was held in 1975. The presence of both collections will give welcome strength in an area in which the holdings of the Library were formerly modest.

This article is limited to a survey of the 166 items which have arrived in the Library. They form the core of a collection which is capable of sustaining serious research in a number of fields. Inevitably the principal emphasis falls on editions of the English Bible, but important texts in other languages are also represented, occasionally in notable editions. It is a collection in which the development of contemporary Biblical scholarship may be clearly traced.

Both the Old and the New Testament appear in the original languages. The Hebrew Old Testament is present in two editions, one printed by Christopher Plantin at Antwerp in 1584 and the other by Pierre de la Rouviere at Geneva in 1609. The text follows that of Plantin’s Royal or Antwerp Polyglot Bible of 1568-72 which reprinted with minor modifications the text of the Complutensian Polyglot of Alcala, printed from 1514 to 1517 and published probably in 1522. In each case an interlinear Latin translation, a revision of Santes Pagninus’s version first published in 1528, is also provided.

The Greek New Testament is strongly represented by ten editions of which six are sixteenth-century, offering versions of four major editions, the Gomplutensian and those of Erasmus, Robert Estienne and Beza. The Complutensian appears in two editions issued with the Hebrew Old Testaments of 1584 and 1609 and in a third printed by Plantin at

Antwerp in 1583, and the Erasmian, first published in 1516, in a 1564 diglot (Greek and Latin) from the press of Nicolaus Brylinger at Basle. A 1568-69 New Testament by Robert Estienne the younger prints the text of his father’s first edition of 1546, incorporating only five readings from the subsequent editions of 1549 and 1550. But the text of the important Estienne edition of 1550 is found, in modified form, in 1565 and 1580 octavo editions of Beza’s recension printed at Geneva by Henri Estienne. These diglots include Beza’s own Latin translation and marginal notes, the 1580 edition adding the text of the Latin Vulgate. Of the three remaining editions, two are seven-teenth-century and the other is a 1763 octavo printed at Oxford with the Greek types of John Baskerville. The sole Greek Old Testament in the collection, a 1653 octavo edition printed in London by Roger Daniel for John Martin and James Allestry, claims to print the Sixtine text of 1587. Edited by John Biddle, this was the first edition of the Septuagint printed in England.

A small group of Latin Bibles includes five incunables, a highlight of the collection. The earliest and latest are Venetian, a folio printed by Reynaldus de Novimagio and Theodorus de Reynsburch in 1478 and a 1497 octavo printed by Heironymus de Paganinis. Of the remainder, all folios, two are Strasburg Bibles, one printed by Adolf Rusch for Anton Koberger before 1481 and the other by Johann Griininger in 1492, and the third is a 1485 edition from the Nuremberg press of Anton Koberger. The Rusch Bible, incomplete in this copy, was the first to print the Glossa ordinaria, a commentary often attributed to the ninth-century Walafrid Strabo but probably the work of Anselm of Laon and his pupils at Laon and Auxerre.

Another five editions of the Vulgate text appear in sixteenth-century Bibles, including a 1504 folio printed at Basle by Johann Amerbach, Johann Froben and Johann Petri and a 1534 Paris octavo printed by Yolande Bonhomme, the widow of Thielmann Kerver. The text of the Zurich Latin Bible, first published in 1543, is present in a 1544 edition printed at Zurich by Christopher Froschouer and the Junius-Tremellius version of the Old Testament and Apocrypha, dating from 1575-79, is found with Beza’s Latin New Testament in a 1680 Bible printed at London by Roger Norton the younger for Nathaniel Ponder. The Greek and Latin diglot New Testaments provide additional versions of the Vulgate and Beza texts.

The collection is strongest in editions of the English Bible. It is also well balanced, with 26 Bibles or Testaments published before 1611. Tyndale’s New Testament, first published in 1526, is represented by the fourth edition of 1550 and Richard Jugge’s revision of 1566. The Matthew Bible of 1537, based on Tyndale’s translations but using Goverdale to complete the text of the Old Testament, appears in two

London editions, one printed by John Day and William Seres in 1549 and the other by Nicholas Hyll in 1551, in two issues, for William Bonham and John Walley. Edmund Becke’s edition of 1551, professedly Matthew, in fact prints the Old Testament and Apocrypha in Richard Taverner’s revision of 1539. Coverdale’s own revision, under the patronage of Thomas Cromwell, produced in 1539 the Great Bible. The third and fourth editions of 1540 and 1541 present in the collection include Thomas Cranmer’s preface first added to the second edition. The Great Bible New Testament is also found in a copy of the 1551-52 edition of a translation of Erasmus’s Paraphrases first published in 1548-49.

The Great Bible Old Testament and Tyndale’s New Testament formed the basis of the Geneva revision undertaken by Whittingham, Gilby and Sampson and published in 1560. The 15 editions held by the Bible Society, from the second edition of 1562 to that of 1640, illustrate not only its popularity but the development of the text, with the gradual introduction of Laurence Tomson’s New Testament translation from 1587 and Junius’s Revelation from 1599. Whittingham’s own Geneva New Testament of 1557, the precursor of the Geneva text, is also held in the first edition, printed by Robert Estienne’s brother-in-law, Conrad Badius. Despite the granting of a royal licence to John Bodley, the Geneva version was not printed in England until 1576. In the meantime Matthew Parker had superintended another revision of the Great Bible text, the Bishops’ Bible of 1568, which dispensed with the contentious Calvinist notes of Geneva. There are four editions in the collection, those of 1575, 1585, 1588 and 1591. The Reims New Testament and the Douay Old Testament, the Roman Catholic response to Protestant translations into English, are also represented, the Reims by the fourth edition of 1633 and Fulke’s second critical edition of 1601, the Douay by the editio prince ps of 1609-10.

The translators of the Authorized Version of 1611 were influenced by the Geneva and Reims translations even though their main task was the revision of the Bishops’ Bible by reference to the Hebrew and Greek texts. The Society’s collection of King James Bibles, with 22 seventeenthcentury editions and six published in the eighteenth century, is particularly strong. Although the true first edition is wanting, the Great She Bible is present along with the second, third and fourth distinct blackletter folio editions of 1613, 1617 and 1634. A 1629 folio proves to be the first edition of the Authorized Version printed in Cambridge and a 1675 quarto the first English Bible printed at Oxford. The impressive large folio edition printed at Oxford by John Baskett in 1717, the Vinegar Bible, is also present in a fine copy.

Many of the English Bibles have other, bibliographically distinct, items bound with them. There are, for example, 19 editions of Sternhold

and Hopkin’s metrical versions of the Psalms, including five from the sixteenth century, one 1572 psalter in the Great Bible translation, 11 seventeenth-century editions of the Book of Common Prayer and six dated editions of Robert Herrey’s concordance. John Speed’s Genealogies also appear in 12 separate editions and the Junius text of Revelation, first published in Latin in 1591 and in English translation in 1592, is present in a 1594 London quarto printed by Richard Field for Robert Dexter. It was this translation of the annotated text by the Huguenot Franciscus Junius, or Frangois du Jon, which from 1599 supplanted the usual version in the Geneva-Tomson New Testament.

The breadth of the collection is revealed by the number of languages represented in translations. Luther’s German New Testament is present in a 1590 edition printed at Nuremberg by Katharina Gerlachin. There are two Dutch Bibles, a 1657 edition of the Roman Catholic version of 1599 and a 1756 edition of the States-General version first published in 1637. All three French Bibles are Genevan, printed in Amsterdam, and include the Samuel des Marets annotated edition of 1669 from the press of Louis and Daniel Elzevir. The 1685 first edition of the Irish Old Testament, translated by William Bedell, is found bound with the second edition, 1681, of the Irish New Testament, translated by William Daniel and others. The Bible in Welsh is represented by a 1689-90 London edition and the New Testament in Syriac by the 1664 Hamburg edition edited by Aegidius Gutbier. Of the polyglots, the most notable is the London or Walton edition printed by Thomas Roycroft and finally published in 1658. Incomplete in this set, wanting four of the six volumes, the Bible was edited by Bishop Brian Walton and remains the last and finest of the great polyglots. The collection also includes the Nuremberg Polyglot New Testament of 1599, edited by Elias Hutter, and a 1671 Stockholm polyglot edition of the Gospels, in Gothic, Icelandic, Swedish and Latin.

In addition to the Bibles, there is a small group of related works. These include a 1531 Strasburg edition of the works of Josephus in German, an English translation of Luther’s commentary on Galatians printed by Thomas Vautrollier in 1580, a 1586 Paris edition of the Disputatio cum Herbano ludaeo attributed to Gregentius and Philip van Limborch’s De veritate religionis Christianae arnica collatio printed at Gouda in 1687. Anthony Sparrow’s 1661 Collection of articles, injunctions, canons . . . with other publick records of the Church of England is also present as are a number of Biblical handbooks such as Francis Roberts’s Clavis Bibliorum, here in the second edition of 1649. Of bibliographical interest is the list of English Bibles from 1526 to 1776 compiled from the manuscript of Joseph Ames and expanded by, among others, the antiquary Andrew Ducarel. The Bible Society’s

copy of the 1778 edition bears an inscription recording that it was given to Bryan Barrett on 16 March 1778 by Dr Ducarel himself. Associations of one kind or another inevitably abound in a collection of Bibles. Many were used to record the births, deaths and marriages within a family for a century or more. Some inscriptions in this collection are of particular interest, such as that in the copy of a 1630 Cambridge King James Bible which asserts that Lieutenant Phillip Browne was quartered with the widow Browne in Lichfield on 14 July 1646, the day the city surrendered to the Parliamentary forces. On this occasion the writer’s memory may have played him false for in fact the garrison capitulated on 10, not 14, July. A 1630 edition of the Thirty-nine Articles bears the signatures of parishioners of Buriton and Chalton in Hampshire witnessing that twice, on 30 December 1660 and 13 March 1669, a Dr Edmund Barker read and consented to the articles of the Church of England. Of local interest is a 1620-21 quarto edition of the Authorized Version, later the property of Bishop Nevill, the first Anglican Bishop of Dunedin, which is held by tradition to have been brought to New Zealand in 1824 by the early missionary-farmer Richard Davis. And a 1608 Geneva Bible, formerly belonging to William Ronaldson, is shown in a lengthy inscription to have been presented to him shortly before his departure for New Zealand in 1855 in the hope that “he will be instrumental, in publishing the Truth in the language spoken by the Polynesians, so that Idolatry, like the Mastadon and Dinornis may past [sic] away, to be replaced by the Gospel &c &c”.

A survey of this kind cannot do justice to the collection. But even a preliminary examination does reveal impressive strengths. The collection has been built up over a number of years largely through the generosity of both the Society’s parent body in London and many donors in Britain and New Zealand. By depositing the collection in the Library the Bible Society in New Zealand has demonstrated a proper concern for its preservation. The Society has also, through its goodwill, made a valuable collection more readily accessible for scholarly research.

* Under the Deed the Library accepts the custody of the Society’s collection of early Bibles and related printed and manuscript materials, to be designated as “The Bible Society in New Zealand Collection”, and agrees to maintain it under the same conditions as the Library’s permanent collections. Ownership of the collection is to remain with the Bible Society. The conditions of use of the volumes will be those laid down in the Library’s Rules for its own rare book collection. The Library has agreed to display the collection from time to time and is considering the publication of a catalogue.— Editor.