Exhibit Shows Bibles as Signs of the Changing Times

Deep behind the locked doors of the Huntington Library’s rare book collection, two Bibles tell a remarkable story.

One is the Gundulf Bible, a 1,000-year-old tome originally owned by an English bishop and written in Latin, a language that most of his flock did not understand. The other is a version of the New Testament published this year that looks like a teen magazine featuring splashy art design and such articles as: “Are You Dating a Godly Guy?”

The Bible’s evolution reflects its dramatic transformation from a largely inaccessible book owned by high religious officials to a ubiquitous bestseller marketed to the masses in myriad ways. The story of that shift will be told in an exhibit, “The Bible and the People,” set to open today at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino.

“We like to start with a question: How did this book, which was so inaccessible in so many ways, become the best-known book in the Western world?” said Lori Anne Ferrell, co-curator of the show and a religion professor at the Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate University.

The four-month exhibit will feature treasures from the library’s collection of more than 2,000 Bibles spanning a millennium of history. Highlights include a 15th century Gutenberg Bible, the first produced by a printing press; a 14th century Ellesmere Psalter, a hand-painted volume of the Psalms; the Great Bible, England’s first authorized English translation of Scripture; and a copy of the Bay Psalm Book of 1640, the first book printed in America.

Each book illuminates part of the Bible’s long journey.

Tradition holds that God gave Moses the Ten Commandments more than 3,300 years ago, although some scholars argue that the laws were developed centuries later. Many agree that the Torah, or first five books of the Bible, was completed between 400 and 500 BC, and say the original Greek manuscripts of the New Testament followed by AD 100.

For centuries, however, few Christians read the Bible because of its enormous expense before the advent of the printing press, widespread illiteracy and church laws against translating the Scriptures into local languages. Those who tackled the text often found a forbidding work filled with incomprehensible words and contradictions.

“We live in a Bible-saturated culture, but not many people understand how difficult the book is to understand,” Ferrell said.

One of the exhibit’s nine rooms, in fact, will be devoted to the various tools people have employed through the ages to learn the Bible: study aids to define the text’s ancient words, “harmonies” that seek to explain the contradictions, rhyming schemes to memorize passages, and concordances to locate key phrases and characters.

Perhaps the most compelling focus of the show will tell the story of how the Bible came to the masses in England and then to the new land of America.

Two Bibles represent the persecution of those who tried to translate the Bible from Latin, the language of the church, to English at a time when church authorities feared that unschooled readers would misinterpret the text and fall into heresy, Ferrell said.

One is a 15th century unauthorized English translation of the New Testament by followers of professor and theologian John Wycliffe. His group, known as Lollards, pressed for greater lay involvement, including direct Bible reading. The church excommunicated Wycliffe and after he died in 1384, ordered his bones exhumed and burned.

The other work is a fourth-edition New Testament translated into English in 1534 by William Tyndale, a Reformation leader and linguist. Many consider him to be as influential as William Shakespeare in shaping the English language, and he is credited with rendering from the original Hebrew and Greek some of the Bible’s best-known phrases: “Let there be light,” “powers that be” and “signs of the times.”

But in 1536, Tyndale was strangled and burned at the stake for what church authorities considered heretical acts of translation. His last words were, “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes.”

Three years after his execution, Tyndale’s wish was granted: Henry VIII issued England’s first authorized translation, known as the Great Bible. The exhibit will feature an original copy, which Ferrell calls the “most thrilling” item to Reformation scholars.

As the newly authorized Bibles spread among Protestants, English Catholics exiled in France began producing their own Bibles even though they were still officially discouraged by Rome, said Stephen Tabor, the Huntington Library’s curator of early printed books and co-curator of the show. The first Catholic translation into English, produced in 1582, will also be featured in the exhibit.

From Europe, the exhibit shifts to America, where the Bible traveled aboard the Mayflower with the Pilgrims. One of the library’s treasures is a copy of the first Bible printed in the United States, a 1663 translation of the New Testament into Massachusett, the now-extinct language of Indians who lived in the Eastern United States. John Eliot, a Puritan minister intent on converting the Indians, mastered the complex language and produced with their help what Tabor says is known as “the most important unreadable book in the world.”

The exhibit also chronicles how Bibles were aggressively marketed by once-ubiquitous traveling Bible salesmen. One suggested sales pitch was to “go into every house, tell what you have in such a glow of enthusiastic assurance that no one will refuse to buy, except out of mere inability to pay the money that the book costs.”

Such home Bibles were ornate, massive and expensive -- one 1873 edition was priced at $16, Ferrell said. At that time, other versions could be bought for as little as 50 cents.

The most elegant display in the exhibit will feature “the Bible as Art,” including tomes with sumptuous bindings, hand-cut woodcuts and fine prints. One highlight is the 60-volume Kitto Bible, produced in the 19th century by a London print dealer who added more than 30,000 prints, including a watercolor by William Blake.

Nearly all of the exhibit’s items are owned by the Huntington Library, whose Bible collection is considered one of the top three or four in the nation, Tabor said.

In their concept for the show, Ferrell and Tabor argue that the Bible and its readers have transformed each other.

“That the Bible molds people is almost a cliche,” Tabor says, “but the process goes both ways.”

*

“The Bible and the People” will run through Jan. 5 at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino. Admission is $15 for adults, $12 for seniors, $10 for students, $6 for youths and free for children younger than 5. Contact (626) 405-2100.