Bible Exhibition 1911 Guide to the Manuscripts Exhibited in Celebration of the Tercentenary of the Authorized Version With Eight Plates Printed by Order of the Trustees INTRODUCTION THE publication in 1611 of the Authorized Version marked an epoch, in the proper sense of that term, in the history of the English Bible. It was a point at which one period ended and another began. It ended a long series of attempts to produce a satisfactory translation of the Scriptures into English. It began a period of supremacy, unassailed after the first thirty years of its existence, and unquestioned for two hundred years thereafter, for the translation which then saw the light. It gave to the English nation, and eventually to all the English-speaking peoples throughout the world, a version of the Scriptures as faithful and accurate as the scholarship of the day admitted, and expressed in prose so stately and splendid as to make it one of the great classics of the English tongue. For the English language, for English literature, for English religion, and, through English, for the religion of many peoples, nations, and languages in all the earth, the publication of 1611 was in the fullest sense epoch-making. The roots of the English Bible lie far back in the history of the nation; but its development was a long and slow process. The Bible of Western Europe, at the time when England was converted to Christianity, was Latin, the so-called Vulgate', due in the main to St. Jerome, though embodying much of the work of earlier translators, and modified not a little since his time. This Bible was used alike by the Celtic monks who carried Christianity from Ireland to Iona, and from Iona to Northumbria, and by the Roman monks who accompanied Augustine to Kent. Monuments of this stage in the history of the Bible in England may be seen in the magnificent Lindisfarne Gospels (no. 11 in the present exhibition) written at the end of the seventh century in Northumbria; in another Northumbrian book closely related to it, of the eighth century (no. 13); and in various copies, at Oxford and elsewhere, which claim to have been brought to Canterbury by Augustine, and which at any rate belonged to the southern Church at a very early period. 657559 |