Rare Books - Foreign Language Bibles

14th Century - Century Manuscript Bible

During the 14th century, the St. Jerome Bible was not transcribed as often as one would expect in the country of its origin and the very land which held the seat of the Roman Church. Throughout the greater part of the 13th century, popes were greatly concerned with gaining political power, art was at a low ebb in Italy, and religious manuscripts were comparatively few and far inferior to the work of monastic scribes in Germany, France, and England. But with the great wealth accumulating in Italy during the 14th century through commerce and the Crusades, this country soon surpassed in richness as well as in numbers the manuscript output of all other nationalities. The estimate time to complete an entire manuscript Bible would vary from nine to twelve months.

1530 - Luther Bible, New Testament

Martin Luther translated the New Testament into German in 1522 and the rest of the Bible in 1534. Martin Luther based his German translation of the New Testament (1522) on Erasmus's Greek text (1516). This marked the first significant departure from the sole use of the Vulgate as a basis for translation. Twelve years later, Luther completed his work with a translation of the Old Testament from a Hebrew edition that had been published in 1495. It marked a milestone by giving people who could read vernacular, but not the classical languages, access to an accurate rendering of the ancient texts. It was the first complete version of the Bible in any modern language.

1576 - Greek New Testament

This small volume is beautifully bound in leather with gold tooling. The publisher, Henricus Stephanus, was also known as Henri Estienne. Henri’s grandfather, also named Henri, was the first in the line of Estienne/Stephanus printers. A Greek and Latin scholar from his early years, grandson Henri had much formal education, printed numerous other works in Greek and Latin, and wrote his own widely accepted Greek lexicon. Henri himself worked on this Greek Testament, published in 1576, and another one eleven years later. The 1576 inclusion of the “first scientific treatise on the language of the apostolic writers” gave the work notoriety. Henri’s father Robert had premiered a verse numbering system in his famous Greek Testament.

1695 - Augsburg Biblia Encyclopedia

Written in German by Christoph Weigel, this Bible encyclopedia bills itself as “The Bible Presented.” Its large folio size makes the illustrations even more beautiful, as it contains “800 beautiful pictures, entirely engraved.”

1800 - First Greek New Testament printed in America

Worcester: Isaiah Thomas, Junior, 1800
The son of Isaiah Thomas was the publisher of the first New Testament in Greek published in America. Caleb Alexander, the editor, drew upon various editions, especially the Elzevir of 1678. In the same year, 1800, Thomas published a Greek grammar, a duodecimo of 224 pages, that was advertised as "recommended by the University at Cambridge, Massachusetts, to be used by those who are intended for that seminary". Several editions of the Greek New Testament, issued by various publishers, followed in the nineteenth century.

1814 - First Hebrew Bible printed in America

Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson, 1814
The first book printed in the Hebrew language in America was an edition of the Psalms, edited by Professor Francis Hare, issued by the press of Harvard College in 1809. In 1810 a prospectus with sample pages for an octavo Hebrew Bible was distributed by Mills Day of New Haven, Connecticut, but the project failed. The first Hebrew Bible to be published in America was that of Thomas Dobson, printed by William Fry in Philadelphia.

1815 - First French Bible printed in America

Le Nouveau Testament ET le Vieux

The first printing of the New Testament in French in America was an edition of the Vulgate in 1810, from the firm of J.T. Buckingham in Boston. The first complete Bible in French was printed by James Seymour in 1815 for the New York Bible Society. The edition was printed from sterotype plates from the London edition of 1807, a reprinting of the Paris edition of 1805 done for the British and Foreign Bible Society.

1852 - Chinese Bible

Due to the complicated and difficult history of Christianity in China, Bible texts of this age and older have rarely survived. The majority of these Bibles were destroyed by the communist Chinese.

18th Century - Torah

18th Century - Torah

Date: 18th Century
Language: Hebrew
Dimensions: 4572 cm.
Materials: vellum and ink.

Scribed by hand on sections of goatskin, calfskin or sheepskin parchment that could stretch half the length of a football field, each Torah scroll has 300,000 letters that must be perfectly reproduced each time a Torah is copied

The word "Torah" can mean different things in different contexts. In its most limited sense, "Torah" refers to the Five Books of Moses: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. But the word "Torah" can also be used to refer to the entire Hebrew Bible (the body of scripture known to non-Jews as the Old Testament and to Jews as the Tanakh or Written Torah), or in its broadest sense, to the whole body of Jewish law and teachings.

1930 - Mandarin Chinese Bible

Due to the complicated and difficult history of Christianity in China, Bible texts of this age and older have rarely survived. The majority of these Bibles were destroyed by the communist Chinese. This Bible is known as the Union Version, and is printed in Mandarin Chinese. Reading from back to front, the Bible also includes five color maps at the end which are also written in Chinese. This Bible was published in Shanghai by the National Bible Society of Scotland, and it is dated 1930.