A History of the English Bible - Part III
Topic: Education is Key
Part III, taken directly from The Founder’s Bible
In 1788, Isaiah Thomas printed America’s first Hieroglyphic Bible. Designed for children, it took key passages from the Bible and substituted pictures, or what Thomas called “emblematical figures,” for nouns, thus making an interesting Bible game for children. Children would have to combine words and pictures (nearly 500 pictures throughout the Bible) to decipher the wording of the verse; but in case the children had trouble with the code, the verse was fully written out at the bottom of the page. These Bibles were abridgments, beginning with Creation and ending with Jesus’ redemption of man, but including many major moral teachings in between.
In 1790, Matthew Carey of Philadelphia published the Douay-Rheims version, the first Roman Catholic Bible printed in America. In it, he included seventy-six books, leaving out four from the Apocrypha.
In 1791, Isaac Collins, official printer for the state of New Jersey, produced a large Bible known as America’s first family Bible. Its introduction was penned by the Rev. Dr. John Witherspoon, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and president of Princeton. Although it was essentially a King James Version, Dr. Witherspoon saw absolutely no reason to acknowledge a king; after all, it was God’s Word, not King James’s word; and the Americans had just fought a war to get rid of kinds. Witherspoon therefore stated in the preface:
As the dedication of the English translation of the Bible to King James the First of England seems to be wholly unnecessary for the purposes of edification, and perhaps on some accounts improper to be continued in an American edition, the Editor has been advised by some judicious friends to omit it.
Also printed in 1791 was the Isaiah Thomas Bible – America’s first illustrated Bible, with fifty copperplate engravings. However, it is rare today to find the Thomas Bible with engravings, for at the time, it could be ordered with or without the engravings, and the engravings were so expensive that most bought the Bible without the illustrations.
In 1798, John Thompson of Philadelphia printed America’s first hot-pressed Bible, a process that used heat to help sear the ink into the paper. It was the biggest Bible printed in America to that time and was published with the financial assistance of President John Adams and Vice President Thomas Jefferson; signers of the Declaration John Hancock and Samuel Chase; signers of the Constitution Gunning Bedford, George Read, James Wilson, John Dickenson, Jared Ingersoll, Thomas Mifflin, and Alexander Hamilton; Constitutional Convention delegate John Lansing; John Jay, coauthor of the Federalist Papers and original Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court; Revolutionary General and Secretary of State Timothy Pickering; and many others.
In 1808, Charles Thomson published the first translation of the Septuagint into English. The Septuagint was the Greek translation of the Jewish Scriptures done centuries before Christ for Jews living in Grecian areas who no longer spoke Hebrew. Thomson was the official Secretary of the Continental Congress from 1774 to 1789 and is responsible for the Great Seal of the United States. It took Thomson nearly two decades to complete the translation, and his Bible was printed by Jane Aitken of Philadelphia – the daughter of Robert Aitken, who printed the Bible of the Revolution. It was the first Bible printed by a woman.
In 1809, America’s first Bible society – the Philadelphia Bible Society – was formed with the help of signer of the Declaration Benjamin Rush. Its goal was to provide a Bible for every individual who did not have immediate access to one, including the poor, prisoners, sick, etc. In 1812, it distributed America’s first stereotyped Bible. Stereotyping was a printing discovery in England that made reprints easier and also allowed more copies to be run in each printing, thus greatly reducing the cost of the Bible.
In 1816, America’s first national Bible Society was established – the American Bible Society. Founded by national leaders, including signers of the Constitution, Supreme Court justices, military generals, a U.S. president, a U.S. attorney general, and other national notables, it became one of the world’s most active forces in Bible distribution.
In 1833, Noah Webster produced America’s first modern-language Bible; A Revision of the Authorized Version of the English Bible. He published this work five years after he had completed his massive Webster’s Dictionary, and therefore took what he had learned from that effort and applied it directly to the Bible, updating outmoded words in order to help them convey their original meanings.
For example, where the Bible had used the ancient word fetch, he substituted the modern word equivalent, bring. Similarly, he used the sixty instead of the obsolete threescore, perhaps for peradventure, cow in place of kine, button for tache, capital for chapiter, etc.
Why did Webster want God’s Word to be easily understood by modern readers? He explained:
The Bible is the chief moral cause of all that is good and the best corrector of all that is evil in human society – the best book for regulating the temporal concerns of men and the only book that can serve as an infallible guide to future felicity [happiness].
In 1842, the American Bible Society printed the first Bible for the blind. It was an eight-volume work using what was called pre-Braille. Rather than the line-letter dot system of Braille that was used widely near the end of the century, pre-Braille instead used regularly shaped English letters pressed onto the sheet from the back, thus raising an impression of those letters on the front of the page. The reader would then move his fingers over the letters and words to read the text.
In 1858, the American Bible Society printed a special edition of the Bible for William Russell, William Waddell, and Alexander Majors (the owners of the Pony Express), with a distinct imprint on the front of each cover; a Bible was given to each rider. Typically, Pony Express riders were under eighteen years old, with some being eleven; and they made a galloping horseback ride of nearly eighteen hundred miles over a period of ten days, traversing through 190 relay stations from Saint Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California, and then returning, fighting outlaws, Indians, and perils along the way in each direction. The owners of the Pony Express wanted their riders who faced daily danger to be spiritually prepared.
To be continued…
Facebook: Toni Shuppe on Facebook
Instagram: Toni Shuppe on Instagram
Truth Social: Toni Shuppe on TruthSocial
Gab: Toni Shuppe on Gab
Telegram: Toni Shuppe on Telegram
Fascinating all the editions here in the US! Thanks for digging about this most important book that is as important as our founding documents. Needs to be read by all to understand how our government works. Required reading before graduation!Start in early years and build on!