The first printed book is a Bible
Gutenberg completes his 42-line Bible
The forty-eight surviving copies of the Gutenberg Bible are scattered across libraries in Europe and America, each slightly different — the hand-illumination was done individually, the rubrication varies, some are on paper and some on vellum. They are among the most valuable books in the world.
But their value is not primarily financial. It is historical.
For a thousand years, the transmission of the word of God required human hands — a monk in a scriptorium, dipping a quill in ink, forming each letter, page after page, month after month. The slowness was the transmission. The text moved at the speed of human hands.
With Gutenberg, the speed changes permanently. Within a decade of his press, there are print shops across Germany. Within thirty years, in every major European city. Within fifty years, millions of books have been printed — more books than had been produced in the previous thousand years of European history combined.
Wycliffe's English Bible had to be hand-copied. The Lollards passed individual manuscripts from person to person. When Tyndale produces his English New Testament in 1526, six thousand copies arrive in England at once, hidden in bales of cloth.
The institution that burned Bibles in 303 AD and burned Bible translators in 1536 AD could not stop the press. Every Bible it confiscated was replaced by ten more. The technology had outrun the censorship.
The word imprisoned in manuscripts had broken free.
“The book that all people should read has become the book that all people can read.”
— A description of the Gutenberg Bible's significance, c. 15th century
“Your word is a lamp to my feet, And a light for my path.”
The Gutenberg Bible is the lamp given to a million feet at once.
For a thousand years the light of scripture reached most people indirectly — through sermons preached in Latin they could not understand, through stained glass windows that illustrated stories they could not read, through the institutional mediation of a church that controlled access to the text.
Gutenberg put the lamp directly in people's hands.
This is the gift that every generation since has inherited and mostly taken for granted. You can read the Bible in your own language, in your own home, at three in the morning if you cannot sleep, with no institution controlling your access.
The Lollards died for this. Tyndale was strangled for this. Gutenberg risked bankruptcy for this.
When did you last read the text as if it was the precious, costly, hard-won thing it is?