The Ark

An astonishng collection of rare Bibles including one possibly used by William Shakespeare is on display in Australia.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

THEME

Rachael Kohn: The Bible is a sacred book, but for some people it's also the only written record of their language. Hello, this is The Ark, and I'm Rachael Kohn.

An historic exhibition of Bibles belonging to the New South Wales Bible Society, will go on display in New South Wales regional centres, starting in Albury in early August.

It's an astonishing collection, including the first Bible translated into an Aboriginal language. One of the Bibles looks to have belonged to The Bard himself, William Shakespeare. And if it's the King James version that most interest you, there's an original Pulpit edition on display.

John Harris describes it.

John Harris: Rachael, very people would have had a King James version of the Bible in their possession in 1611. Perhaps the Pulpit is to just distinguish the fact that this is a very large edition, and there were later on some smaller editions. But the first edition of the King James Bible was to be read in churches, it was to be on a lectern and so it was quite a large volume, and this is one of the original 1611 printings.

Rachael Kohn: Goodness, is there any other one like that in Australia?

John Harris: I don't know of another one in Australia. It is certainly quite a rare volume, and although there are some older volumes in the collection, I feel that this particular volume, because of its place in not just the history of the Christian church, but the history of the world in a way, is probably the more important book in the collection.

Rachael Kohn: And is it in any way illustrated? Does it have any decoration on it?

John Harris: This one has woodcuts and so on in the introductions, but it doesn't have any actual illustrations. But it has decorated capitals and other kind of woodcut illustrative detail throughout the text.

Rachael Kohn: Well the King James was not the first English version of the Bible, that was the work of William Tyndale, but he didn't fare well at the hands of the English, and nor did his Bible. I suppose more were burned that survived?

John Harris: Well that is true. The first printed English scripture was Tyndale's. Of course there's the Wycliffe and even earlier translations into Saxon, but the first printed scripture was certainly Tyndale's 1525 scripture. And certainly you're right, he in the end, fared very badly, but I suppose there's an amusing anecdote, in that the bishops of the church were so afraid of the Bible in the language of commoners that they were to go to any lengths to obtain these Bibles and destroy them and so Tyndale and his followers, found that the most lucrative market for the scriptures was in fact the bishops, to whom they sold them, particularly the Bishop of London, who burnt them.

And so they actually funded their whole printing press from selling them to be destroyed. But as a result, hundreds, thousands became distributed in England from the Continent.

Rachael Kohn: Gosh, and you've got a copy there?

John Harris: We have a 1551 New Testament, and these two are very, very rare. This was of course printed after Tyndale's death. Tyndale himself was arrested and imprisoned in 1535 and he was strangled and burnt at the stake. His final words were, 'Lord, open the King of England's eyes', and the ironic thing is that in the same year King Henry VIII allowed his protégé, Miles Coverdale, to publish a version of the Bible based on Tyndale's work.

Rachael Kohn: Now Tyndale's English was influential in the King James version?

John Harris: I think every Bible that has ever been translated into the English language has the shadow, the ghost of Tyndale in it. His phrasing was very influential in the King James version, and the King James version of course has influenced the English language. Even the word 'church', for example, where Tyndale struggled with maybe he'd use the word 'assembly' and maybe he'd use the word 'congregation' and eventually decided on the use of the word 'church'. This has in itself influenced the English language and probably influenced theology. But when we take well-known verses you know, 'For God so loved the world', or 'The Lord is my shepherd I shall not want', and so on, this is of course Tyndale.

Rachael Kohn: Yes. So belovedly sung too in hymns. Well one of the Bibles on display is much more recent, but very interesting: the Dutch Bible, plucked from the hands of a dying soldier.

John Harris: Yes, this was a very interesting Bible. You need to see the thing because it's about - I don't know how to describe the size of it - it's like four house bricks, it's a great big square block of a Bible that must weigh a couple of kilos. And this was carried in the knapsack of an Afrikaaner sergeant all through the Boer War.

He was injured at the Battle of Paardsberge, at the time of the surrender of General Cronje, and when an Australian sergeant was going around the wounded Afrikaaners, taking their weapons, or the dead Afrikaaners, he came across this sergeant, and it was a kind of sergeant-to-sergeant gesture, in which the young Australian sergeant tried to make him comfortable and left his water bottle with him, and so on. And in his dying breath, the Afrikaaner sergeant gave him his Dutch Bible.

Rachael Kohn: Gosh. Any bullet holes in it?

John Harris: No, but it's a very, very ragged Bible, and then I think rather sadly, someone made an attempt I think about 100 years ago to rebind it, and I don't know that they did that very well. But no, it has no bullet holes in it, although the Bible Society is in possession of - Bible Society issue New Testaments with bullet holes in them which soldiers carried through all the wars in their left-hand pocket, over their heart.

Rachael Kohn: Well the Bible is certainly the most translated book in history, and I think people will be able to see part of the New Testament translated for Aboriginal Australians. That's your area of specialty, isn't it?

John Harris: Yes, my particular interest is in Aboriginal Australia and in the translation of the Bible into Aboriginal languages, and that's what I'm employed to do within the Bible Society. But we're quite excited to be able to display some of these important scriptures.

The first translation ever of any of the Bible into an Aboriginal language took place near Newcastle in New South Wales, Lake Macquarie, the Awabakal people, and that translation was never published. The Awabakal people were massacred to death and Lancelot Threlkeld, the London Missionary Society missionary who had translated it, never had it published, although it was published after his death. So that's on display.

But the earliest Aboriginal scripture ever published is also on display and that's the Ngarrindjeri selections from the gospels, published in 1864 by the Bible Society in South Australia. It's quite interesting that even though this language is close to being lost by most of its speakers, every now and then things prompt them to remember this little volume of scripture, and ask for its reprinting. The latest event was the Hindmarsh Island women's business, which reminded the Hindmarsh Island women's business people that Ngarrindjeri was their language and that there was part of the Bible, and again, they asked for its reprinting. So it's an historically interesting scripture.

Rachael Kohn: Well some of the Bibles on display are particularly beautiful I understand, and one such is the Macklin Bible. Tell us about its origins.

John Harris: Macklin was a rather interesting character. He was one of these people who inhabited I suppose late 17th century, early 18th century London, in the time of a great deal of affluence.

He sold beautiful books, and himself was a bookbinder, probably the greatest bookbinder of his time, maybe ever. And he conceived this idea of noting the turn of the century. We've just had the turn of the millennium, and we know how it might have felt, but in 1800 and 1900 and 1700, and so on, people felt the same way about the turn of the century. And so he had this idea of producing this huge, bountifully illustrated volume of the Bible.

Well it was six volumes, and they're huge, huge things, it's very hard to lift even one of them. They measure about I think 70-centimetres by about 50-centimetres. All of the great artists of England were brought in to cut woodcuts, and so they have woodcuts from Joshua Reynolds and Angelica Kauffmann and James Northcote and John Opie, and all these other great British artists of the time.

Rachael Kohn: Well in great contrast to that, you've also got miniature Bibles; who were they intended for?

John Harris: Well curiously enough they were mainly intended for children. I think they're part of the era of the miniature railways and the doll's houses that very often little tiny Bibles were published and they were thought to be a suitable gift for a child. And some of these required a magnifying glass to read, and the one that's on display, its original little box is there, and its little magnifying glass. It's the whole Bible.

This little volume was a technological marvel because it was typeset and printed with tiny movable type that you needed a magnifying glass to actually even handle. And it measures, what, 2-centimetres by 1.5, or something like that.

Rachael Kohn: Sounds like it would have been more practical to carry that one on the battlefield rather than that giant Dutch one.

John Harris: It certainly would have been, yes.

Rachael Kohn: I understand that the piece de resistance, at least historically, is the Geneva Bible, which became the Bible of the English-speaking Reformers. You've got a 1607 edition on display, which might have had an illustrious owner.

John Harris: Well it might indeed. The 1607 Geneva Bible we have is an interesting Bible in its own right, but we have very strong reasons to believe that it belonged to William Shakespeare.

It's the right era, certainly in 1607 Shakespeare was writing and his plays are full of quotations and allusions to the Bible, and these are of course from the Geneva Bible that he greatly loved. Now this Bible was given to the Bible Society by a William Lea, and he said that it had been given to him by the last living descendent of Shakespeare's sister, and he in turn gave it to the Bible Society for safekeeping, which is the reason why we have quite a lot of these Bibles. They've been given to us to be kept safely. And it's got the initials 'WS' scratched on the front cover, although that alone doesn't mean a great deal perhaps.

Rachael Kohn: Could it belong to Walter Smith?

John Harris: Well it could have. The initials WS appear in the margins against many verses, and there's a faded, very faded signature on the title page which even special lighting is unable to bring out very well now. However I don't have any reason to doubt the good faith of the person who gave it to us.

But the other suggestion that is made is that it might indeed be a forgery, and if it was a forgery, this in itself is very interesting indeed, because there was a very famous forger, William Ireland, and there's a remarkable story about him, because he worked for his father, who was a bookseller, and he learnt the book trade, and as a teenager he was apprenticed to a solicitor, who was apparently like some solicitors one hears of, you know, not the most honest in his trade.

And this young men learnt how to forge signatures from his boss, and he found he was quite a hand at it, and he did things like getting scraps of old paper from the bottoms of old documents, and forging on them signatures of famous people and selling them through his father's bookshop. And eventually he contrived to have letters from Anne Hathaway to William Shakespeare, and all these kinds of things, and sold these for quite a lot. And he turned then to books, and he would find books that were totally blank and he would forge King Henry VIII's signature, or William Shakespeare's signature and so on.

Until at the ripe age of 19, he confessed to all of this in an article in The London Times, and gave up forging, and in some ways the William Ireland forgeries are more famous than William Shakespeare's Bible itself. So there you are. You can have a look at this Bible and you can decide whether it was young William Ireland or whether it was young William Shakespeare. It was one or the other.

Rachael Kohn: Well people can have a look at that and many other interesting Bibles, including a Welsh Bible. But John, can you tell me where else is this collection going to be displayed in Australia?

John Harris: It was first put together Rachael, for the Public Library in Newcastle at Eastertime this year. And it's being displayed at the Albury Regional Museum, I think the exhibition opens from 6th August, and it's going to tour regional New South Wales and we hope as well a couple of major institutions in Sydney. We don't have dates for those yet, but in Albury, it will be on display from 6th August to 30th September. And then following that, it will continue to be displayed in major regional centres in New South Wales.

Rachael Kohn: The Reverend Dr John Harris of The Bible Society of New South Wales. In 1997 the surviving Awabakal people in the Newcastle region finally did benefit from that translation of the Gospel of Luke into their language.

John Harris: In a marvellous gesture I think, all of the Christian churches in Newcastle made a reconciliation gift to the Aboriginal people of Newcastle and its region, to the Awabakal people, and they paid for the Bible Society to print this Bible. And so it was printed for the first time 150 years after it was translated, and a copy was given to every Aboriginal family in the region.

Rachael Kohn: John Harris of the New South Wales Bible Society.

Next week on The Ark, a look at the Commonwealth's greatest Field Commander in World War I, Sir John Monash.

Guests

Reverend Dr. John Harris
is a Translation Consultant with the Bible Society.

Further Information

Murder, Mayhem and the Making of the King James Bible
Rachael Kohn discusses the making of the world's most influential book with Alister McGrath, author of In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible.
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/relig/spirit/stories/s344583.htm

Passion and Parables
From 6 August to 30 September 2004 there will be an exhibition of Historic Bibles from the Bible Society NSW at the Albury Regional Musuem. Also on display will be photographs by Ken Duncan, taken on the set of Mel Gibsons movie The Passion of the Christ.
http://www.alburycity.nsw.gov.au/museum/exhibitions/index.htm