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The people lining up to see the exhibit when it opened Feb. 8 ranged from bishops and biblical scholars to artists and typography enthusiasts, said curator Pearce Carefoote.

“It������Ƶapp just such a broad range,” he said. “It������Ƶapp because it������Ƶapp connected to the culture.”

Prefaces to the show have been prepared by Catholic, Jewish and Protestant scholars, among them Toronto Archbishop Thomas Collins. Collins draws attention to how precious the word of God is to Christians.

“Christians treasure their encounters with the Word through the experience of life, prayer and especially through the sacraments and written texts that they believe are inspired by the Holy Spirit,” said Collins.

Jesuit Scripture scholar Fr. Michael Kolarcik notes there are more than 400 English renderings of the Bible — or substantial parts.

“Do we really need more?” he asks.

As long as we keep interpreting the Bible in our own time and place, we’re going to need to keep translating it, argues Kolarcik.

“Every reading of the Scriptures, whether in the original language or in translation, is a new interpretation,” he writes.

A substantial portion of the show is dedicated to Catholic translations including the Coverdale Bible, the Douay-Rheimes, the Challoner revision of the Douay-Rheimes and the Haydock Bible, which was serialized and sold for one shilling per installment every two weeks from 1812 to 1814.

The Haydock Bible was briefly popular again in 1961, after U.S. President John F. Kennedy took the oath of office on one.

Over the course of the last half century the distinction between Protestant and Catholic Bibles begins to fade. The New Revised Standard Version, the direct descendent of the King James Version, is the standard text for liturgy and study for English-speaking Canadian Catholics. It������Ƶapp also the translation used in the Saint John������Ƶapp Bible — the first handwritten, illuminated Bible produced since the printing press made them obsolete in the 16th century. The Fisher Rare Book Library exhibition culminates with a copy of the Book of Psalms from the Saint John������Ƶapp Bible.

The display is a huge undertaking for the relatively small Fisher Rare Book Library, said Carefoote. But the creation of the Bible in English has done so much to shape our culture, it������Ƶapp the sort of thing librarians and curators live for.


“It������Ƶapp just so, so important and certainly worth celebrating,” he said.

The Thomas Fisher Library is at Harbord and St. George Streets on the University of Toronto campus. Guided group tours for parishes or schools can be arranged directly with the curator by phoning (416) 946-3173 or e-mailing pearce.carefoote@utoronto.ca.

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Bible facts

"Great and Manifold: A Celebration of the Bible in English" puts 1,000 years worth of Bibles on display at the University of Toronto's Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library Feb. 8 to June 3. Here's a few astounding facts about the Bibles on display:

• ��The Codex Torontoensis, a manuscript from Constantinople produced about 1070, was the first Greek manuscript copy of the four Gospels brought to Canada.

• Several Bibles on display — including a complete, one-volume Bible produced in Canterbury between 1220 and 1228 — date from the 13th century. With the exception of coins, more Bibles survive from the 13th century than any other artifact.

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• ��A copy of the great humanist Erasmus's new translation from Greek and Hebrew of the New Testament produced in Basel in 1519 is actually a corrected and improved version of a translation he first produced in 1516. Erasmus's ambition was to produce a more accurate translation from original sources into Latin than St. Jerome's Vulgate. This new translation became the basis for Martin Luther's 1522 translation into German.

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• The 1380 Lollard translation of the New Testament into Middle English — attributed to John Wycliffe but in fact the work of several scholars — was a daring act. English law under King Richard II promised excommunication and in some cases death by burning to anyone caught translating the Bible into English.

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• Before William Tyndale's translation of the New Testament in 1524, England was the only major European country that did not have a vernacular Bible. King Henry VIII would only allow the Vulgate.

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• Tyndale was condemned by the English bishops after he produced his revised English New Testament in 1534. He went to Antwerp to work on translating the Hebrew Bible but was strangled and burnt at the stake near Brussels. ������Ƶapp 90 per cent of the King James Version of the New Testament is lifted directly out of Tyndale's.

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• The first Catholic English Bible was produced by Miles Coverdale in 1534.

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• The Lord Protector of the English Republic, Oliver Cromwell, ordered in 1538 that every English church should have a large English Bible on display so it could be consulted by both clergy and laity.

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• In 1546 the Council of Trent officially declared the Vulgate the only acceptable translation, and a 1559 edict by Pope Paul IV banned the Bible in modern languages. However, by 1578 the Vatican was encouraging a new English translation, and the project was sanctioned in 1580. Five-thousand copies of the the Rheims Bible were smuggled into England in 1582, enraging Queen Elizabeth.

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• The 1609-1610 Douai-Rheimes Bible contained extensive, polemical notes – just like the Protestant Geneva Bible.

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• In 1836 a new translation of the Gospels was anonymously published by "a Catholic," priest-scholar Fr. John Lingard. Lingard, author of the hymn "Hail Queen of Heaven, the Ocean Star," anticipated the liturgical reform of Vatican II, insisting that during Holy Week the Passion be declaimed in English while he quietly read it in Latin, as required.

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• Today we pirate movies and software. In the 17th century, they pirated Bibles. The Fisher Library has a 1684 pirate Bible.

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• Canadians and other subjects of the crown outside of England couldn't publish their own King James Version Bibles until the Second World War. The King held the copyright and would not allow it. By 1943 the difficulty printing and shipping books from England persuaded the crown to allow the Ryerson Press to print Bibles under licence to Oxford University Press.