One man's long biblical journey

At the launch of The Book: A History of the Bible , held last year at the British Library, Christopher de Hamel told how his interest was first sparked in the history of the Bible.

As a 13-year-old growing up in Dunedin, New Zealand, he took precocious delight in visiting a collection of manuscript and printed Bibles given to the Dunedin Public Library by an elderly collector. One day this collector, a certain A. H. Reed, encountered the young de Hamel looking at the collection and encouraged him to open the case containing a 14-century Bible. Impressed by his enthusiasm, Reed extracted one of the Bible's pages and gave it to him. At this point in his story, de Hamel reached into an inner pocket of his jacket and, with a dramatic flourish, pulled out this very page, unfurling it with relish before his astonished audience of bibliophiles, scholars and curators.

Reed's vandalism was not in vain: some 45 years later, de Hamel's enthusiasm for medieval manuscripts is undiminished. For 25 years the head of western manuscripts at Sotheby's, and now fellow librarian at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, de Hamel has devoted his life to indulging his fascination and delight in manuscripts. His latest work, The Book: A History of the Bible , is dedicated to Reed, and marks a return for de Hamel to his spiritual roots in Dunedin Public Library as well as to his academic passion as a historian of the Bible.

The Book begins late in the 4th century with St Jerome's translation of the Bible into Latin, a work known as the Vulgate. By then, the Bible had already circulated widely for some time in Hebrew, Greek and an earlier Latin translation. Jerome set himself the formidable task of producing an accurate translation of the Bible from its original languages.

For 1,000 years, Jerome's Vulgate remained the standard Bible of western Europe, paralleled by the Greek Bible of the Orthodox church.

Though de Hamel's focus for much of The Book is on the Latin Bible, he devotes a chapter to its parallel history in Hebrew and Greek.

The Bible changed shape during the Middle Ages, shrinking from the giant works of the earlier Middle Ages to portable single-volume copies, small enough to be carried in a pocket or satchel, and with text so minute that the contemporary invention of reading glasses does not seem entirely coincidental. The enormous Bibles of the 11th and 12th centuries were inspired by the monumental volumes of the early Middle Ages, and were often embellished with extraordinarily fine illumination.

One of these, a vast tome known as the Codex Gigas , was made in Bohemia in the late 12th century, probably by a solitary anchorite named Herman, although popular legend attributes the copying of the book to the Devil.

The readers of the Latin Bible and its scholarly commentaries were principally erudite monks, but in the 13th century another type of book developed that allowed less educated people access.

These were the Bible picture books, which related the stories of the Bible in images rather than words. De Hamel describes these books as being somewhere between Bibles and commentaries. They were often lavishly illuminated, and their audiences would almost certainly have been aristocratic and, in many cases, royal.

An important turning point in the history of the Bible came in the 14th century, with its translation into English under the aegis of the Oxford theologian John Wycliffe (c. 1330-84). Wycliffe's beliefs were revolutionary: he argued that the Bible itself, rather than the abstruse learning and legislation of the church, should govern the lives of Christians, and advocated that it should be accessible to believers in their own language. Repeatedly rejected by the church, the Wycliffite translation came to be associated with the Lollard heresy, punishable by death. It was dangerous to own the English Bible, although its popularity is attested to by the fact that more copies of it survive than any other Middle English text.

In chapters devoted to the invention of print and the Reformation, de Hamel demonstrates the fundamental role played by the book in the history of Europe. With the invention of movable type in the 1450s by the Mainz printer Johann Gutenberg and the onset of the Protestant Reformation approximately 70 years later, the Bible came within reach of ordinary people for the first time in its history. Translations into the vernacular languages of Europe were disseminated in affordable mass-produced copies. Among the most important of these was the translation into German by Luther, whose excommunication from the church marked the beginning of the Reformation. Another was the English translation dedicated to King James, known as the Authorised Version.

The Authorised Version was subject to a monopoly, the first in the Bible's history. In 1589, Elizabeth I granted an exclusive charter to Christopher Barker to publish the Bible in English; in subsequent centuries, only a few more publishers were granted this right. Enterprising vendors found ways around these restrictions by making relatively insignificant alterations to the text or by interpolating additional material into other publishers' editions.

One such entrepreneur was Francis Ash, who added illustrative engravings into a legitimate Scottish edition of the Bible, selling them on at a profit. Ash, however, paid the ultimate price for his deception: he hid his profits down the latrine to avoid detection by invading royalist armies in 1642, but died of the smell when trying to recover his fortune.

From the quest of dubious Bible sellers to widen their profit margins, de Hamel turns to the missionaries of the 18th and 19th centuries. The Bible, de Hamel maintains, is available in almost every language. English and American missionaries patronised translations of the Bible into Tamil, Inuit, Hindustani, Maori and many other languages. Perhaps the most extraordinary of these is the Eliot Indian Bible, a translation of the Bible into a dialect of the Algonquin native to the coastal regions of New England.

With his final chapter, de Hamel takes us back to the Bible's origins. As Darwinism began to challenge the accuracy of biblical texts (particularly the creation story of Genesis), archaeological and philological efforts were made to corroborate them.

Among the finds that seem to confirm the antiquity and the accuracy of biblical texts were cuneiform tablets unearthed in Nineveh in 1872, which apparently describe Noah's flood; papyri fragments of c. 200AD found in the 1880s in Egypt, containing passages of the Gospel of St Matthew; and the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered in 1947 by Bedouin shepherds.

De Hamel's is a secular history of the Bible as an artefact, dwelling not on divine inspiration but human ingenuity, scholarly acumen and entrepreneurial cunning. He does not attempt to write an exhaustive history of the Bible; rather, he focuses on themes that reveal watersheds in its journey through the millennia.

This approach will perhaps frustrate those who wish to turn to de Hamel's book for reference, but it will satisfy those who wish to read a narrative history, rich in human interest and enlivened with telling anecdote. Sumptuously illustrated and engagingly written, The Book charts a fascinating course through what its author describes as "the biggest subject in the world".

Alixe Bovey is curator, department of manuscripts, British Library.