Gnosticism was not so much an organized religious system as a variety of beliefs in which the material world was thought to be evil and salvation comes through a higher knowledge of the mysteries of the universe. Stephan Hoeller, a modern Gnostic, explains that Gnosticim is a “conviction that direct, personal and absolute knowledge of the authentic truths of existence is accessible to human beings . . . and that the attainment of such knowledge must always constitute the supreme achievement of human life.”

            “Gnosticism . . . was not a heresy so much as a rival” to Christianity,” says historian Will Durant.

            Various Gnostic groups had mostly disappeared by the fifth century and would be nothing more than an interesting footnote for students of early church history if not for three recent events.

Nag Hammadi Codex II, opened at the conclusion of the Gospel of Thomas, courtesy of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity, Claremont, California            First, in 1945 a library of more than fifty Gnostic texts was found at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, about forty miles northwest of Luxor. The best known, the Gospel of Thomas, is not an account of the life of Christ, but 114 sayings attributed to Jesus. Other texts (popularly known as The Gnostic Gospels) include the Gospel of Mary, the Secret Book of James, the Gospel of Truth, and the Acts of Peter. They created quite a stir when they were discovered. Headlines promised a new look at the life of Christ, playing on popular intrigue with anything new, secret, or suppressed—a clever marketing twist on the early church’s condemnation of Gnosticism.

            Second, in 2003 The Da Vinci Code, one of the bestselling books of this century, suggested that the Gnostic Gospels had as much—or more—validity as the New Testament books and that their exclusion from the canon occurred at the time of Constantine (a misinterpretation of Constantine’s request to Eusebius to make fifty copies of Scripture for the churches in Constantinople). The Da Vinci Code was a well-written novel with suspense, intrigue, and murder, but because it suggested that what the church has taught about Jesus is wrong and that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married, it heightened interest in Gnostic writings.

            Third, in May 2006 The National Geographic published a lead article on the discovery of The Gospel of Judas, which contains “the secret account of the revelation that Jesus spoke” with Judas Iscariot. The magazine gave the article major promotion and presented Judas not as the disciple who betrayed Jesus, but as the disciple who was the closest to Him and turned Him over to the authorities because Jesus had asked him to do so. The New York Times quoted an executive of the geographic society that The Gospel of Judas “is considered by scholars and scientists to be the most significant ancient, nonbiblical text to be found in the past 60 years”—a claim that is more hype than fact.

            In spite of the headlines and press releases, there is nothing new about the Gnostic texts. The Gospel of Judas has been known for centuries. Irenaeus called it “fictitious history.” The fourth-century historian and theologian Eusebius distinguished “between those writings which, according to the tradition of the Church, are true and genuine and recognized” and “those which the heretics put forward under the name of the apostles; including, for instance, such books as the Gospels of Peter, of Thomas, of Matthias, . . . and the Acts of Andrew and John and the other apostles.” (The Gospel of Thomas was among the manuscripts at Nag Hammadi.) The “thought and purport of their contents are completely out of harmony with true orthodoxy and clearly show themselves that they are the forgeries of heretics . . . to be cast aside as altogether absurd and impious.”

            In spite of the warnings of Irenaeus and Eusebius, Gnosticism is alive and well.

Title page of the Aitken Bible, Library of CongressAs long as the colonists were subject to British law, they could not print the King James Version, which was—and still is—copyrighted by the British Crown and can be printed only by license from the king or queen. When independence from Britain was declared, British law no longer governed the colonists. In addition, the war cut off imports of many goods, including Bibles.

A committee of the Continental Congress suggested in 1777 that “the use of the Bible is so universal and its importance so great” that Congress should order a printing of Bibles or “import twenty thousand Bibles from Holland, Scotland, or elsewhere.” Bids were solicited from printers, but they were all too expensive. Because of the British army’s capture of Philadelphia and Congress’s lack of money, the Bibles were never imported.

Robert Aitken, a Philadelphia bookseller and one of the five printers who had bid on the Bible and who was already printing the Journals of Congress, printed a New Testament in 1777. He reprinted it several times.  Encouraged by his success, Aitken asked for the financial support of Congress to print the entire Bible.

The money was never granted, but Aitken printed ten thousand copies of the complete Bible anyway in 1782, the first English Bible printed in America. In the front he reproduced a resolution passed by the Continental Congress on September 10, 1782:

The United States in Congress assembled highly approve the pious and laudable undertaking of Mr. Aitken, . . . and . . . recommend this edition of the Bible to the inhabitants of the United States, and hereby authorize him to publish this recommendation in the manner he shall think proper.       

Today fewer than forty copies of Aitken’s Bible exist, making it one of the rarest books in the world. While these Bibles were being printed, the colonies were at war with England, and at one point Aitken had to bury the type in a barn to prevent British soldiers from destroying it

Seven years later Aitken asked Congress to grant him the exclusive right to print Bibles in America for fourteen years. The request was denied, and by 1800 there were fifteen editions of the New Testament and twenty of the whole Bible in print from a variety of American printers.

There have been reports of earlier printings of the English Bible in America, most notably in an 1810 book on The History of Printing in America. But no confirmed copy of an earlier printing of the English Bible has ever been found.



Froben had, most likely, heard that a Greek New Testament had been printed in Spain in 1514, but that it could not be released to the public until the pope gave his blessing. So he got in touch with the Dutch scholar Desiderius Erasmus.

Erasmus had been creating a revised edition of Jerome’s Latin Vulgate. He had collected all the manuscripts he could find, corrected what he felt were errors, and polished the Latin. He compared the Latin with Greek manuscripts available to him at the Basel University, and used the Greek to improve the Vulgate. “My mind is so excited at the thought of emending Jerome’s text,” he said, “that I seem . . . inspired by some god.”

Title page of the first published Greek New Testament, compiled by Desiderius Erasmus and published by Johannes Froben, courtesy of the American Bible SocietyNone of the Greek manuscripts Erasmus consulted was complete, and he tended to rely on the more recent ones rather than the older ones. And because he started the project with Latin, when the Greek manuscripts he consulted did not have a passage that was in the Vulgate, such as Acts 9:5-6 and Revelation 22:16-21, he translated the Latin text into Greek and added it to the Greek text.

Froben published the Greek and Latin versions together. The importance of this publication is usually seen as its being the first published Greek New Testament, but it is likely that Erasmus saw the primary importance as its being his revision of the Latin New Testament with the Greek added for comparison. 

Erasmus admitted that the book was “rushed into print rather than edited.” Over the next twenty years Erasmus issued four more editions, each correcting misprints and inserting improved readings into the Greek text.

Two other sixteenth-century publishers, Robert Stephanus and Theodore Beza, printed Greek texts similar to that of Erasmus’s fifth edition. These texts were based on the Byzantine family of manuscripts and became known as the “Received Text” (textus receptus), which was the Greek text that was used by the King James Version translators.  



Codex Gigas, the largest medieval Bible in the world, courtesy of the National Library of Sweden

About midnight Hermannus realized he would not be able to finish his task and asked the devil to help him. In return, the monk included in the Bible a fanciful image of the devil, which is why the book is popularly called “The Devil’s Bible.”

Codex Gigas, the largest medieval Bible in the world, is 36” (that’s three feet!) by almost 20” and weighs nearly 165 pounds. One page has a full-page illustration of the devil. On the facing page is an illustration of what heaven might look like.

In addition to the Latin Bible, the book contains an encyclopedia, Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews, a list of the monks in the monastery, mystical incantations for everything from curing illnesses to catching thieves, and more—a strange mix.

The image of the devil from Codex GigasThe book most likely was made by one scribe and probably took more than 25 years to complete. Hermannus was a recluse, and his living alone is probably how the legend of his sentenced to be buried alive—or walled up in a room—got started.

The codex belonged to various monasteries until 1594 when it was taken to Prague to become part of the collection of the emperor Rudolf. In 1648 the Swedish army stole the entire collection including the codex and took it to the Swedish Royal Library, which loaned it to the Czech National Library in 2007. You can see the entire manuscript here. The devil is on page 290r; heaven is on 289v.

That’s why only two copies were known to exist: an incomplete copy missing 59 leaves at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London and a copy missing only the title page at Bristol Baptist College that had been bequeathed to the college in western England in 1784 by Andrew Gifford, a Baptist minister. Speculation is that the Bristol copy had belonged to an English merchant living on the Continent and came to England when the Tyndale's New Testament was no longer in danger of being burned.

In 1994 the Bristol Baptist College copy was sold to the British Library, which called it “the most important printed book in the English language,” for more than 1 million pounds.

The only title page still in existence of the 1526 printing of Tyndale’s New Testament, courtesy of Eberhard Zwink.It was assumed that these were the only two copies in existence. But amazingly in November, 1996, while superintending the transfer of a hand-written catalog to a computer, Eberhard Zwink, director, realized that one of the books in the magnificent Bible collection of the Württembergische Landesbibliothek in Stuttgart, Germany, was a 1526 Tyndale, New Testament—complete with a title page.           

It turns out that the book’s probable first owner, a German nobleman named Otto Heinrich, had all his books re-bound in 1550. The bookbinder put the 1550 date on the binding and because many of the subsequent owners could not read English, they thought the book was printed in 1550 instead of 1526. Even though two scholarly articles were written about the bindings of Otto Heinrich, neither author recognized the Tyndale New Testament for what it was.           

The wood cut on the title page was used on many of the books printed by Peter Schoeffer and was not entirely appropriate for a New Testament. Tyndale would have chosen the words to be inserted in the central panel, which, we now know, was published anonymously: “The newe Testament as it was written and caused to be written by them which herde yt. To whom also oure Saveoure Christ Jesus commaunded that they shulde preache it vnto al creatures.”



It “is in truth the food of death, the fuel of sin, the veil of malice, the pretext of false liberty, the protection of disobedience, the corruption of discipline, the depravity of morals, the termination of concord, the death of honesty, the wellspring of vices, the disease of virtues, the instigation of rebellion, the milk of pride, the nourishment of contempt, the death of peace, the destruction of charity, the enemy of unity, the murder of truth."

“It” in this quote is not the Koran, but William Tyndale’s English translation of the New Testament, according to German priest John Cochlaeus.

Rev. Terry Jones sounds similar to John Cochlaeus when he says on the Burn a Koran Day website that his purpose is “to bring to awareness to the dangers of Islam and that the Koran is leading people to hell. Eternal fire is the only destination the Koran can lead people to so we want to put the Koran in it's place - the fire!”

Five hundred years ago, Tyndale’s English translation of the New Testament became a lightning rod for a fight over authority and copies were burned publicly. Some churchmen were afraid that with a Bible in English “even tailors and shoemakers, yea, even women and ignorant persons who could read a little would study the New Testament as the fountain of all truth” (John Cochlaeus again).

“Where they have burned books,” Heinrich Heine wrote in 1821,” they will end in burning human beings. And eventually Tyndale himself was killed and his body burned at the stake – for the “crime” of translating the Bible into English.

Let me be clear. I am not equating the Bible with the Koran. I’m just saying that both are lightning rods for perceived threats to the status quo.

In the 1500s, the English church reacted to a threat to its authority by burning Bibles – a reaction that was ineffective, hateful, and divisive.

In 2010, Terry Jones and the Dove World Outreach Center say they will react to the threat of Islamic terrorists by burning copies of the Koran – a reaction that is also ineffective, hateful, and divisive.

And burning books frequently backfires. It did 500 years ago! Tyndale's body was killed, but his vision flourished to such and extent that within fifty years of his death, "no greater moral change ever passed over a nation than passed over England. . . . England became a people of a book, and that book was the Bible."

The room at Wartburg where Luther completed his translation of the New Testament into German. Photo © by Suzanne Hein-HoffmannMartin Luther’s translation was the resource that gave power to the Reformation. It also was a watershed in the development of the German language.

The Reformation was all about whether authority rested with the church and the pope or with the Scriptures. Luther’s translation made the Word of God available to everyone so that Germans could read the Bible for themselves. John Cochlaeus complained that “even tailors and shoemakers, yea, even women and ignorant persons who could read a little German studied Luther’s New Testament as the fountain of all truth.”

Luther’s Bible was also a watershed in the development of the German language. German translations of the Bible had been made before, but Luther’s was readable and contemporary and helped standardize a language that was fragmented by many dialects. “I endeavored to make Moses so German,” said Luther, “that no one would suspect he was a Jew.”

The New Testament was published in 1522 and the complete Bible in 1534 with 184 woodcuts. Its widespread distribution—one Wittenberg printer printed more than one hundred thousand copies between 1534 and 1574—helped to unify both the language of the Germans and the spirit of German nationalism.

Luther’s Bible inspired others, and translations were soon made into French, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic, Hungarian, Bohemian, Polish, Russian, and modern Greek.

Luther’s translation of the Bible is the finest work in the German language, according to Friedrich Nietzche. Like the English King James Version, it is a literary classic—and, like the King James Version, it is still in use today.

“England has two books, the Bible and Shakespeare. England made Shakespeare, but the Bible made England.” – Victor Hugo, French playwright, poet, statesman, author of Les Misérables and Hunchback of Notre-Dame

“The Bible has been the Magna Carta of the poor and oppressed. The human race is not in a position to dispense with it.” – Thomas Huxley, English biologist

“That book, sir, is the rock on which our republic rests.” – Andrew Jackson, seventh president of the United States

“The Bible is the cornerstone of liberty.” – Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States

“The Bible is a great and powerful tree. Each word is a mighty branch. Each of these branches have I well shaken. And the shaking of them has never disappointed me.” – Martin Luther, reformer, Bible translator

“I prayed for faith, and thought that some day faith would come down and strike me like lightning. But faith did not seem to come. One day I read in the tenth chapter of Romans, ‘Now faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God.’ I had closed by Bible and prayed for faith. I now opened by Bible, and began to study, and faith has been growing ever since.” – Dwight L. Moody, evangelist

“Within the covers of the Bible are the answers for all the problems men face.” – Ronald Reagan, fortieth president of the United States

“All I have written, whatever greatness there has been in any thought of mine, whatever I have done in my life, has simply been due to the fact that, when I was a child, my mother daily read with me a part of the Bible, and daily made me learn a part of it by heart.” – John Ruskin, English art critic and social thinker

“Most people are bothered by those passages in Scripture which they cannot understand. The Scripture which troubles me most is the Scripture I do understand.” – Mark Twain, author

“I ask every man and women in this audience from this day on to realize that part of the destiny of America lies in their daily perusal of this great Book.” – Woodrow Wilson, twenty-eighth president of the United States



The Chi Rho page contains a “Chi” (X) with the stroke from top left to bottom right considerably shorter than the stroke from top right to bottom left. The “Rho” (P) is tucked under the arms of the Chi. Wikimedia Commons.

In the twelfth century Gerald of Wales gave this description: “For almost every page there are different designs, distinguished by varied colors. Here you may see the face of majesty, divinely drawn; here the mystic symbols of the Evangelists. . . . Fine craftsmanship is all about you, but you might not notice it. Look more keenly at it and you will penetrate to the very shrine of art. You will make out intricacies, so delicate and so subtle, so full of knots and links, with colors so fresh and vivid, that you might say that all this were the work of an angel, and not of a man.”

An extravagantly fantastic page at the beginning of the gospel of Matthew contains a decorated “Chi-Rho,” a monogram developed from the Greek letters “Chi” and “Rho”—the first two letter in the word Christ in Greek. In addition to designs, the Chi-Rho page contains otters, cats, mice, butterflies, and angels.

This detail from the top of the Chi-Rho page between the two right arms of Chi shows the intricacies of the art.The Book of Kells was probably begun by monks in a monastery on the island of Iona off the western coast of Scotland. Vikings raided the island, and the monks fled to Ireland’s Abbey at Kells. The book was completed there, stolen for two months in 1006 when it lost some pages and its cover, and in 1661 was presented to the Library of Trinity College, Dublin, where it is still on display. 

More than 500,000 visitors a year travel to the library to see the Book of Kells.



After several steins of beer, when they were “in their cups,” one printer mentioned a book they were printing that would sooner or later make Lutherans of everyone in England whether the king liked it or not. Cochlaeus listened carefully.

The second printer remarked that Quentel, their boss, was being very secretive about the project and would not let the printers talk to the British customers. The rumor was that they were very clever and that one even spoke eight languages.

Cochlaeus joined the two printers and invited them to his room. After serving several glasses of wine, he learned that they were printing three thousand copies of an English translation of the New Testament by William Tyndale. He also learned about plans to smuggle the books into England.

Cochlaeus went to the Cologne authorities, who investigated the matter, obtained an order to stop the printing, and wrote to King Henry VIII to watch the seaports “lest that pernicious article of merchandise should be conveyed into all parts of England.”

William Tyndale printing the English New Testament at Cologne (left) and British citizens unpacking and reading smuggled New Testaments (right). Mural is by Violet Oakley, photograph by Brain Hunt and courtesy of Pennsylvania Capitol Preservation Committee.John Cochlaeus was no fan of vernacular translations of the Bible. He once wrote, "The New Testament translated into the vulgar tongue is in truth the food of death, the fuel of sin, the veil of malice, the pretext of false liberty, the protection of disobedience, the corruption of discipline, the depravity of morals, the termination of concord, the death of honesty, the wellspring of vices, the disease of virtues, the instigation of rebellion, the milk of pride, the nourishment of contempt, the death of peace, the destruction of charity, the enemy of unity, the murder of truth."