To our knowledge, these extremely historically important leaves have never been offered for sale by anyone at any time, and every collector of Bible leaves will surely want one.

We have secured a fragment of the 1551 “Latin-Greek-Latin” New Testament of Erasmus, published by Robert “Stephanus” Estienne. One of the most important books ever printed; it is the first printed scripture with modern verse divisions!

This unspeakably rare printing is the original source of the “numbered verses” we see in all our Bibles today, which appeared in English for the first time in Geneva Bibles, printed less than a decade after this 1551 edition.

Printed in three parallel columns, we see above the first column a “V.” indicating the ancient Latin Vulgate, and the middle column contains the accurate Greek version of Erasmus, and the third column has an “E.” atop it indicating the new and more accurate Latin version of Erasmus. This critically important edition showed in easily comparable parallel columns, the flaws and corruption of Roman Catholic church’s ancient Latin Vulgate, when considered in light of the original Biblical Greek right next to it… and for those educated to read Latin but not Greek, Erasmus provided a more accurate rendering of the scripture in Latin right next to that, so that they too could appreciate the difference, and read an accurate version of God’s Word.

This exposed the corrupted version in popular use, while simultaneously offering a faithful and accurate version which was then used to translate the scriptures into English and other European languages. The Greek and Latin content had first been published by Erasmus in 1516, (a publication that helped birth the Protestant Reformation), however this edition, for the first time, introduced an extra feature that every reader of God’s Word uses today. In order to assist in comparative study of the versions, the scriptures were for the first time ever, divided by the publisher, Stephanus, into numbered verses… a feature so extremely popular that it was carried forward into nearly all Bibles printed after that point.

Anyone who collects Bible leaves and appreciates the history of the transmission of God’s Word will certainly celebrate with us that this 1551 first printing of scripture with modern verse divisions is finally, for the first time, available by-the-leaf! The importance of this cannot be understated, as this milestone of history should be part of every collection of Bible leaves.

NOTE: We no longer sell Bible Leaves. The description and images here are provided only for reference and education. To view our current offerings, please visit our Ancient Rare Bibles & Books page.

These leaves are from Pulpit folios, quite large, measuring between 15 and 16 inches tall by between 10 and 11 inches wide. They were printed on 100% rag cotton linen sheet, not wood-pulp paper like books today, so they remain in excellent condition… even after over 450 years. Each leaf is a unique piece of ancient artwork, carefully produced by the King’s printers, one-at-a-time using a movable-type press, and later bound together into whole Bibles. These genuine original antiquities are very rare and precious pieces of our history and our Christian heritage. Each leaf comes with a beautiful Certificates of Authenticity. Imagine… having a favorite passage of scripture from the Bible that was later revised to become the famous King James Bible: the Bishops Bible.

NOTE: We no longer sell Bible Leaves. The description and images here are provided only for reference and education. To view our current offerings, please visit our Ancient Rare Bibles & Books page.

The Geneva Bible (also known as the “Breeches” Bible) was the Bible of the Protestant Reformation. It was originally produced in 1560, more than 50 years before the King James Bible, and it remained the most popular English language Bible among the people until decades after the introduction of the King James Bible. Whether framed and displayed in your home, or given as a wonderfully unique gift: it is sure to draw attention.

The Geneva Bible was first printed in Geneva, Switzerland, by refugees from England, fleeing the persecution of Protestants by Roman Catholic Queen “Bloody” Mary. Many copies were smuggled back into England at great personal risk. In later years, when Protestant-friendly Queen Elizabeth took the throne, printing of the Geneva Bible moved back to England. The Geneva Bible was produced by John Calvin, John Knox, Myles Coverdale, John Foxe, and other Reformers. It is the version that William Shakespeare quotes from hundreds of times in his plays, and the first English Bible to offer plain roman-style type in some of its early printings.

The Geneva Bible was the first Bible taken to America, brought over on the Mayflower… it is the Bible upon which early America and its government was founded (certainly not the King’s of England’s Bible!) The Geneva Bible was also the first English Bible to break the chapters of scripture into numbered verses, and it was the first true “Study Bible” offering extensive commentary notes in the margins. It was so accurate and popular, that a half-century later, when the King James Bible came out… it retained more than 90% of the exact wording of the Geneva Bible.

These leaves were printed on 100% rag cotton linen sheet, not wood-pulp paper like books today, so they remain in excellent condition… even after over 400 years. Each leaf is a unique piece of ancient artwork, carefully produced one-at-a-time using a movable-type press, and later bound together into whole Bibles. These genuine original antiquities are very rare and precious pieces of our history and our Christian heritage. We offer them for considerably less than the $1,000 each (!) that they sold for on “The 700 Club” TV Broadcasts in the late 1990’s. Imagine… having a favorite passage of scripture from the First edition of the huge Pulpit Folio printing of the Bible of the Pilgrims & Puritans: The Geneva Bible.

NOTE: We no longer sell Bible Leaves. The description and images here are provided only for reference and education. To view our current offerings, please visit our Ancient Rare Bibles & Books page.

The main reason why there were no English language Bibles printed in America until the late 1700’s, is because they were more cheaply and easily imported from England up until the embargo of the Revolutionary War. But the kind of Bible John Eliot needed for his missionary outreach to the native American “Indians” was certainly not to be found in England, or anywhere else. It had to be created on the spot. Eliot recognized that one of the main reasons why the native Americans were considered “primitive” by European settlers, is that they did not have a written alphabet of their own. They communicated almost exclusively through spoken language, and what little writing they did was in very limited pictorial images, more like Egyptian hieroglyphics than that of any functional alphabetical language like those of Europe or Asia or Africa.

Clearly the Word of God was something these people needed if they were to stop worshiping creation and false gods, and learn to worship the true Creator… but God’s Word could not realistically be translated effectively into their primitive pictorial drawings. So Eliot found a wonderful solution: he would give the native Americans the gift of God’s Word and also give them the gift of true literacy. He agreed to learn their spoken language, and they agreed to learn the Western world’s phonetic alphabet (how to pronounce words made up of character symbols like A, B, C, D, E, etc.) Eliot then translated the Bible into their native Algonquin tongue, phonetically using our alphabet! This way, the natives did not really even need to learn how to speak English, and they could still have a Bible that they could READ. In fact, they could go on to use their newly learned alphabet to write other books of their own, if they so desired, and build their culture as the other nations of the world had done. What a wonderful gift!

These Eliot Algonquin “Indian” Language Bible leaves remain one of the most rare and historically important artifacts of our American heritage. They are also among the earliest of all American printings, and the very first Bible printed in this hemisphere. Leaves from the Eliot Bible have sold for well over $3,000 each in recent months. We have fewer than a dozen leaves in stock. Each leaf comes with a beautiful Certificate of Authenticity. They measure approximately 7 to 8 inches tall by almost 6 inches wide, and they were printed on 100% rag cotton linen sheet, not wood-pulp paper like books today, so they remain in excellent condition… even after nearly 350 years. Each leaf is a unique piece of ancient artwork, carefully produced one-at-a-time, using a very rare early American movable-type press. Imagine… owning a leaf from the first Bible printed in the “New World”: The Eliot Bible.

Sadly, the many tribes that make up the diverse people-group that is collectively referred to today as “Native Americans” have for centuries continued to exhibit a stronger resistance to the Gospel and the “White Man’s God” than perhaps any other culture in the world. The result has been that the Native American Indians today have a higher rate of alcoholism, drug addiction, gambling-addiction, poverty, and suicide than any other culture in the world. In this we see clearly demonstrated, the multi-generational wages of rejecting the Gospel.

Many natives, however, did receive the Gospel through John Eliot’s Bible. In learning the concept of “written language”, and in learning the message of salvation in the written scriptures, many natives found their lives enriched beyond measure both spiritually and intellectually. More than a century later, Thomas Jefferson would make his own attempt to reach the native Americans by publishing “The Morals of Jesus”, a collection of Christ’s parables designed to communicate the core message of the Gospel to the natives.

Today, we see a liberal “revisionist history” being popularized regarding the evangelical outreach of the 1600’s and 1700’s to the native Americans. Through highly inaccurate story telling, such as that of Disney’s seemingly innocent animated movie “Pocahontas”, we see a story of early American settlers abandoning their Christian beliefs, and embracing the pagan nature-worship of the native Americans, in a politically correct display of multicultural unity! Of course nothing could be further from the truth, and that is quite the opposite of what actually happened. We can only assume that the film’s producers must have decided that a more true-to-life tale of Pocahontas rejecting her pagan traditions and accepting the Gospel brought to her through John Smith and others, though later dying in England of Syphilis, would not have made as nice a movie for the children!

NOTE: We no longer sell Bible Leaves. The description and images here are provided only for reference and education. To view our current offerings, please visit our Ancient Rare Bibles & Books page.

]]> https://greatsite.com/shop/special-interest-bible-leaves/the-1582-rheims-new-testament-the-first-english-roman-catholic-scriptures/ Wed, 21 Jul 2021 03:55:58 +0000 https://staging.greatsite.com/?post_type=product&p=1361 NOTE: We no longer sell Bible Leaves. The description and images here are provided only for reference and education. To view our current offerings, please visit our Ancient Rare Bibles & Books page.]]> A leaf from the 1582 First Edition of the Rheims New Testament. These leaves are over 440 years old. So… the Anglicans are printing their Great, Bishops, and King James versions… and the Protestants are printing their Tyndale and Geneva versions… finally in 1582 the Roman Catholics throw in the towel, retracting their official policy of “kill anyone who prints the Bible in English” which they held to for over 1,000 years. Hey, if you can’t beat them , join them, right? This landmark turning point in church history makes a great gift for your Catholic friends.

Translated exclusively from the Latin Vulgate (the only source text accepted by the Roman Catholic Church, in spite of the fact that the original scriptures were in Hebrew and Greek) this work was done at the College of Rheims. This first press run of the scriptures to ever be authorized as “acceptable” by the Roman Catholic Church was published in 1582. Strangely enough, the Roman Catholic Church did not complete its authorized translation of the Old Testament until 28 years later in 1610, with the Douay Old Testament. Often, one will hear of the two printings referred to collectively as “The Douay-Rheims.”

When the Rheims translation was published, there was an outcry from both the Anglican and the Protestant Churches, concerning how grossly inaccurate it was. The problem was, that while the Anglicans and Protestants were using the original Hebrew and Greek to do their translations, the Catholics were using only the corrupt “Latin Vulgate” to do their English translations, and even then, they were altering the translation to reflect more kindly upon Roman Catholic teachings. Sometimes these examples were so glaringly obvious as to almost be laughable.

For example, the passage in the Lord’s Prayer in which Jesus says “Give us this day, our daily bread” is rendered “Give us this day, our super-substantiated bread” (!) This was done to emphasize the supposed scriptural legitimacy of the elements of the Lord’s Supper (the Eucharist) literally becoming the flesh of Jesus (transubstantiation); a belief that the Catholic Church has always held to, but that all non-catholic Christians consider to be cannibalism and heresy. It doesn’t take a translation expert to tell that the same word cannot possibly be translated both “daily” and “super-substantiated”! In fact, in 1589, Dr. William Fulke published his now famous “Fulke’s Refutation” in which he printed the entire text of the New Testament in parallel columns showing both the Bishops translation side-by-side with the Rheims translation, in an effort to make plain the corruptness of the Rheims version.

Regardless of what you think about all this, the Rheims remains one of the most historically important printings of the scriptures. These leaves measure approximately 8 inches tall by 6 inches wide. They were printed on 100% rag cotton linen sheet, not wood-pulp paper like books today, so they remain in excellent condition… even after over 440 years. Each leaf is a unique piece of ancient artwork, carefully produced, one-at-a-time using a movable-type press, and later bound together. Each leaf comes with a beautiful Certificate of Authenticity. Imagine… having a rare leaf from the first time the English language scriptures were ever authorized by the Roman Catholic Church: The 1582 Rheims New Testament.

NOTE: We no longer sell Bible Leaves. The description and images here are provided only for reference and education. To view our current offerings, please visit our Ancient Rare Bibles & Books page.