Customer Reviews

The Book: A History of the Bible

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This work by Christopher de Hamel is a handsome volume that deals mainly with the history of the translated Bible in Western Europe. It is lushly illustrated throughout with colour plates of various ancient and mediaeval manuscripts, and Renaissance printed works. Much (more than half) of de Hamel's work is focused on the journey of the translation of St. Jerome, the Vulgate, from its birth in the late Roman Empire on through to its distinction as the first printed Book by Gutenberg. However, de Hamel also touches upon other manifestations of the Holy Scriptures-- the original Hebrew and Greek texts, as well as the modern translations in the vernacular that sprung forth in the aftermath of the Reformation.
De Hamel starts off with an Introduction showing the undesputed influence the Bible has had on civilization, outlining his purpose in writing his book, and describing topics that he will touch upon in the coming chapters. He then turns to the (in his opinion) most influential translation of the Scripture: Jerome's Vulgate. Jerome's life is decribed, and how he came to produce his monumental Latin Bible. The gradual triumph of the Vulgate is shown, as it was more and more the version copied out in monasteries. De Hamel cites manuscript after manuscript to illustate his points, and this can get grating after a while since each is categorised with the university/museum in which it is currently housed. The first chapter ends with Charlemagne, the reviver of Roman culture, and the Vulgate is now de facto the Bible of the West.
Next, de Hamel turns to the original texts of the Holy Scripture: the Hebrew Masoretic (and its Greek translation, the Septuagint,) and the Greek New Testament. Briefly turning his focus back to the East from whence the Writings originated, de Hamel traces how the Scripture in its original languages survived in the volatile and ever turbulent Eastern Mediterranean, where dispersed Jewish communities zealously preserved the Torah and Tanakh, and the Eastern Church strove to stem the tide of a new faith from the deserts of Arabia. The distinction in how Christian and Jew, and Western and Eastern Churches produced and reverenced the Bible is highlighted.
Chapters 3-6 deal withthe further story of the Vulgate in the Middle Ages. First, the Latin Bible grows to humongous proportions, and is beautifully illuminated. It then is commented upon, and padded with the discertations of Church Fathers and medieval clerics. Finally, at the threshold of the Renaissance, the Vulgate gradually assumes a familiar form as it becomes reduced in size and attains a standard format and ordering of books. As the common folk yearn to become more acquianted with the cloistered, highly protected Scripture, the Bible in picture form for their edification is touched upon.
Chapters 7-9 deal with the Bible in vernacular translation and printed form. The 14th century Wycliffe Bible in Middle English is devoted an entire chapter, as its groudbreaking influence is stressed. As the spark that would ignite the Reformation a century later, Wycliffe's translation is given its due honour. Next comes Gutenberg, and the first printed book: Jerome's Vulgate. Even though in a obsolete language, Gutenberg's Bible would usher a new era as now the doors were opened for mass dissemination of ideas and doctrines-- the time for Reformation had come. Chapter 9 deals with this, as from Germany to England, the Reform movement gains headway against Rome and the Bible is translated in the mother tongue of the common people. The work of scholars who turned to the original languages, the translating of Luther, and the monumental translation of King James are covered.
The final three chapters shift to the dissemination, mainly through the efforts of British and American missionaries, of the Bible to the ends of the earth. The modern Bible industries of the two nations are illustrated from the 19th to 21st centuries. Chapter 12 deals with the modern search for the ancient origins of the Bible, and its earliest texts, in the archaeological expeditions of Western scholars.
Overall, de Hamel's work was a joy to read. Especially with its colour plates, it vividly illustrates the evolution of the Holy Writ. There are a few grammatical and typographical errors in this edition, as well as the mentioned overlisting of manuscripts that can get tiring, but they are negligible. The price too, was a bit high for a lengthy coffee-table book and 1-2 weeks worth of reading, but in the end well worth the journey one experiences in this tale of the Book of Books.

Two thousand years after the birth of Jesus, and four thousand after the birth of Abraham, is there anything that hasn't been written about the Bible? As it turns out, quite a lot. Christopher De Hamel, formerly the manuscripts curator for Sotheby's and currently on the faculty at Cambridge, has given us in "The Book: A History of the Bible" what we didn't have before: a book about the Bible as a book. His narrative begins with St. Jerome's translation of the Bible into Latin, and proceeds through the centuries to describe how it has been copied, illustratied, translated, and printed, in both its Jewish and Christian forms. De Hamel's prose style is lively and engaging, and the illustrations are copious and beautiful high-resolution photographs of stunning examples of the Bible-maker's art. The book is filled with small gems. Did you know, for example, that more Bibles survive from the thirteenth century than any other artifact, save possibly buildings? This book should reach a wide and diverse audience, from those who revere the Bible as the Word of God to those who want to gain a better understanding of its historical and literary importance.

This work by Christopher de Hamel is a handsome volume that deals mainly with the history of the translated Bible in Western Europe. It is lushly illustrated throughout with colour plates of various ancient and mediaeval manuscripts, and Renaissance printed works. Much (more than half) of de Hamel's work is focused on the journey of the translation of St. Jerome, the Vulgate, from its birth in the late Roman Empire on through to its distinction as the first printed Book by Gutenberg. However, de Hamel also touches upon other manifestations of the Holy Scriptures-- the original Hebrew and Greek texts, as well as the modern translations in the vernacular that sprung forth in the aftermath of the Reformation.
De Hamel starts off with an Introduction showing the undesputed influence the Bible has had on civilization, outlining his purpose in writing his book, and describing topics that he will touch upon in the coming chapters. He then turns to the (in his opinion) most influential translation of the Scripture: Jerome's Vulgate. Jerome's life is decribed, and how he came to produce his monumental Latin Bible. The gradual triumph of the Vulgate is shown, as it was more and more the version copied out in monasteries. De Hamel cites manuscript after manuscript to illustate his points, and this can get grating after a while since each is categorised with the university/museum in which it is currently housed. The first chapter ends with Charlemagne, the reviver of Roman culture, and the Vulgate is now de facto the Bible of the West.
Next, de Hamel turns to the original texts of the Holy Scripture: the Hebrew Masoretic (and its Greek translation, the Septuagint,) and the Greek New Testament. Briefly turning his focus back to the East from whence the Writings originated, de Hamel traces how the Scripture in its original languages survived in the volatile and ever turbulent Eastern Mediterranean, where dispersed Jewish communities zealously preserved the Torah and Tanakh, and the Eastern Church strove to stem the tide of a new faith from the deserts of Arabia. The distinction in how Christian and Jew, and Western and Eastern Churches produced and reverenced the Bible is highlighted.
Chapters 3-6 deal withthe further story of the Vulgate in the Middle Ages. First, the Latin Bible grows to humongous proportions, and is beautifully illuminated. It then is commented upon, and padded with the discertations of Church Fathers and medieval clerics. Finally, at the threshold of the Renaissance, the Vulgate gradually assumes a familiar form as it becomes reduced in size and attains a standard format and ordering of books. As the common folk yearn to become more acquianted with the cloistered, highly protected Scripture, the Bible in picture form for their edification is touched upon.
Chapters 7-9 deal with the Bible in vernacular translation and printed form. The 14th century Wycliffe Bible in Middle English is devoted an entire chapter, as its groudbreaking influence is stressed. As the spark that would ignite the Reformation a century later, Wycliffe's translation is given its due honour. Next comes Gutenberg, and the first printed book: Jerome's Vulgate. Even though in a obsolete language, Gutenberg's Bible would usher a new era as now the doors were opened for mass dissemination of ideas and doctrines-- the time for Reformation had come. Chapter 9 deals with this, as from Germany to England, the Reform movement gains headway against Rome and the Bible is translated in the mother tongue of the common people. The work of scholars who turned to the original languages, the translating of Luther, and the monumental translation of King James are covered.
The final three chapters shift to the dissemination, mainly through the efforts of British and American missionaries, of the Bible to the ends of the earth. The modern Bible industries of the two nations are illustrated from the 19th to 21st centuries. Chapter 12 deals with the modern search for the ancient origins of the Bible, and its earliest texts, in the archaeological expeditions of Western scholars.
Overall, de Hamel's work was a joy to read. Especially with its colour plates, it vividly illustrates the evolution of the Holy Writ. There are a few grammatical and typographical errors in this edition, as well as the mentioned overlisting of manuscripts that can get tiring, but they are negligible. The price too, was a bit high for 1-2 weeks worth of reading, but in the end well worth the journey one experiences in this tale of the Book of Books.

Christopher De Hamel offers up a detailed history of the most influential book ever. No, he doesn't get involved in the complexity of theology or the arguments of veracity and soul. What he does is to give the reader a chronology and background of the Bible, how it has evolved, yet maintained its wondrous significance over the millennia.

For those of you who maintain a strict fundamentalist view of the Bible, you might be disappointed to learn of some of many translations and iterations that have given rise to different interpretations and beliefs inherent to the Judeo-Christian tradition. But to Mr. De Hamel's credit, he deftly sidesteps any issues as to who is right and who might be wrong. His is a historian's view, not that of a theologian.

The illustrations of various Bibles, lushly printed from copies generously made available by various libraries and monasteries will give you some idea as to the love that was invested in each version. They balance what can at times be a slighlty dry text. All in all it makes for wonderful history, without denting any of my beliefs in the process. Thank you Mr. De Hamel!

Balanced history of how we got our Bible, no visible 'side' or 'agenda' in the writing, just the facts. Very READABLE, hard to put down. Great resource for a catalogue of the outstanding mss (manuscripts) and where you can find them.

Can't tell you how many times I've referred DeHamel's book to people who need to know how we GOT our Bible of today. Best book out there on a listing of the mss, where they are, how the Bible came to be compiled, replete with lavish illustrations. The illustrations are extremely important, so you can tell how HARD it was to GET and READ a Bible, for centuries.

The other book worth buying 'just because' is also here on Amazon, called Atlas of Bible and Christianity edited by Tim Dowley. I recommend these two books often.

Cloistered up, hacked up, argued over, torn up, the story of our Bible is like a kidnapping blockbuster, yet few know its story.

Not much is said about the manuscript finds after 1940, but maybe Mr. DeHamel wrote another book. GET THIS, it's worth the money.

First things first, the very title of this book may generate unfulfilled expectations.

Here is the author's statement of what this book is about: "This is the history of the Bible as a book. It is the story of a literary artifact. This is not an account of the writing of the Bible, or of the events in the ancient Near East and in Palestine which are described in the text of the Bible itself. The title, which has evolved several times during the writing of the text, is The Book, a History of the Bible, but it could as well be The Bible, a History of the Book...." [Page viii; italics omitted by reason of Amazon's technological limitations.] This book, then, is concerned with a series of tangible artifacts, words reproduced on various media and known collectively as Bibles.

The author is identified as "the Fellow Librarian of Corpus Christie College, Cambridge." For 25 years, we are told, "he was responsible for all sales of medieval and illuminated manuscripts at Sotheby's in London." He has a doctorate from Oxford University. He is a Fellow of the Society or Antiquaries. His previous publications are a book on Bible texts and two on manuscript illumination.

Mr. de Hamel is a manuscript man and a bibliophile. That is plain enough to see. What his religious beliefs, if any, might be, I haven't a clue, for he takes pains never to explain them. Perhaps the closest he comes to revealing himself is in an offhand remark toward the end of the book to the effect that in spite of centuries of diatribes, vitriol, finger pointing, and viewing with alarm, the competing texts of the Catholic and Protestant translations of the Bible are remarkably similar in meaning.

The contents of "The Book" are nicely summarized by the headings on its contents page:
Introduction
1. Latin Bibles from Jerome to Charlemagne
2. The Bible in Hebrew and Greek
3. Giant Bibles of the Early Middle Ages
4. Commentaries on the Bible
5. Portable Bibles of the Thirteenth century
6. Bible Picture Books
7. English Wycliffite Bibles
8. The Gutenberg Bible
9. Bibles of the Protestant Reformation
10. The English and American Bible Industry
11. Missionary Bibles
12. The Modern Search for Origins
Bibliography
Index of Manuscripts
General Index
Photographic Acknowledgments

As can readily be seen, even a book with 329 large pages of text and illustrations can provide only a very broad overview of a subject that consists of innumerable examples scattered over thousands of miles of space and more than two millennia of time.

As it happens, the author comes down from the mountaintop only once, in Chapter 8. There, he takes out the microscope of scholarly research to examine the astonishing Gutenberg Bible. And it is quite remarkable, to me at least, just how much scholars have gleaned from intense examination and close analysis of that book. By a series of convincing arguments, we deduce what niche in the market Gutenberg aimed to fill. We read an account of his marketing strategy from no less a personage than a future Pope. We examine his printing procedures, involving four separate compositors (and maybe four presses). We determine the date of his printing (sample pages ready to show to potential buyers in February 1455; a complete copy bound on August 24, 1456.) We take note of the increase in his print run mid-way through, probably owing to unexpectedly high sales. And we calculate the probable size of this first edition of all printed first editions: about 140 copies on paper and 40 on parchment.

An earlier Amazon reviewer has written of "a slightly dry text." That is true enough, but I think that Mr. de Hamel has provided us with about as sprightly a text as we could hope from any serious treatment of his subject. That aside, there can be no dispute about the many illustrations. They are beautiful, with pride of place going to a wonderful, two-page spread devoted to a Gutenberg Bible flung open and displaying all its typographic glory. With, I think, the single exception of a still from Cecil B. DeMille's "The Ten Commandments," all the illustrations are in full color, even those reproducing monochrome images and texts.

For all the things I have mentioned so far, I would be happy to assign a full five stars to this book. However, there is another consideration. This is a book about manuscripts and printed books, some of them of magnificent quality and spectacular beauty. This book, this tangible object of the printer's and bookbinder's craft, does not measure up to its subject.

The binding of the hardbound edition is typical of the cheesy stuff dumped into the market these days: far from robust, almost flimsy; devoid even of cloth, simply paper pressed into boards. The paper within the book is smoothly coated, very white stock. It is as well-suited for photographic reproduction of images as it is terrible for displaying text. This is a picture book, you see, and the text is no more than a vehicle for the display of imagery.

Printing was accomplished by some sort of offset process. Shiny ink lies absolutely flat on the surface of the shiny pages. While reading the book, one is often obliged to shift it around in order to avoid unpleasant reflected glare.

The book is a large, squarish quarto. Its text runs 42 lines per page, just as in the Gutenberg Bible, something not likely to be a mere coincidence. This forces a comparison with that two-page spread I've already mentioned. Against such competition, this book appears very feeble indeed. The Gutenberg--as well as many of the illustrated manuscripts and printed books--lies symmetrically on its two pages, providing a serene balance of text against margins and dark printed letters against warm, creamy paper. This book has its single, wide printed column arranged asymmetrically, so that each page has a wide left-hand margin for notes and a narrow right margin. The paper is too white for extended reading comfort. The printed columns are too wide to take in with a single glance, requiring a reader to be shift gaze along each line. (The old scribes and the earliest printers knew better than to make that mistake.)

The typeface is quite unsuitable for such a monumental work. It is some transitional serif font that I do not recognize, quite similar to the Times New Roman so familiar to users of computers, but with slightly wider separation between letters, thinner vertical strokes and idiosyncratic designs for the lower case "k" and the "6." Considering the size of the pages and the wide spacing between the lines, the font could and should have been two or even four points greater in size. Considering the subject, it should have been a darker, more decorative, old-style font, perhaps Garamond or Goudy.

The book was printed in China with the English author's text generally edited to American standards and spellings. The printed text is set with ragged line endings on the right-hand side. I'd be willing to bet that it was composed on a computer with a minimum of adjustments from a human hand or eye. The ragged ends are far more mechanical and irregular than any manuscripts of the medieval scribes.

For a book about the most intensively proofread book in the last two millennia, there are an annoying number of typographical errors. Some of them are the sort of thing characteristic of computer spell checks, such as an inability to pick up "that" when "than" is intended or vice versa. Others are just plain slovenly, "Boywer" for "Bowyer."

Finally, there is the matter of the page numbering. The Introduction begins on the unnumbered page vi. It continues to page xi. Chapter I begins overleaf on an unnumbered page that is immediately followed by an unnumbered full-page illustration. The text continues overleaf on what is finally identified as page "14." Now, THAT is bush league book making!

Since this otherwise admirable book falls (as an artifact) well short of the standards of the very subject with which it deals, I reduce my rating to four stars.

This is a beautiful book to look at,but what I really loved,was how it answered my question "how did we get our Bible"? It has strengthened my faith even more to learn that manuscripts,cunniforms,and even the wrapping on an Egyptian mummy,some items dating from as early as the 2nd century BC coincide(have stories with only slight differences) with the Bible as we know it today! It is so awesome,that this is true,despite the age or location where the artifacts were found. The author also lists where these artifacts now reside,which museums,libraries,the Vatican,private holdings,ect.Wonderful work.

The other reviewers have done well their job and, acknowledging thet, I don't have to repeat what has already been better said.

Don't be fooled by its all-picture mass consumer appearance. Of course, there are a lot of wonderful high-quality color images of "every" conceivable Bible, whether manuscript or printed, and so it may be something of a "presentation" book. But it is, above all, a truly scholarly -yet acessible- work.

First and foremost, one could say that the most important part of the book is its printed text! De Hamel is a world leading authority on medieval manuscripts (especially illuminated ones) and, though this book's subject widely outspans his area of specialized knowledge, he does a magnificent job of synthesizing the best sources and research materials in other fields (also recurring to the large web of friends and colleagues of his). All this to tell a most compelling and accurate story of the capital Book that Mankind (and Deity) have ever produced.

Of course, it's not a devotional reading, nor a theological treatise, nor a survey or comment on the Book of books. It's a passionate history of the Bible as a book, as an artifact passed down through succeeding generations and centuries. It tells us, at length, of the cultural, economic and political factors that marked the spread and influence of the Bible (and the other way round, too). It tells us, at length, about the battles (bloody or otherwise)... the almost untold story of stupid and utterly blasphemous battles we all fought (and lost!) around (of all things!) this God-given Book of love and forgivemess. Mankind is made of sinners ("the crooked timber of Humanity" as Isaiah Berlin put it, in an updating of Jeremiah's psychanalytic
avant-la-lettre sentence "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?" Jer 17,9 KJV (see also REB and NAB to make my point clearer)).

Please get this book. Please get, at all means, the HARDCOVER edition (it pays the price). And, if you are intent on a first-hand, much more scholarly account of this subject ("The Bible as Book"), then don't miss the four volumes with this very title at Oak Knoll (or the British Library). If your interests look more like a good, full history of the "Bible in English language", then (setting aside the excellent and elementary books by METZGER, BRUCE and others), perhaps you can do no worse than get the large volume by DANIELL, avowedly passionate and more combative than compassionate -anti-Popish if you would tell it so-, "The Bible in English".
David Daniell is a top-notch bona fide scholar -I can bear witness to that, as well as does his work on Tyndale's Bible-, although some Americans regard him, perhaps a little rightly so, as a provincial and rather self-conceited British Oxbridge don.

The Book : A History of the Bible

This is a fabulous book! Beautifully written, illustrated, and packed with countless details to make it a surprisingly exciting read. This is best Bible history I have seen.

The Bible is the most important book ever published. On the same note, it is also the most controversial, the most revered, and the most hated book ever published.

The author does not take a position either way, but presents the Bible as the most central book to influence the history of Western Civilization, or civilization as a whole, for that matter.

Important point that the author makes: if you go up to anybody, be it a total stranger, your mother, your best friend, anyone, and strike up a conversation about the Bible...just watch them. Their whole demeanor will change.

That is the power that this-the most important of all books that man possesses-has over mankind.

"The Book" includes dozens of beautifully rendered photographs of Bibles that have been produced over the past 1500+ years.