The present exhibition is divided into two sections. The first, placed
in the Manuscript Saloon, traces (in very summary fashion) the history
of the Bible from the original Hebrew and Greek to the time of the
invention of printing. It begins with the earliest Hebrew Bible known
(a Pentateuch of the ninth century), and the earliest Greek Bible in this
country (the great Codex Alexandrinus of the fifth century), together
with photographs of the only two Greek Bibles in existence which are of
earlier date. Then follow other Greek Bibles, illustrating the various
styles of writing employed in such books, and examples of the two great
Eastern versions of the Scriptures, in Syriac and Coptic. On the other
side of the room we find the great Bible of the Western world, the Latin
Vulgate, in which form the Scriptures first reached this country, and
from which all translations of them into English before the time of
Tyndale were made. Chief among the manuscripts of the Latin Bible
stands the magnificent Lindisfarne Gospels, of about A. D. 700, which is
not only a splendid specimen of Anglo-Celtic art, but also contains, as
a later addition, an interlinear translation of the Gospels into Anglo-Saxon,
which is the earliest extant version of the Gospels in English. Other
manuscripts illustrate the revision of the Vulgate made for Charlemagne
by Alcuin of York, and the outburst of activity in the production of
Latin Bibles in France and England in the thirteenth century. These
are followed, finally, by a selection of manuscripts illustrating the
history of the English Bible itself, from the interlinear gloss, mentioned
above, in the Lindisfarne Gospels, to the Wyclifite Bibles of the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries.
