The Way The Truth The Life

Bible 2 Restored  and rebound 1634 edition of the King James Version, printed by Robert Barker, printer to the King on (I assume) high quality cotton rag paper.  We take Bibles for granted. As the most published book EVER (1995 Guinness world record estimates 5 billion copies sold and distributed), there is ample reason NOT to take this Book of Books for granted. It's mere history and authenticity cannot be paralleled.  The New Testament alone has been preserved in more manuscripts than any other ancient work of literature, "with  over  5800 complete or fragmented Greek manuscripts catalogued, 10000 Latin manuscripts and  9300 manuscripts  in various other ancient languages including Syriac, Slavic, Gothic, Ethiopic, Coptic and Armenian". This is an amazing statistic, yet millions still question its authenticity. Take an opposite extreme - Archimedes' writings. EVERYONE accepts he lived and wrote, yet there is ONE surviving copy of his treatise on...

The story of how the English bible came to us is miraculous, a slow outworking of many smaller miracles which finally came to fruition in the King James Bible of 1611.  In the South African Bible Exhibition Collection, the first ancient Bible under discussion is the Bishops’ Bible printed in 1568, under the authority of the church of England. It was revised in 1572 with the 1602 edition recommended as the base text of the 1611 King James Bible.  This particular edition is Coptic bound with 1/3 of the cross struts still intact. Unfortunately, the first 30 pages are missing, including the preface, prologue and order of the Psalms. A full version is on-line here: https://archive.org/details/holiebiblecontey00lond There is a list of previous owners of the bible on the fore page, (see image above, left) but due to some (bad) restoration, instead of introducing more binders paper, the older pages were just glued down. This of course places strain on the binding and the...

The South African Christadelphian Bible Exhibition, begun in the 1960's from a garage in Pietermaritzburg was abandoned after many years until it found a new format in April 2018. Life and Covid meant it went back under wraps until now - February 2021. We are attempting to give it on-line availability, a historical context and bring to light some of the many treasures in this collection.