A view from the High Street

by Gethin Russell-Jones

Elsewhere in this magazine I have penned a few words about the 400th birthday of the King James Bible. Quick eyed readers will have noted my sympathies towards William Tyndale’s earlier translation of the New Testament published in 1525. Why so, you may have wondered. Many and various are the reasons.

On the one hand, I have great admiration for a man whose experience of God led him to pursue the highest standards in scholarship in order to make the scriptures available to everyone. This single-mindedness eventually led to his own death at the hands of the established church. However, I also have other, more personal reasons.

During the late 1980s, I studied at Bristol Baptist College, the world’s oldest seminary for training free church ministers. Curiously, this establishment had in its possession one of the very few first editions of Tyndale’s Bible still extant. To put it in perspective, there were only two other editions in circulation. All the others had been burned at the time of Tyndale’s martyrdom, but a small number had been squirrelled away by a few wealthy supporters.

So how did a college established in 1679 come to acquire such an exquisite rarity, published more than a century earlier? Indeed the mystery is even more opaque, since the Bible was bequeathed to the college in 1784. Here’s the story.

A bequest was made to the college by Andrew Gifford, an eminent 18th century Baptist minister from London. On his death in 1784, Bristol Baptist College benefited greatly from his estate. Former principal, the late Rev Dr Morris West, describes the main part of the bequest, which also included mosses, seaweed, rocks and coins. ‘…Most importantly, his collection of manuscripts and books, including many Bibles, arrived at Bristol.

The most extraordinary of all of the bequests in the collection were the printed Bibles. These included a first edition of a Tyndale 1526 New Testament, Tyndale’s 1530 Pentateuch, his 1534 New Testament, Coverdale’s Bible of 1535, a first edition of the Great Bible, the Geneva Bible, the Douai version and two Authorized Versions from 1611…’ (www.tyndale.org/Reformation/1/west.html)

It seems that the Bible was purchased on behalf of Lord Oxford in the 1730s and ended up in Gifford’s care in 1776. How it survived from 1526 to 1730 is anyone’s guess. And so it came to pass in 1986, in a small airless room in Bristol Baptist College, I was shown this remarkable work of literature. It was sold to the British Museum in 1994 for £1.4 million, enabling the college to continue its original intent of supplying churches ‘with a succession of able and evangelical ministers.’

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