Well on this episode of five minutes in church history we are once again continuing our journey here in the

scriptorium and looking at the great Van Campin collection. The scriptorium opened in 2002 and provides a beautiful

showcase for the riches and the treasures that are in the Van Campin collection of Bibles and of books related to the Bible.

And I'm actually looking at a replica of a printing press and it's quite a structure and

one thing I can say in looking at it, it looks like a lot of work to produce books and to produce Bibles.

We not only have the efforts of translation of the folks like Wycliffe and Luther, but we also have the efforts of printers and of their apprentices and of those that are even making paper and making the ink and

casting the dye for the printing press and all that goes in to putting Bibles

into the hands of people.

Well, in this room, not only is their printing press,

there are also a number of very crucial books

in the history of the Reformation.

One of them is long before the Reformation and it dates to 1455 and it is the Gutenberg Bible.

That first big book to come off the movable type printing press of Gutenberg and so

the Gutenberg Bible.

And of course, all they had prior to the printing press

were handwritten manuscripts.

So that is what they copied when they actually printed the page and the pages of the Gutenberg Bible.

Some of it was later gone back and filled in by hand with some scribes to give that painted look of a manuscript.

So a fragment of the Gutenberg Bible.

I'm also looking at an early Hebrew lexicon, a dictionary of Hebrew words.

This is Rooklands Hebrew lexicon from 1506.

Such a tool would be invaluable to translators of the Hebrew, whether that was into German

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