Exhibit of early New World Bibles

In school, much is made of secular reasons for the European exploration of the new world. They came for gold, silver, land, political freedom, etc. But we often forget how many came hoping to evangelize the native peoples. A new exhibit in Notre Dame collects together many of the first Bibles produced in the New World. Most of them were aimed at providing the Bible to Native Americans in some approximation of their own language.

The first Scripture translated in America was the Nahuatl (or Aztec) Lectionary prepared by Bernardino de Sahagún in 1532, just a few years after the arrival of Cortes in Mexico. The manuscript of this work disappeared after the death of its author and was recovered and published only in 1858. In the British colonies of North America, Scripture translation began with the spectacular achievement of John Eliot, who crafted a complete version of the Bible in the language of the Massachusetts Indians and had it printed in Cambridge in 1663. Bible translation in America came to a halt after Eliot's Indian Bible and was resumed only in the nineteenth century by the British and Foreign Bible Society and the American Bible Society. The BFBS was founded in 1804 and its first publication, issued before the end of the year, was a translation of John's Gospel in Mohawk. For Latin America, the first BFBS Scripture was Luke in Aymara, issued in 1829, while the first ABS Scripture was the book of Acts in Arawak, completed in 1850.