The two earlier volumes of this comprehensive and magnificent historical source, produced by a fine team of scholars, are The Cambridge History of the Bible: Volume 1, From the Beginnings to Jerome and The Cambridge History of the Bible: Volume 2, The West from the Fathers to the Reformation.



Chapters include "The Bible in the Reformation" (by Roland H. Bainton, biographer of Martin Luther; Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (Hendrickson Classic Biographies)), "English Versions of the Bible, 1525-1611," "The Bible in the Roman Catholic Church from Trent to the Present Day," "The Rise of Modern Biblical Scholarship and Recent Discussion of the Authority of the Bible," "English Versions Since 1611," etc.



Here are some representative quotations from the volume:



"But on other occasions Luther behaved as is he were minded to open a controversy on the canon not only of the Old Testament but also of the New. 'I so hate Esther and II Maccabees that I wish they did not exist. There is too much Judaism in them and not a little heathenism.'" (Pg. 6-7)

"John Toland ... took the view that there could not possibly be anything mysterious in Christianity since mystery was contrary to reason. Absurdities in the biblical records must therefore be eliminated, and Toland proceeded in his next work to excise those parts of the New Testament which appeared to him to be incomprehensible." (Pg. 241)

"The net result of the Deist controversy, as it affected Holy Scripture, was to leave the traditional view of the authority of the Bible in a much weakened condition... to bandy about the sacred texts in public dispute, and to make the Scriptures the small change of pamphleteers, was at once to unseat the Bible from the pedestal on which it have been placed in the seventeenth century. The awe and reverence with which its exaltation into the seat of infallible authority had surrounded it were soon tarnished in the rough and tumble of debate." (Pg. 243)

"For eighty years after its publication in 1611, the King James version endured bitter attacks. It was denounced as theologically unsound and ecclesiastical biased, as truckling to the king and unduly deferring to his belief in witchcraft, as untrue to the Hebrew text and relying too much on the Septuagint. The personal integrity of the translators was impugned." (Pg. 361)

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