Title page of the first edition of the King James Bible. The Holy Bible, conteyning the Old Testament, and the New. London, 1611. Folger Shakespeare Library.

What does the Good Book have to say about love? Plenty. Here is a selection of several well-known verses from the King James Bible on love, just in time for Valentine’s Day.

Proverbs 10:12
“Hatred stirreth up strifes: but love covereth all sins.”

Proverbs 15:17
“Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith.”

Proverbs 17:17
“A friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.”

Song of Solomon 8:7
“Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it: if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned.”

John 3:16
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

1 John 3:11
“For this is the message that ye heard from the beginning, that we should love one another.”

Finally, 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 is commonly read at weddings. In many modern translations, the passage begins “Love is patient, love is kind.” However, the King James Bible translates these well-known verses somewhat differently:

“Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up. Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth. Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.”

For the King James Bible translators, “charity” meant benevolent, kind-hearted feelings towards one’s fellow human beings.

The King James Bible is not the only Bible translation to use charity in this sense. The Wycliffe Bible, based on the work of John Wycliffe, one of the first individuals to translate the Bible into English,  also uses “charity” where most modern translations would use the word “love.” For example, in the Wycliffe Bible, 1 Corinthians 13:13 is rendered as “Nowe forsothe dwellen feith, hope, and charite, thes thre; forsoth the mooste of thes is charite.” Today’s readers are probably more familiar with the verse in this form:

“And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. “

Amy Arden assisted in the development and production of the Manifold Greatness website. She is a communications associate at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

The poet Andrew Hudgins has identified the King James Bible as the most important work in Southern literature, and the crowd that gathered at William Carey University for the panel discussion, “Living in the Belt with the Good Book,” would agree.  William Carey faculty members Dr. Tom Richardson, Dr. Lorie Watkins Fulton, and Dr. Allison Chestnut led a wide-ranging discussion of Biblical influences on Southern literature, and in particular, the writings of Mark Twain, William Faulkner, and Eudora Welty.

Richardson, chair of the Department of Language and Literature at William Carey, opened the discussion with reflections on Twain’s complicated, irreverent, and iconoclastic views on the Bible and religion. “It is full of interest.  It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies.”—Twain’s Letters from the Earth, published posthumously in 1962.

Fulton, author of William Faulkner, Gavin Stevens, and the Cavalier Tradition (Peter Lang, 2011), recounted the story of Faulkner’s grandfather, who demanded that each grandchild recite a verse from the King James Bible each morning before breakfast.  No Bible verse, no breakfast.  Fulton surmised that perhaps this early training directly inspired the many Biblical allusions in Faulkner’s novels.

The influence of parable on the short stories of Eudora Welty was the subject of Chestnut’s presentation.  Chestnut argued that Welty’s stories imitate both the style and structure of Biblical parables.

The “afterlife” of the King James Bible is clearly on display in the works of these great writers that we Southerners claim as our own. A timeline of the King James Bible’s literary influences is viewable on the Manifold Greatness website.

Sherry Laughlin is Director of Libraries at William Carey University.

Staff with the Manifold Greatness traveling panels at the University of Texas, Brownsville. Courtesy of the University of Texas at Brownsville.

It’s been an outstanding experience hosting Manifold Greatness: The Creation and Afterlife of the King James Bible exhibit here at the University of Texas at Brownsville (UTB) since January.  UTB and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin are the only institutions in the state of Texas where the exhibit can be viewed. We’ve enjoyed excellent turnout for each of the special presentations held in conjunction with the exhibit.  Our opening night presentation was delivered by UTB English Department faculty member Dr. Mimosa Stehenson, and focused on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s use of the Bible.  To date, three of the five scheduled presentations have taken place, with guests visiting from across the state and the border stopping by to learn more.

“It’s extraordinary to have an exhibit like Manifold Greatness here in the Rio Grande Valley, and the Academic Libraries of the UTB are pleased to help play a role in educating our community about the historic anniversary of this great book,” said Annabel Treviño, University Librarian for UTB.

Our area’s population truly seems to hold their faith dearly and we’re not always as well-served as other parts of the nation with world-class exhibits like Manifold Greatness.  Seeing so many guests take part in this intuitive and educational exhibit leave with a smile on their face or a desire to learn more from the Manifold Greatness website is really inspiring.

Millie Hernandez is the Special Events Coordinator for the Academic Libraries at the University of Texas at Brownsville.  The Arnulfo L. Oliveira Library is hosting the Manifold Greatness exhibit and related presentations through February 16^th. 

A family Bible owned by Tim Strand, published in 1684 in Copenhagen. Photo by Susan Gangl.

Both William Carey University and the University of Minnesota have shared photos from events related to the Manifold Greatness exhibition.  The University of Minnesota hosted two events over the weekend, including a  “Manifold Greatness Colloquium” on Friday. Over 70 people gathered to see the traveling exhibit, as well as a local exhibition entitled  ”The Word Made Flesh” which showcased rare Bibles. The colloquium included presentations by scholars from the University of Minnesota, Bethel University and Luther Seminary, as well as a reception with music, tea, and scones!

On February 5, a “Share Your Bible” workshop for adults and children encouraged participants to share family Bibles and memories. William Carey University is also showcasing family Bibles, and has photographs of many of these heirlooms on display along with the Manifold Greatness traveling exhibition.

To view photos of events at William Carey University and the University of Minnesota, please visit Flickr.

Amy Arden is a communications associate at the Folger Shakespeare Library. The Folger partnered with the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, to produce Manifold Greatness: The Creation and Afterlife of the King James Bible.

Manifold Greatness opened at the University of Minnesota in January, following an exhibit on early Bibles and religious writing entitled “The Word Made Flesh.”  Here are some of the events at UMN so far:

Courtesy of the University of Minnesota.

In the image above, University of Minnesota Libraries in-house designer checks the final layout for the Manifold Greatness exhibit for its January 25 opening.

Members of Gloria Dei Lutheran Church in Saint Paul, MN visited the University of Minnesota Wilson Library on January 27 to explore the Manifold Greatness traveling exhibit, plus the local exhibit of rare Bibles, “The Word Made Flesh.”  Librarian Susan Gangl and Curator Timothy Johnson guided the group and fielded many questions.  The preference for the Geneva Bible over the King James Bible  in early America came as a surprise to some visitors.

Courtesy of the University of Minnesota.

Courtesy of the University of Minnesota.

Also in January, Timothy Johnson, University of Minnesota Curator of Special Collections and Rare Books, spoke about the King James Bible, and showed images from our collection of earlier Bibles and manuscripts and recent art press editions of illustrated Bibles. Tim developed “The Word Made Flesh,” an exhibit of rare Bibles, to accompany the showing of Manifold Greatness at the Wilson Library. The audience was fascinated and asked many questions! Some had already seen the exhibition, while others plan to visit in the coming weeks.

Susan Gangl is a librarian at the University of Minnesota Wilson Library.

A richly illustrated family Bible. Courtesy William Carey University.

Manifold Greatness arrived at the William Carey University Library in Hattiesburg, MS , in January. One of the highlights of the exhibition to date has been a “Family Bibles Road Show.” The program featured a workshop on the care and preservation of family Bibles. Community members brought about a dozen family Bibles to be photographed for the exhibit. These treasured heirlooms, held together with tape, bound with faded ribbon, or enclosed in a box, were carefully opened and examined. And what interesting things we discovered!

Two of the Bibles contained Family Temperance Pledge documents, designed to be signed by family members who “solemnly promise by the grace of God to abstain from the use of all intoxicating drinks as a beverage.” Neither of the Family Temperance Pledge documents in our Bibles was signed, but we heard rumors of a temperance pledge in another family Bible which was signed by two individuals, who, upon further reflection or perhaps after a nice apertif, crossed out their names!

Family Temperance Pledge, unsigned. Courtesy of William Carey University.

 Another family Bible, an 1815 American imprint, had multiple pages of family birth, death, and marriage dates. Clearly visible water stains in the text were explained by a family legend, which held that the ancestor who acquired the Bible was forced to flee from pursuing Indians as he returned home with his new purchase. At the height of the chase, he dropped his Bible into the creek, but fortunately, was able to retrieve it.

Still another family Bible was noted to have won the Highest Prize Diploma of Merit at the International Cotton Exposition in Atlanta in 1881. And another, found in the Clarence Dickinson Collection in the William Carey University Library, was Dickinson’s family Bible. Dickinson, who was a pioneer in the training of church musicians in the early 20th century, was a cousin of poet Emily Dickinson.

The “Road Show” revealed fascinating local lore in family Bibles.  Photographs of these treasured Bibles have become a popular supplement to the Manifold Greatness panels at William Carey University. 

Sherry Laughlin is Director of Libraries at William Carey University.

Program highlights so far include:

• Kennessaw State University in Kennesaw, Georgia presented a program titled, “Music, Text, and the 1611 King James Bible,” in which Dr. Tamara Livingston, Associate Director of Museums, Archives & Rare Books, discussed the interplay between early 17^th century music, text, and the production of books, as exemplified by the King James Bible.
• At Northwest Christian University in Eugene, Oregon, Dr. Jim Earl, professor of English at the University of Oregon, spoke on “The King James Bible and the Invention of Readable English.” Dr. Earl’s lecture explored the influence of the King James Bible on the development of the more direct style of language that is commonplace today.
•  And the Burke Theological Libraryat Union Seminary at Columbia University, New York, hosted “The King James Bible at 400: A Conversation with Dr. David Burke,” Emeritus Scholar, the NIDA Institute, American Bible Society.
  

  "Manifold Greatness" traveling exhibition on display at Kellenberger Library, Northwest Christian University. Image courtesy of Northwest Christian University.

Manifold Greatness is currently on view at the University of Texas in Brownsville; William Carey University in Hattiesburg, MS; and the  University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, MN.

The traveling Manifold Greatness exhibition provides host libraries with the opportunity to connect with their communities in new and fun ways – through lectures by scholars, panel discussions, book and film discussion series, school and college class tours, concerts, and more.

We look forward to seeing the creative ways the remaining tour sites will engage with Manifold Greatness: The Creation and Afterlife of the King James Bible!

Jennifer Dominiak is a program officer in the Public Programs Office at the American Library Association. The ALA Public Programs Office has a highly regarded program of traveling exhibitions; during 2011, the Public Programs Office toured 11 traveling exhibitions to 123 public, academic, and special libraries. Visitors to these exhibits numbered more than 300,000. An estimated 46,000 library patrons attended exhibit-related public programs.

Rockwell Kent. Plattsburgh State Art Museum. Bequest of Sally Kent Gorton. Copyright 1930, R.R. Connelley & Sons, Inc and the Plattsburgh College Foundation, Inc. All rights reserved.

Well, as I write this, Manifold Greatness is coming down, making way in the Folger’s Great Hall for the next exhibition. I’m in Columbus, but I can imagine the Bibles and books being carefully carried back down to their usual resting places in the Folger vaults. The couriers are sealing up loan items to transport them back to their homes at the Library of Congress, the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site, Graceland (Elvis Presley Enterprises, Inc.), the Bodleian Library, Lambeth Palace, and elsewhere. The Hamlin Family Bible will find its way back to me. The ever-resourceful Caryn Lazzuri will no doubt find a storage space for the antique radio she scrounged up for the exhibition, and the pulpit and pew we borrowed from the Lutheran Church of the Reformation will be returned.

It’s been a remarkable experience planning, making, mounting, and writing and talking about Manifold Greatness. Thinking back on how much it involved is almost dizzying. And I’ve learned so much. I remember coming (online) upon the John Alden Bible at Pilgrim Hall, for instance, and how exciting it was to think that this might have been the first King James Bible in America. We almost got a Bible owned by Bob Marley, a photo of which we did use on the traveling panel exhibition. That loan, like some others, didn’t work out, but Elvis’s King James Bible was a fine addition. It was fun to see this loan, and Manifold Greatness, advertised at Graceland, which I visited in November. We borrowed Bibles and other books from around the world; the Library of Congress and the Bodleian were especially generous. Steve Galbraith, Caryn, and I sat down with Mark Dimunation, the Library of Congress’s Chief of Rare Books and Special Collections, and he showed us some gems: the Massachusett Bible of John Eliot, the first Bible printed in America, and Robert Aitken’s “Revolutionary” Bible, America’s first homegrown KJV. We made a pitch for the KJV Abraham Lincoln was sworn in on, but it had been traveling too much and needed a rest from exhibitions. A happy alternative was the George Washington Family Bible, which we found at the George Washington National Masonic Memorial, across the Potomac in Alexandria, Virginia.

John Bois’ manuscript notes of the proceedings. Courtesy of Corpus Cristi College, University of Oxford.

Especially momentous was the loan of the “Big Three,” the only surviving manuscripts from the KJV process itself. Manifold Greatness brought these together for the first time; they’re normally at the Bodleian Library, Corpus Christi (Oxford), and Lambeth Palace (London). They met first in Oxford’s exhibition and then travelled to the Folger, their first visit to America as well. I was fascinated, as visitors were, by the Bishops’ Bible with the inscriptions of one of the KJV translators, deleting a word here, adding one there, noting changes in the margin. I gave at least half a dozen tours of the exhibition, and it was a treat to be able to read aloud from this document, showing how the specific language of this most influential of books actually came into being.

My memories stay with me, but I’ll miss the physical experience of the exhibition. I loved the contrast between  the massive and luxurious Bishops’ Bible of Queen Elizabeth I and the tiny, spare Bible brought to sea by Justinian Isham. The case of Literary Influences (also viewable as an interactive timeline on the exhibition website) was another favorite. I hadn’t realized until they were all in place what a radical bunch of biblical writers we’d assembled: John Milton, John Bunyan, William Blake, Herman Melville, Allan Ginsberg. You could practically hear their rebellious roaring through the glass! Finally, being able to walk from the case with the fragile little leaves from Tyndale’s 1530 Pentateuch across to the 1968 photo of Earthrise, listening on cellphone to the Apollo 8 astronauts reading Genesis from outer space—that was an amazing leap across the centuries. Manifold Greatness indeed.

Hannibal Hamlin, associate professor of English at The Ohio State University, was co-curator of the Manifold Greatness exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

The Folger exhibition is open today (Saturday), Sunday, and Monday; admission is free. And we’re delighted to have started the last weekend of the exhibition with brilliant sunshine.

Some of the many “don’t miss” items now on display in the Folger exhibition include:

Bishops' Bible. 1568. Folger.

• An Anglo-Saxon manuscript from about the year 1000 that retells biblical stories in epic verse
• A rare Wycliffite Bible from the 1380s
• A 1530 fragment from William Tyndale’s contraband biblical translations, discussed by Hannibal Hamlin in this post: Tyndale was executed in 1536
• Queen Elizabeth’s 1568 Bishops’ Bible
• A Bodleian copy of a 1602 Bishops’ Bible annotated with translators’ changes
• The Folger first edition of the King James Bible
• The Prince Henry Bible, an elaborately bound copy of the King James Bible owned by James I’s older son, Prince Henry, who died in 1612
• A “Wicked” Bible (1631) in which the printer omits a key word from the commandment on adultery
• A King James Bible that came over on the Mayflower
• King James Bibles owned by Frederick Douglass and Elvis Presley
• Early family Bibles, with century-old handwritten records of births, christenings, and other events, including the Hamlin Family Bible

Earthrise. Apollo 8, December 24, 1968. NASA.

And what story does it all tell? In the words of the Washington Post from last September:

The exhibition includes fascinating mysteries, epic battles, stake burnings and other enthralling episodes in the lives of the men involved in Bible translation. It covers the events that led to the birth of the King James, as well as the book’s influence on art, literature, popular culture, music and history—from Handel’s “Messiah” to the reading of Genesis by the astronauts aboard Apollo 8, a broadcast heard by a quarter of the people on Earth at the time, making the Bible’s reach literally astronomical.

The New York Times (also in September) put it this way:

Pay close attention to the major new exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare Library here, “Manifold Greatness: The Creation and Afterlife of the King James Bible,” and you will see not only manuscripts going back to the year 1000, an early translation from the 14th century, Queen Elizabeth I’s copy of the Bible, and imposingly bound versions of the King James; you will also sense the gradual birth of the modern English language and the subtle framing of a culture’s patterns of thought… you cannot survey the riches at the Folger without realizing that you are being given a glimpse of a culture’s birth.

In his recent blog post about an American Civil War POW’s King James Bible, curator Steve Galbraith noted “the long reach of the King James Bible and how much history was covered by our one exhibition.” Another reminder of those historical KJB associations comes this weekend, with the Martin Luther King, Jr., holiday on Monday and Dr. King’s actual birthday on Sunday. Curator Hannibal Hamlin wrote about Martin Luther King and the King James Bible last August, and King is recognized in the Folger exhibition as well. On Monday, the exhibition’s last day, the Folger Shakespeare Library also offers a free, family-friendly event for the King holiday on the theme of protest. And once again, the King James Bible of 1611 traces its connections to the present day.

Circulating Manifold Greatness bookshelf. Rhodes College.

The Manifold Greatness panels were packed up and shipped from Rhodes College on Monday this past week. But their presence lingers, in part through the exhibition of Rhodes archival holdings that it helped inspire.

Last September, when I attended the ALA/NEH workshop at the Folger Shakespeare Library in preparation for our hosting these panels, I recall a moment that was almost Norman Rockwell-esque in its poignancy. We had been invited to introduce ourselves and our home institutions. One by one, forty different people stood up and expressed their eagerness for “Manifold Greatness” to visit their libraries. But what was most moving were the accounts everyone spontaneously gave of how they planned to augment the panels with local resources. Someone mentioned a copy of a Native American Bible translation that they planned to display; another person described with pride the venue in which the panels would be exhibited, a converted church sanctuary; many others detailed the extraordinary range of documents, events, and people who would be connected to this traveling exhibition. It seemed ‘American’ in all the best ways: regional riches strengthened in conjunction with federal resources.

ABS facsimile pages, with Manifold Greatness panels in background. Rhodes College.

Here at Rhodes, the arrival of Manifold Greatness occasioned some delightful discoveries. The more we sought biblically related materials, the more we found. We gathered dozens of critical studies related to the biblical translation into one nearby shelf, so that visitors could read further into this cultural history.

Based on a suggestion made by another Manifold Greatness host (Stan Campbell, at Centre College), our archivists Bill Short and Elizabeth Gates realized that we hold copies of a series of facsimile reproductions of leaves from early English Bibles, produced in 1935 by the American Bible Society.

We already knew of our copies of a Geneva Bible (1582), Fulke’s contentious refutation of the Rheims New Testament (1589), and an early reissue of the 1611 Bible by the King’s printer (1617). All three of these items from our Special Collections enriched the panels’ narrative considerably—many visitors commented gratefully that these volumes helped them appreciate the scale of the portable Geneva or the dauntingly large KJV.

But what was a marvel to encounter was the discovery that we had, decades ago, acquired an extraordinary collection of mounted pages from various biblical translations. These include a manuscript (1121) of the Bible in Armenian; a Paris Bible (c. 1240); the new edition of the Greek New Testament and accompanying Latin translation by Desiderius Erasmus; the complete Douai-Rheims Bible (1609-10); the London Polyglot (1657), edited by Brian Walton; John Eliot’s Algonquin Bible (2nd edition, 1665); and The Works [Opera] of St. Cyprian (1563).

Geneva Bible, Fulke's refutation of the Rheims New Testament, King James Bible. Rhodes College.

Our colleague Michael Leslie was teaching a seminar on the pre-history of the 1611 translation, and eagerly provided explanatory commentary, further enriching the collective exhibition.

While the panels have departed our library for their next host institution, the circulating bookshelf, the facsimiles, the original volumes, and the mounted pages will all remain on display for another month. This is a tribute to the generative quality of Manifold Greatness itself and the ways in which it inspires local libraries to recognize their own great and manifold holdings.

Scott Newstok is associate professor of English at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, which hosted the Manifold Greatness traveling exhibition in November and December of 2011. For more about the traveling exhibition at Rhodes College and the related symposium and programs, see Hannibal Hamlin’s previous blog post, Manifold Greatness at Rhodes.