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Building the Bible

The 1400s and the Printing Press

When was the printing press used to print the Bible in its original languages of Hebrew and Greek?

In Spain, Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros (1436–1517) initiated the project for the Complutensian Polyglot in 1502, but the translation was not complete until 1522. It was a six-volume set. Six hundred copies were made. Only 123 are known to have survived to the present day. The adjective Complutensian derives from Complutense, the name of the university that published the translation. A polyglot is book in which the text is presented is several different languages arranged side by side in columns. In the case of the Complutensian Polyglot, the languages used were Greek, Hebrew, and Latin in the Old Testament and Greek and Latin in the New Testament.