Three Bible Firsts

When was the first Bible printed in America? As it turns out, you could give any of three answers and still be right.

The first year we'll look at is 1663. In that year, the first printing press in the Colonies was set up in Cambridge, Mass. This press was built in England and transported to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The printers Samuel Green and Marmaduke Johnson published a Bible, titled The Holy Bible: Containing the Old Testament and the New, Translated into the Indian Language. The "Indian language" referred to was the Massachusett language of the Algonquian language family. The man responsible for this translation was John Eliot. Eliot is known as the "apostle to the Indians." He had translated a number of smaller pieces of Scripture into Massachusett, but in the 1660s, he devoted all his effort to translating the entire Bible. So, in 1663, the Massachusett Bible was the very first Bible to be printed on American soil.

In 1743, the first German Bible in America was printed. Christopher Sower saw twelve hundred copies of Luther's edition of the German Bible come off his printing press in Ephrata, Pa. Sower grew up near Heidelberg, Germany; his father was a minister in the Reformed church. He migrated to Philadelphia and set up a printing press in Germantown before moving out to Lancaster County. And there he published the first German Bible to be printed on American soil.

Then, we move on to the English Bible. Robert Aitken was a Scottish immigrant and another printer based in the Philadelphia area. He had printed magazines and sermons and numerous other things. But in 1771, he printed the first English New Testament to be printed in the Colonies. In 1782, right on the heels of the Revolutionary War, Aitken petitioned the U.S. Congress of the Confederation for its approval for his printing project. Assuming that the Congress would be interested in safeguarding Christianity on the people's behalf, he asked that his work be checked for accuracy. The Congress of the Confederation reviewed and commended his work. Aitken had also asked to be named the official Bible printer of the United States; though this request was denied, his 1782 Bible was still the first English Bible produced on American soil.

So these are three Bible firsts: the first Bible in an American Indian language, the first Bible in German, and the first Bible in English. Printing Bibles soon became a productive industry on American soil once those first Bibles made their way through the presses. Hundreds of thousands and millions of copies of the English Bible have since been printed in the United States, as well as Bibles in many other languages. But it all began with the efforts of John Eliot, Samuel Green, Marmaduke Johnson, Christopher Sower, and Robert Aitken.