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Gutenberg Bibles Online 127

Richey writes: "The British Library is making the Gutenberg Bible, the first major bible printed in the West available online. (Direct link to the book)." This isn't the first high-res copy of the Gutenberg Bible online; a German university library has already done it with their copy, but it's still cool. Update: 11/23 8:25 AM by michael : For the people that skipped those boring history classes, this was the first book printed in the western world with movable type, a huge leap in printing technology.
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Gutenberg Bibles Online

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  • by Jonathan ( 5011 ) on Thursday November 23, 2000 @02:32AM (#605448) Homepage
    This isn't just some religious thing. The Gutenberg Bible is important because it was the first book printed with moveable type in the West (The Chinese Empire actually had a moveable type several centuries prior, but as with their invention of gunpowder, they failed to use it effectively -- they were sort of the Xerox PARC of civilizations, I guess).

    The thing about moveable type is that it made books afffordable. Like the Internet, it suddenly made a lot of information available to people.
  • From the creator that brought you Life On Earth and The Great Flood, comes an epic story of a carpenter's son:

    You've read the first. But you don't know the whole story...

    Jesus is back. This time, it's personal.


    FluX
    After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
  • by Anonymous Coward
    Call it what you want, but the bare truth is that, like a lot of "christian" festivals are actually attempts by the christian church to "hijack" pagan festivals. Don't believe me? Go do your research you busy little beaver god bothering bible basher and get back to me.

    If you want to believe in God, go for it, then take a look around at the state the world is in and shut your fucking mouth. As for christmas, it always amuses me that christians jump onto this pagan festival. I mean it's the ultimate consumergasm. BUY BUY BUY! SPEND SPEND SPEND! I don't particularly believe in God, but I do believe in a higher power. I just choose to think that he or she would have the sense to not put such jackasses like 80% of christians are on earth to spread his word. As I always "God, I believe in you, but your envoys on earth are morons."

    As for me, I personally don't with christmas anymore than I have to for the sake of my family. It's a fucking joke. People say "I won't get you any presents" as if to test my belief to which I say "Okay." I honestly and truthfully don't care. Why should there be a day a year set aside for being kind to your fellow man in the "christmas spirit". What's wrong with all year? This christmas a friend I haven't seen in years is coming to visit. That's more than a good enough present for me, but no doubt people like yourself will go to church, sing sombre hymns and generally mull around like you're at a funeral, then go home and stuff yourself stupid without a second thought to those who are alone at this depressing and solitary time of year.

    Think on that as you eat your turkey...

  • What did the stooopid UK government decide to waste hundreds of millions of pounds on a couple of years back? A new reading room for the British Library. Waste of money. They could have converted hundreds of thousands of books into electronic form for that amount of money, and they would have been accessible to 50+m Brits rather than just the few hundred thousand that live a short bus ride away from Euston. (Yeah, I'm gonna pay #4.80 to travel on the underground to go read a book, right).

    At last someone's seen some sense.

    1 book, it's a start...

    FatPhil
  • Latin. They didn't have Microsoft Word spellchecked US English in those days.

    Not classical Latin but the religious latin that had adapted somewhat by this time (1500 years after the Romans).

    Actually I thought the typeface was remarkably clean and sharp. Just depends on your culture and how you're expecting letters to look (check out contemporary printings of the Koran, or Talmud).

  • The typeface was damned near unreadable, but it looked an awful lot like latin to me. Talk about a perfect way to brush up on the latin you learned in high school or college and have since then forgotten. If I remember right the catholic church was not happy about the printing press, especially the printing of bibles. The last thing they wanted was for the common man to study and understand the bible his or herself. After all, the bastion of religion is ignorance. Lee Reynolds
  • Public domain means "not copyrighted". Copyright is not permanent. The copyright on the Gutenberg Bible (if there ever was one) has long since expired. It has been public domain for centuries.
  • A typical page of the British Museum rendition seems to be about 60kbyte JPEG, barely legible, with heavy JPEG artifacts. The German work is much higher resolution, typically 500 kbyte JPEG, and quite legible.
  • Now ... it's only a matter of time before they put the indulgences online too, so we can all get into web-heaven.
  • I am somewhat taken aback by the venom in some of the above posts. If the online book in question was the Torah or the Koran would they have provoked such vitriolic comment? Just a thought.
  • I am an atheist, and I also found the original comment objectionable in the way it disregarded the faith or belief of others.

    However, I find your post is equally objectionable. You are as bigotted and as narrow-minded as the person to whom you respond.

    Are you really so insecure in your faith that you need to rubbish that of other people? Perhaps you should embrace the 15 billion years of secular culture.
  • I am somewhat taken aback by the venom in some of the above posts. If the online book in question was the Torah or the Koran would they have provoked such vitriolic comment?

    Familiarity breeds contempt. Americans are mostly surrounded by screaming protestant fundamentalists, other denominations and religions generally keep their heads down and do the American thing - keep Church and State apart.
  • Well apart from Latin what have the Romans ever done for us ?

  • Late eighties. Yeah, I remember then. I remember going through the PAD> prompts to get to NASA's online news services.

    The technology has been right for digitising books since exactly the time the technology has been right for digitising porn.

    I can't prove the first porn image was scanned in the 70s, but it certainly wouldn't be the late eighties.

    FP.

  • 2.It was decided to increase the number of lines per page, presumably to save paper.

    And how many lines did they decide to fit per collumn (actually after 18 collumns)? 42!! Obviously Gutenberg knew that to make the most famous book of all time he should use a magical number of lines.

    Another little tidbit: The first letter of each book of the bible and section starts with a hand drawn letter. For the cheeper versions, these hand drawn letters are rather plain, but as one can see from the Kings version at the site, some versions had very elaboratly drawn letters. This was done after the printing by specialized painters (getting paid in proportion to how elaboratley they could draw).

  • Books have 2400, 4800 or even 9600 lpi. Even the cheapest laser printer does 300lpi. Screens typically have 72. There is a LONG way to go before any screen can get the resolution we're used to on paper.

  • However, you, of course, don't have to read the whole thing from page to page. This is a sweet link to have bookmarked when some jerk on irc claims he is quoting "Matteus 5:1" or whatever.

    If reading normal books on line if tough for you, this one should give you a head ache in about 30 seconds (just to figure out what the letters are in a given word is a chore). Note as well that it's in latin, and the IRC jerk will probabily claim that you don't know Latin well enough to translate it. At any rate, most of the bible is written in Hebrew and Greek, IIRC; and only a few Letters were written in Latin, so your argument would not be valid anyway. Now if you found a copy of a scribe-written bible in the origonal laguages, you might be in luck.

  • It was a good 20km away. would you walk that distance to just read a book?

    Damn straight I would.

  • I trust there`ll be a concerted effort to keep this sexist, homophobic, retarded, redneck trash off the internet!
    .... Um, why?
    ~cHris
    --
    Chris Naden
    "Sometimes, home is just where you pour your coffee"
  • Why is better to believe in something based upon no facts, than only believe things which can be proved?
  • sure, if it was a good book
  • Although many of them are labeled 'NT only'. Well, as a confirmed worshipper of the church of the toy penguin, *I* certainly won't be reading those. Bloody Microsoft gets everywhere these days.

    It's a joke, dammit

  • There is another testament of Jesus Christ, and it's called the Book of Mormon. (Read More... [lds.org])
  • Don't know about you, but when I saw the verse headings in red I instinctively clicked on them - guess Gutenburg didn't invent the Hyperlink, then...
  • i was in dublin in september 2000 and bought a copy of the 'Book of Kells CD-ROM' - it gives just legible scans of every single page - worth the 20 pounds ($40) i paid for it - i imagine they are selling the CD-ROM until they can recoup their production costs - at which point they morally should publish it publically on the web like they have done with gutenberg. if you want any particular page of the book of kells, send me an email at: johnRpennner@earthlink-NOSPAM-.net and i'll email you over a jpeg from the specified page of the book of kells.

    regards,
    john.
  • I posted the story, and I meant to say BOOK. D'oh! I felt sure it wouldn't get posted simply as the first bible.
    ---
  • > I just don't get it?
    > Religion has done nothing but harm
    > in the history of man.

    man - what do you know about religion.
    any religion that does those things is not worthy of the name. what you are referring to is the failure of religion.

  • Prove to me the your life has value.

    Trivial. Attack me, and the proof will become self-evident. :)
  • I submitted this story. It's meant to say the first BOOK published in the West. I cocked up. Sorry. *holds hands up*.

    To be honest I don't think it's that interesting just having a major bible online. The British Library has done it well though.
    ---
  • The bible has some nice ideas about how to live in a moral manner. Ideas that followers of most religions as well as atheists would agree upon. But why the emphasis? If the bible is correct, why should the God fearing worry? They are on the right side. The only reason to look down on the less God-fearing would be if you had your doubts about wether your moral behavoiur will pay off and you don't want others to have the benefits of a less godly life.

    The bible teaches people to "Love thy Neighbour" That means, among other things, you must teach them about your beliefs, lest they die. God-fearing people look down on others because they want them to get saved like they have. No doubts, just worry for the soul of the OTHER person.

  • Speaking of sueing, did anybody bother to patent the concept of a "Bible"?
  • Wouldn't a "Psalm Pilot" be easier to carry?
  • One thing's for sure, the way it looks, I'm going to be the first one who laserprinted it...
  • i'm a latin 3 ap student, our curriculum mainly being translating (gramatically) the aneied, and the current latin translating programs out there are pure *crap*. I'd actually PAY for my copy of bablefish, should they ever release a latin translator.
  • Trinity College Dublin recently had the famous Book of Cells digitized, but for some strange reason you can only get the results of this by BUYING a CD-ROM. Anyone know why they are not making this available online (I suspect this has something to do with profit)
  • You didn't look at the high-res version of the British bibles - they have thumbnails, low-res, and if you click the low-res versions, high-res, which is quite similar to the German images.
  • You'd get the bus from Euston. Why don't you walk you idle good for nothing?
  • Yes, it is in Latin.

    I believe the first bible to be translated into English was the Wycliff version. (Someone please correct me if I'm wrong. &lt--- Hey look a first on /. Someone asking to be corrected if they are wrong :)

    Allthough most bibles don't properly TRANSLITERATE [olivebranch.org.nz] the names.

    From http://www. the modernreligion.com/comparative/christ/bibleversion .htm [themodernreligion.com]

    1. 1384 Wycliff
    2. 1526 Tyndale
    3. 1535 Coverdale
    4. 1537 Matthew
    5. 1539 Great Bible
    6. 1568 Geneva Bible
    7. 1568 Bishop's Bible
    8. 1582 Rheims, New Testament
    9. 1609 Douai, Old Testament
    10. 1611 Authorized / King James Version
    11. 1903 R.T. Weymouth, The New Testament in Modern Speech
    12. 1913 James Moffatt, A New Translation of the Bible
    13. 1917 The Holy Scripture
    14. 1927 E.T. Goodspeed, The Complete Bible: An American Translation
    15. 1944 Ronald Knox, The Holy Bible
    16. 1946 The Revised Standard Version (The Common Bible)
    17. 1950 The New World Testament
    18. 1955 H.J. Schonfield, The Authentic New Testament
    19. 1958 J.B. Phillips, New Testament in Modern English
    20. 1958 The Amplified Bible
    21. 1959 The Holy Bible: The Berkely Version in Modern English
    22. 1961 The New English Bible
    23. 1966 The Jerusalem Bible
    24. 1966 Today's English Version
    25. 1970 New American Bible
    26. 1971 New American Standard Bible
    27. 1971 Kenneth Taylor, The Living Bible
    28. 1973 New International Version

    Yahweh [yahweh.org] bless.

  • I wrote: A typical page of the British Museum rendition seems to be about 60kbyte JPEG, barely legible

    My mistake. There are two levels of thumbnails. Click on the 60k JPEG to get a 900k JPEG which is indeed high resolution and legible.
  • open minded is not the same as gullible.

    i'm open minded - but if you want me to believe in something, you damn well better bring some facts to back your point up. EVERY argument i've had about the existance of god has come down to something on the order of:

    "dude, you just gotta have faith"

    sorry, but that's basically saying that, in order to find proof that god exists, i first have to believe that he exists...

    WTF?!?! You want me to believe in god...it's really simple - GIVE ME PROOF HE/SHE/IT EXISTS!!!!


    FluX
    After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
  • Err. That's a thumbnail. Try clicking on it...

    The full size version is presented in 1450 x 2048 and is often 1.5Mb in size.
  • Oh nice bait, lemme have a bite... Not because of you (+1 Troll) but because of those who really think like that.

    What a perfect example of the kind of secular thinking that has led Western culture down the road to decadence and immorality.

    A road traveled by so many great civilizations before. The road signs are not "Godlessness" but "Success, beware"

    Rather than embracing over two thousand years of our cultural heritage,...

    If two thousand year old theories are better than current ideas, then I guess pre-christian religions must be even better?

    ...you're perfectly willing to accept revisionist lies that claim that Christianity is some kind of "myth" rather than being the undoubted Truth of a kind that doesn't exist nowadays.

    Funny, replying to someone calling christianity a myth by calling it the *undoubted* truth. Apparently at least someone has doubts... Actually a few billion people have.

    The Truth is that the Bible teaches us of our place in the Universe and how to live our life in a decent, moral manner, so that all mankind will better itself and rise up to Heaven when they die. But oh no, you'd rather accept concepts like "moral relativism", an excuse for atheists to do what they want without fear of consequence

    The bible has some nice ideas about how to live in a moral manner. Ideas that followers of most religions as well as atheists would agree upon. But why the emphasis? If the bible is correct, why should the God fearing worry? They are on the right side. The only reason to look down on the less God-fearing would be if you had your doubts about wether your moral behavoiur will pay off and you don't want others to have the benefits of a less godly life.

    Unfortunately, science has said nothing, and indeed can say nothing, about the ultimate Truth of creation.

    Fortuately, neither can the bible.
    The only truth is: We don't know.

    You make me sick.

    You make me laugh. Gee, that *makes* you a better person!

  • Parent links to http://atsm.fr.fm, which points directly to Goatse.cx [goatse.cx]
  • god should sue for copyright infringement. It's his work, and he aint dead yet.

    Any work created on or before December 31, 1922 (such as the original Hebrew/Aramaic/Greek source of the Bible or the authorized 1611 English translation thereof commissioned by King James), is public domain. Any work created on or after January 1, 1923, is effectively under perpetual copyright in the United States [everything2.com] thanks to Congress's "creative" use of a loophole in the Constitution.

  • It's the Book of Kells.

    Which is actually a number of books (4?) that relate the gospels. Quite beautiful really.

    I presume that the reason it isn't online is due to the profit motive. Which of course doesn't preclude it being placed online at a future date

  • If I remember right the catholic church was not happy about the printing press, especially the printing of bibles. The last thing they wanted was for the common man to study and understand the bible his or herself.

    And rightly so, because they knew the popularization of printed Bibles (specially those translated into vernacular languages) would allow all manners of used car salesmen to call themselves preachers, just by virtue of thumping the Holy Book with enough self righteousness. Time has only proved them right. After all, the bastion of religion is ignorance.

    No, it is the bastion of false religion.
    --

  • The Bible II would only start a global fringe cult at best!!

    As an anonymous coward commented above [slashdot.org], this "global fringe cult" is called the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints [lds.org].

  • http://www.voynich.nu

    For those who are not aware, the Voynich Manuscript is perhaps the only work of European literature that remains untranslated, or even undeciphered. It is a handwritten work on vellum, 300+ pages long, written in a finely calligraphed alphabet found nowhere else in the world, and illustrated by drawings of plants, astronomical diagrams, and strange arrangements of pipes inhabited by frolicking naked women.

    Unfortunately, this work can only be accessed by accredited scholars at Beineke Library at Yale, who has so far been unwilling to produce a full-color photocopy of it, although some pages are available through the Beineke web site. This represents a loss not only to scholars, but to artists, cryptographers, healers (it may be a medical text), and to the public at large. Please email Beineke library and petition them to make this work available, if not in a book, then online.

  • I trust there`ll be a concerted effort to keep this sexist, homophobic, retarded, redneck trash off the internet!

    The cheeeeldran, the cheeeeldran!
  • So you're telling me that a group having a monopoly on information and its interpretation is a good thing?

    An understanding of the bible by the people helped lead directly to the protestant reformation. This fragmentation of the catholic church's power was very important to the social and scientific advances of the past few centuries. Democracy and theocracy are mutually exclusive. Imagine a western world similar to that of islamic countries where the church and the state are one and the same and everyone is brainwashed by religion. One where demonstrable reality takes a back seat to what some priest says is the truth based on the beliefs of a mid-eastern culture from ancient antiquity. For all practical purposes you might as well be living in the soviet union. But luckily we don't have to live like that. We live in a world where what can be seen and what can be proven is the basis for the interpretation of reality. One where each of us has the freedom to speak our mind without fear of imprisonment and tortue.
  • bzzzt. wrong answer, but thank you for trying.

    i almost feel bad for you guys sometimes...i mean, is that the strongest argument you have for the existance of god? If there is a god - he's going to be pretty pissed off, come judgement day, that you guys didn't have anything better to say than some philosophical babble about how we can't actually prove that something DOESN'T exist.

    going back to an earlier argument i made. Prove to me that 10,000 foot invisible lizard people didn't create the universe. Oh...you can't prove that they didn't???? Well then, they must exist. (if my invizible lizard-god argument is insane...then prove it to me without poking holes in your own crackpot theory on "god").

    sorry theists, but the burden of proof lies with you guys...and every argument i've ever heard is just fucking weak.


    FluX
    After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
  • Think laterally here folks!
    I would be happy if the morons here showed any sign of intelligent thought period. This is the land of glib remarks, witty sarcasm, etc.
    Seeing the significance of having great historical documents like this online is just beyond these idiots.
  • Sir Charles Gutenberg has announced the availability of the "Biblewulf" cluster technology. With the ability to now combine up to 1024 Gods in a cluster, a world can be made in 6 minutes. Weather prediction will now be a thing of the past as the Biblewulf cluster waves it's protons around the globe and says "Let there be light". The nasty problem of not having any God's before it will be solved by using the newly patented GCL (God Console Locking) where ine God Console will actually be controlling the whole Biblewulf cluster.

    Thou shalt have no clusters before me.
    Thou shalt not kill -9
    Thou shalt honour your parent process
    Thou shalt not fork thy neighbors code

  • You mean dpi, not lpi. Lines Per Inch is used to measure halftone screens. Resolution is measured in Dots Per Inch.
  • by stesch ( 12896 ) on Thursday November 23, 2000 @01:42AM (#605502) Homepage
    One thing is missing:

    Latin for Babelfish
  • I said:
    ...and they would have been accessible to 50+m Brits rather than just the few hundred thousand that live a short bus ride away from Euston. (Yeah, I'm gonna pay #4.80 to travel on the underground to go read a book, right).

    You said :
    I said you were lazy for walking from Euston to the BM and not from 20km away. It's only a couple of minutes.

    Do I say it's a bus ride from Euston to the BL? I, not being a central Londoner, thought that the reading room _was_ in Euston. When I walk from Euston/Euston Square to Kings Cross, I pass it, and deemed it closer to Euston than KX.
    I claimed that it was only accessible to those a bus ride away (from the Library/Euston). I still claim that. 99% of the country do not fall into this category. Many/most "Londoners", such as my parents in Harrow, would have to fork out something like #4.80 for a return ticket to get there.

    FP.
  • Battlefield Earth Bibles Online

    L Ron Richey writes "The Scientology Library is making the Original BattleField Earth script avaliable on-deck, the first major bible printed in the Theaten Sphere available online....
  • Hello fellow slashdot users,

    I found a great article with a bit of history on the Gutenberg Bible and a recent attempt to make a copy of the Cardinal Mazarin edition. It is amazing that out of an estimated 180 originals there are only 20 copies left in existence!

    Enjoy... [state.or.us]

    -Shawn

    "The whole world admits unhesitatingly, and there can be no doubt about this that Gutenberg's invention is the incomparably greatest event in the history of the world." -Mark Twain
  • by werty ( 245510 )
    Jesus was a black man
    No! Jesus was batman
    Hell no! That was Bruce Wayne!
  • yes.

    if you believe in god, in my opinion, you are dumb. jews, muslims, christians, etc. all equal.

    ...equally dumb.


    FluX
    After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
  • Isn't about time God got round to writing a sequal.

    Imagine the publishing opportunities, after all 2000 years is long enough for any mortal to write a sequal why should god be any different ?

    More importantly has anyone made a lego version of the Bible yet ?

  • Hey fluxrad, its easy to poke holes in someone elses belief system, why don't you tell me what you believe in so I can tear it to shit and make fun of you?

    simple. i believe in nothing. my life has no value, neither does yours. neither does anyone else's. We are a cosmic fluke. There may be others like us, on some other planet (in fact, i'm pretty sure there are. read: statistical probability).

    why are we here? i have no idea - i figure somewhere a long time ago, life just happened. no rhyme, no reason - i've never seen any indication that there is a rhyme or reason.

    what happens when we die? we're worm food. our bodies cease to function and we are buried. decomposers (worms, fungus, etc.) eat us and take what's left of the energy stored in our bodies. other organisms, higher up on the food chain, eat them...and thusly, the cycle of life continues...perhaps, in that sense, we are all canibals.

    but in the end, it makes no difference. we are here for nothing.

    if you ask me about morality, why it exists, i will give you this justification: if humans have a single evolutionary purpose, it is to see that that evolution continues unabated. Species continue to survive because they find it in their interests to survive. Otherwise, homo oftheweekticus would have died out hundreds of thousands of years ago - and no one would have cared. So - we have evolved with a genetic will to survive. In that instance - it is in our own best interests to set "rules" to ensure our survival.

    i only have morals insofar as they serve either my own interests, or the interests of the species. No killing: this decreases the human population...that is bad for humans in general.

    Don't be a dick to your fellow humans. this just comes down to the fact that i don't want to be treated poorly (i.e. being beaten up, mugged, etc.) - so i'll treat others in the manner that i wish to be treated. if we all abided by this rule, we'd all get along pretty well.

    that pretty much sums up my belief system - there are others...but these are the big'uns.


    FluX
    After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
  • the first major bible printed in the West available online
    Uhh? The Bible Gateway [gospelcom.net] has dozens of major Bibles available online (in a bunch of languages, too), including NIV. I guess they may mean available IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN, but that's not at all the same thing.

    __
  • You mean part (or should we say "testament" 3?

    You didn't read the linked story, did you :-)

    Szo
  • Yeah, but why would he when his first book has been a best-seller for the last two millenia? Besides, Sequels never quite do as well as the original, The Bible II would only start a global fringe cult at best!!

    Kleedrac
  • Although I don't usually find bibles terribly exciting, this thing's a real work of art [prodigi.bl.uk]. Pity they don't make books like that these days.

    Incidentally, there is another one (from the University of Keio (Japan) here [keio.ac.jp].
  • Sure you're one of those people who believes religion is only for Windows ... aren't you??

    Kleed
  • I've looked at those pages, and they've got something on them that could easily be described as icons.

    How do the hypertext links work?

  • I downloaded one image of an 'indulgence' from the site. The page is beautiful. But I was very irritated to see at the bottom:
    (C)2000 British Library Board

    This is just wrong. The work of scanning the page is so much less than the work of creating it. In addition, the content was written by the Pope and meant to be widely known. It bothers me that the British Library Board would claim intellectual property rights in a document of that nature.
    Then I downloaded a page of the actual Bible and saw that instead of a copyright notice, it bears a simple notice of who scanned it and when. Much better.
    What if the Church had been able to use copyright law to prevent the publication of the Gutenberg Bible? Maybe they could have prevented the reformation. Maybe this is an argument that could show conservatives why intellectual property is not good.
    PS - I notice they're running IIS and have that odd microsoftish need to shorten file/directory names. The pioneer in question was, as near as I can render it in US-ASCII, Gutenberg, not "gutenbg". Are they saving keystrokes?
  • I think it means first major bible printed in the west COMMA available online. The Gutenberg bible was (one of?) the first bibles printed. Due to the fact that Gutenberg invented the press (in the west at least).
  • The reason for this was because the old reading room was running out of space.
    You can have all the online works you want, but they're no substitute for the real thing...


    Hacker: A criminal who breaks into computer systems
  • What a perfect example of the kind of secular thinking that has led Western culture down the road to decadence and immorality. Rather than embracing over two thousand years of our cultural heritage, you're perfectly willing to accept revisionist lies that claim that Christianity is some kind of "myth" rather than being the undoubted Truth of a kind that doesn't exist nowadays.

    The Truth is that the Bible teaches us of our place in the Universe and how to live our life in a decent, moral manner, so that all mankind will better itself and rise up to Heaven when they die. But oh no, you'd rather accept concepts like "moral relativism", an excuse for atheists to do what they want without fear of consequence.

    History's greatest thinkers have all seen the Truth that the Bible contains - Newton, St Augustine, even Galileo - but people like you think you know better, that science has "proven" that there is no God. Unfortunately, science has said nothing, and indeed can say nothing, about the ultimate Truth of creation. You make me sick.

  • hrm. i'm not sure where in that post i belittled those who have faith. But frankly, i do think most believers have the emotional IQ of a rock, however.

    BTW - i DO belittle most christians. As do i belittle most people who have been "abducted by aliens" and those who believe in the tooth fairy. same principle applies.

    one other thing: tell you benevolent god that i want my fucking dog back!


    FluX
    After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
  • by fantomas ( 94850 ) on Thursday November 23, 2000 @02:53AM (#605521)

    Think laterally here folks!

    This is a very useful, very important use for the internet. You are looking at very high resolution images across the internet of a unique book.

    OK so this may not be big news for folks whose idea of important books are the latest O'Reilly's a whole 30 minutes away in your nearest bookshop.But for historians, academics, subject specialists, this means potential desktop access to a whole library of significant works that could previously only be accessed by flying 3000 miles to see. Not all of these have been previously accessible via high resolution facsimile copies, and besides, the facsimile copies that do exist are often very expensive themselves and rare enough (they don't do Harry Potter style print runs of 12th century works...)

    This is very good news for historians.

  • Sometimes you whore the Karma, sometimes the Karma's whored from you. All part of the natural balance of the universe.

    Hell, if I hadn't already posted, I'd moderate you up out of principle. As well as the "Jingle Bells" song and the "torso plate" story.

    Damn, why is all the best stuff relegated to '-1'?
  • The new reading room of the British Library is actually quite nice to use, and the old one was too cramped in the middle of the British Museum. The construction project may have been mishandled and could have been better specified, but the end result is pretty impressive inside.

    The problem is that there is no public access to the library. To get a readers card you need to demonstrate a need for it - which means access is generally limited to academics, postgraduate students, and undergraduates studying with the Open University.

    Putting the Guttenberg Bible online is a good thing - shows what can be done, and gets good publicity for the British Library.

    Also there would be copyright issues with converting hundreds of thousands of books - the greatest demand would be for modern texts, but the only ones that could be converted are the older ones. Great for the arts and historians but possibly difficult to justify the cost if they are accessed rarely.

  • Remember, work on the British Library began in the late 80's, well before the Internet was popular.

    Yeah, I'm gonna pay £4.80 to travel on the underground to go read a book, right
    If you're an academic, and the British Library is the only place to find some work of reference, or other, then its quite likely you'll pay.

    As for location, you have to put it somewhere and, given its proximity to so many universities, UCL in particular, its current location is probably pretty good. Until its stock is available online, anyway.
  • But the devil did take that work and offer up VBscript as an alternative.

  • It should be out at the time of the rapture. I read about it's release. The book is mentioned in the Bible. It's called The Book of Life. I for one will be checking it out!
  • I'm not passing judgement, just saying the teaching of the Bible is usually a bit more sugar coated than the plain book.
  • The Bible forms the basic underpinning of western european thought. In it are contained the seeds of our culture, our way of perceiving the world, and the basis of our ethics and morals. No one book has had more effect on where we are today than this one.

    Technologicaly the Gutenberg Bible represents the first step in mass public disemmination of information that that ultimately lead to the internet. Think of it as a religious floppy disk. Previously, Bibles were labouriously hand copied and could not be distributed widely, much like HD's. The Gutenberg and more importantly its printed descendants, could be sneaker netted across the known world relatively easily.

    Philosophically, the Gutenberg Bible is important because it is free as in speech. It began the process of opening the Word of God to examination by others than the clergy. Did this cause the reformation? Maybe not, but it certainly contributed. From the Reformation, come the Protestants, from the Protestants, Capitalism and modern democracy whether or not these are good things I leave up to you to decide.

    To have this on the net for everyone to see is simply amazing.

    Just to state my biases, I am Pagan not Christian, but I still maintain the Bible is the most important work in the Western canon.

  • I agree Church and State should be kept apart. I didn't realise what it was like in the US... here in the UK it doesn't seem to be so much of an issue.
    But a coziness between church and state is good for the state and bad for the church (GK Chesterton). The church can never acheive its aims through politics anyway, Jesus certainly didn't do it that way, and I certainly can't imagine any government enacting the set of laws that Jesus sets out in the Sermon on the Mount! :-) (Matthew 5-7. The Bible)

    Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth... etc etc [gospelcom.net]

    Hey, maybe some of those screaming protestant fundamentalists should try reading some of it ;-)

    But seriously though, in a democracy of course everybody should have a voice, so every religious group has a right to speak out. Though I think Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement is a good example of how the church should be involved in politics ie. tackling real issues with grace, humility, love and coutesy.


  • History's greatest thinkers have all seen the Truth that the Bible contains - Newton, St Augustine, even Galileo - but people like you think you know better, that science has "proven" that there is no God

    Most of history's greatest thinkers believed there was a god because they were raised to believe there was a god. In their time, belief in god was not only common, it was assumed (BTW - Augustine is a REALLY bad example as he was himself a man of the cloth, so there's a general conflict of interest). I, too, believed there was a god for quite a number of years before waking up one day and realizing that i had absolutely no proof whatsoever (not even circumstantial evidence) that there was a god.

    FYI - a number of history's greatest thinkers also believed that there was no god. Sagan was a perfect example.

    So the question becomes - what undeniable truth do you have to offer the world that a god does, in fact, exist? Surely it can't be the arguments brought to bear by Aquinas or Augustine - these arguments are easily refuted by even the simplest musings of someone like Hume. (yes, athiests can read - and do quite frequently).

    The fact of the matter is - you can offer no proof whatsoever. I should know, i've looked. And furthermore, it does not fall upon science to disprove the existance of god. It falls upon believers to PROVE the existance of such a deity. If I were to convey my belief about a race of 10,000 foot tall lizard-people who created the universe, and still roam the earth (although they are invisible) - you would call me crazy.

    my question: can you prove they don't exist?

    no? then by following your logic - they MUST exist.


    FluX
    After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
  • by eap ( 91469 )
    You mean the British already have the Gutenberg Bible?! That's a +10% Science bonus!

    We must sign a permanent alliance with the Germans or the Aztecs if we are to have any hope of defeating the evil British.

  • Since we're invited to share our biases, I consider the Reformation to be on of the bad consequences of the invention of the printing press, just like spam and Natalie Portman trolls are the annoying outcome of the advent of the Internet.
    --
  • People stopped replying to my sig. So I changed it...

    "May He who is without .sig throw the first exception"

  • and that lives in or near New Haven, CT can visit the Beinecke library at Yale. It's their rare book and manuscript library. The have a copy of the Guttenberg, as well as the Voynich Manuscript (hailed as the most mysterious document in the world; one of the greatest unsolved cryptographs/possible hoaxes), and tons of other really rare, and really interesting stuff.

    http://www.research.att.com/~reeds/voynich.html

    this is a good starting point, and has a link to the beinecke as well, so you can browse the collection

  • ... but I find it hard to read more than 5 pages of an online novel without having at least a couple of coffee breaks. Printing the damn thing doesn't make things easier either: carrying around a jillion of loose papers you drop all over the place and arrange in random order when you pick them up is quite painful too (not to mention the painful process of actually printing it).

    However, you, of course, don't have to read the whole thing from page to page. This is a sweet link to have bookmarked when some jerk on irc claims he is quoting "Matteus 5:1" or whatever.

  • Shh... Don't feed the troll, the sign says.
    --
  • And on the 8th day, he created HTML, and he saw that it was good.

    Amen.
  • jis' be glad it wiznae a Jon Katz post ...
    --
    Remove Me-Kilt
  • Sorry, that should have been:

    And on the 8th day, He created HTML, and He saw that it was good.


  • A few years back I wrote a column on the Gutenberg Bible and the parallels it had with the birth of the Internet. Poor Gutenberg was plagued by back-stabbling VCs, and short-sided employees. Story is here [joabj.com]
  • > > the first major bible printed in the West available online
    > Uhh? The Bible Gateway has dozens of major Bibles available online

    I think you miss the point: *major* bible.

    This is just about the most major bible ever created - online versions of modern translations do not count as major when compared to Gutenberg's bible - after all, Gutenberg's invention of printing has to count as one of the most important developments in the history of Western civilization.
  • by afc ( 12569 )
    This just goes to show how essential punctuation is for the understandin of text, even when that text is as content-free as Slashdot posts go.
    --
  • by H*rus ( 237994 ) on Thursday November 23, 2000 @01:54AM (#605543) Homepage
    Cool, now I can bring my laptop to church

    Mark [zwienenberg.com]
    "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
  • ... but I find it hard to read more than 5 pages of an online novel without having at least a couple of coffee breaks

    When electronic books become cheaper and more widespread this will cease to be a problem.
    They have the portability of mobile web access (wap, i-mode etc) with the readability of a traditional book.

    The book readers that are slowly becoming available have backlit display, are virtually indestructable (i.e. in moments of boredum you throw them at your collegues) and allow you to download new books or journals to them as you see fit.

    Of course unlike a traditional book or newspaper content will be able to be updated....

  • by belbo ( 11799 ) on Thursday November 23, 2000 @02:27AM (#605548)
    The Background page [prodigi.bl.uk] has some interesting remarks:

    While producing the Bible, Gutenberg's team learned fast about the economy of printing. This is reflected in differences between various copies of the Bible.

    Three major changes of plan can be detected :

    1.It was first envisaged that rubrics should be printed in red. This was soon abandoned, perhaps to save time.

    2.It was decided to increase the number of lines per page, presumably to save paper.

    3.It was decided to increase the print-run, but as some sheets had already been printed in the number first envisaged, these pages had to be printed again. This is the best explanation for why a number of the pages exist in two different versions.

    Times haven't changed that much, now have they?

    --

  • It pays to have a good press agent. Printing actually goes back to about 800 AD in China and Korea. Guttenburg also printed on small item before this Bible (a hymnal). Slightly more than half the issue was on vellum. The paper ones were considered to be the inferior copies. The decorations you see on these were added after the printing process was dome.
  • by cfish ( 61161 ) on Thursday November 23, 2000 @07:26AM (#605570)
    Chinese invented exposive powder and created fireworks.

    Westerners got thier hands on these powders and started to make weapons and started war.

    So, who failed to use it effectively?

Let's organize this thing and take all the fun out of it.

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