Americans don’t dwell on anything for long. Once Thanksgiving is past, it’s on to Christmas. In fact, we go from Halloween straight to Santa Claus, at least in the marketplace.
So let’s back up a little, for the five minutes it takes to read this column, and look at this country’s beginnings.
The pilgrims — back then called Separatists, having separated from the Church of England — left their home country for Holland in 1608 for purely religious reasons.
They landed in North America 12 years later, looking for a good place for their brand of Christianity to grow.
Although the King James version had been in print since 1611, the Bible they used was the Geneva Bible, which had been around for 60 years and translated the Scriptures in a way more suited to the Puritan point of view.
You have to fast-forward to 1663 before the Bible was printed in British North America, and it wasn’t in English.
It was John Eliot’s translation in the Algonquin Indian language, printed in Cambridge, Mass. The British government forbade the publication of a Bible in English in the colonies.
The American Revolution opened the door for Robert Aitken, a Philadelphia printer, who published the New Testament in English in 1777 and the whole Bible in 1782.
It was a 4-by-6-inch King James Version with this inscription on the title page:
“PHILADELPHIA: Printed and Sold by R. AITKEN, at Pope’s Head, Three Doors above the Coffee House, in Market Street.”
The “Coffee House” was a meeting place for newspapermen of the day and for the Sons of Liberty, famous for their role in the break from England.
The Aitken Bible is one of the world’s rarest books, with 30 to 40 copies still in existence (compared to 48 copies of the 1455 Gutenberg Bible).
But what intrigues me about it is what follows the title page.
Aitken had sought funding and approval from the U.S. Congress to publish his Bible.
Congress didn’t provide any money, but its resolution printed at the front of the Bible sheds valuable light on the attitude of the nation’s founders toward the church-state question.
“Resolved, that the United States in Congress assembled highly approve the pious and laudable undertaking of Mr. Aitken, as subservient to the interest of religion, as well as an influence of the progress of arts in this country, and being satisfied … of his care and accuracy in the execution of the work, they recommend this edition of the Bible to the inhabitants of the United States.”
According to the Manhattan Rare Book Co., George Washington regretted that he couldn’t give the Aitken Bible to his troops before the war ended.
He wrote, “It would have pleased me well if Congress had been pleased to make such an important present to the brave fellows who have done so much for the security of their country’s rights and establishment.”
You can buy an original copy of the Aitken Bible for $149,000 at www.great site.com, or you can get a reproduction copy like mine at the same place for $149.
This Thanksgiving, I was grateful for our freedom of religion but wary of the misguided attempts to squelch it.
Now we move on to Christmas, which needs its own defense against those who want to dispose of its true meaning.