Welcome to five minutes in church history hosted by Dr Stephen Nichols, where we take a little

break from the present to go exploring the past. Travel back in time as we look at the people,

events, and even the places that have shaped the story of Christianity.

This is our story, our family history. Let's get started.

Let's start with the quiz. This will be a very simple quiz. There will only be one

question. In which year was the first Bible printed in America?

Now, you could have guessed three different years and you'd be right.

The first year we'll look at in 1663 on the very first printing press in the colonies

and this was not a printing press that was built here, it was built in England and was transported by ship and arrived there in Massachusetts Bay Colony and was set up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and under the guiding hands of Samuel Green and Marmaduke

Johnson, the printers, this book was published.

It was entitled The Holy Bible, containing the Old Testament and the new translated into the Indian

language. The Indian language referred to was the Algonquin language and this was done by the efforts of

John Elliot. John Elliot is known as the Apostle to the Indians. He was one who

had worked on the Baysalm Salter. He had translated a number of smaller

pieces of scripture into the Indian language, but in the 1660s he devoted all of his effort

to translating the Bible and in 1663 the Algonquin Bible was the very first Bible to be printed on American soil.

It would not be until 120 years later that an English Bible was printed, but in between

there there was the first German Bible. In 1743, Christopher Sauer saw 1,200 copies of Luther's

edition of the German Bible come off his printing press in Efreta, Pennsylvania.

Sauer was an immigrant.

He had grown up near Heidelberg.

His father was a minister in the Reformed Church, and he migrated to Philadelphia and set up a printing press there

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