H-195. Transmission of the Bible from the Beginnings to 1500
Peter Toth
Course Length: 30 hours
Course Week: 30 June–4 July 2025
Format: in person, Oxford University in Oxford, UK
Fee: $1,495
Probably no other book has had a deeper and more wide-reaching impact on human culture and history than the collection of sacred texts we know today as the Bible. Billions of people across the world have read or may even possess a printed copy of these texts, but not many of us know the incredible stories behind our modern pocket bibles. It is this gap that the present course is set to fill by exploring the history and development of “the Bible.”
Taking place at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, the sessions will draw heavily on the riches of the historic collections in Oxford, inviting participants to a journey of several millennia to explore the evolution of the Bible. Starting with the genesis and transmission of the Hebrew Bible and then the New Testament, surveying the rich array of various translations and adaptations of the texts in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, the course will close with a brief survey of the first printed editions of the biblical books.
The course will focus mainly on the evolution of the Christian Bible and its content from the beginnings up to the Middle Ages, with only a short detour about early printed versions at the end. In this sense, it breaks off where H-105 begins, thus serving as a pair with and also as an introduction to that one. Topics will include transmission and transformation of Biblical texts, especially of the New Testament, with a special emphasis on translations and the impact of copying and of reading the Bible on book history.
Teaching will be in two parts: The mornings will feature lectures on the history of the biblical texts, while afternoons will have presentations of manuscripts, papyri, early printed books, and other collection items at the Bodleian and elsewhere in Oxford, thereby illustrating the topics discussed in the mornings. No prior knowledge is required, but it will be helpful in advance to brush up your knowledge of the content of the Bible.
The course is useful for librarians and curators who are not specialists in the field but would like to gain familiarity with the main witnesses of the Old and the New Testament and an ability to recognize and understand the various versions of the Bible. Participants in this course will gain insight into the complicated but adventurous history of how the Bible, as we have it today, came together.
Course History
Faculty
Peter Toth
Peter Toth earned his M.A. in Egyptology and Classics and his Ph.D. in Classics at the University of Budapest. After a ten-year curatorship of medieval manuscripts at the University Library Budapest, he had various research projects at The Warburg Institute and King’s College London. Between 2016 and 2024, he was Curator of Ancient and Medieval Manuscripts at the British Library, responsible for Codex Sinaiticus and all biblical manuscripts in the collection. As of 2024, he works at the Bodleian Library, as the Cornelia Starks Curator of Greek Collections. His main interest is in Classical and Medieval cultural interaction via translations of texts and ideas from one language and tradition to the other. Besides editions and studies of various Latin, Greek, and Syriac texts, his research sheds new light on the origin of texts like the Letters of St. Anthony of Egypt or the Pseudo-Bonaventurean Meditationes Vitae Christi. He has curated a number of exhibitions and displays, and has run various courses and presentations at the British Library and Oxford alike.
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