Four Languages on One Page, and a Cardinal's Fortune Behind It

Cardinal Francisco Jimenez de Cisneros, confessor to Queen Isabella of Castile and one of the most powerful churchmen in Spain, spent a fortune and the better part of a decade on a single publishing project: a printed Bible that set the Hebrew, Latin and Greek texts of the Old Testament side by side on the same page, with an Aramaic Targum running alongside the Pentateuch, and the Greek and Latin New Testament in parallel in a further volume. No printed book had ever attempted anything at this scale before. Cisneros assembled a team of scholars fluent across the languages involved, founded a new university at Alcala de Henares partly to house the project, and had the printer Arnao Guillen de Brocar produce six volumes between 1514 and 1517 that included the first printed Greek New Testament and the first printed complete Greek Septuagint the world had seen.

The scale of the ambition is easy to underestimate now, when parallel-text editions are unremarkable. In 1514, sourcing reliable Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic manuscripts, training printers to set three or four different scripts accurately on facing columns, and funding the whole enterprise privately required resources only a figure with Cisneros's combination of wealth, institutional power and personal conviction could marshal. The result stood for generations as the reference standard for serious biblical scholarship working across the original languages, even though its own publication was delayed for years after the printing itself was finished.