The Complutensian Polyglot Bible

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.

History does not always reward the team that finishes first. Cardinal Cisneros's scholars completed the printing of the Complutensian Polyglot's New Testament volume, the first Greek New Testament ever set in type, in 1514, a full two years before Erasmus's rival edition appeared in Basel. But finishing the print run was not the same as publishing the book. Cisneros, a careful and institutionally minded churchman, held the completed volumes back to seek formal papal approval before releasing them for sale and circulation, a process that dragged on for years and did not conclude until 1520, with the full six-volume Bible not actually reaching booksellers and scholars until 1522.

Erasmus and his publisher Johann Froben felt no such obligation to wait, and their comparatively rushed, cheaper edition reached the market in 1516, four years before the Complutensian New Testament its makers had finished printing years earlier. That gap let Erasmus's edition establish itself first among reformers and translators across Europe, becoming the working Greek text behind Luther's and Tyndale's vernacular Bibles before Cisneros's more carefully prepared edition had even been released for sale. The Complutensian Polyglot remains, by any technical measure, the more meticulous scholarly achievement of the two; it simply lost the race that mattered for influence, a race its own patron's caution helped it lose.