Two calendar events fall on October 31. You probably know about Halloween. It gets lots of attention. But not everyone has heard about Reformation Day. This October 31st will mark 507 years since the start of the Protestant Reformation.
What is the Reformation and why is it important? The Protestant Reformation came about with the help of an invention: the movable type printing press. To understand how it fits into this story, we need to head to Mainz, Germany. That’s the birthplace of a man named Johannes Gutenberg.
No one knows much about Gutenberg’s background. They don’t even know what he looked like. If you see a painting of Gutenberg, the artist was probably guessing. Historians do know that Gutenberg was an entrepreneur who saw an opportunity to make bookmaking easier.
Before Gutenberg came on the scene, people hired scribes to copy out every single word by hand. So books were rare and incredibly expensive. There were other printers before Gutenberg, but they weren’t very efficient. European printers used a method called block printing. This involved carving words onto a large block of wood, smearing the block with ink, and pressing paper onto the wood. Just one typo, and the printer would scrap the entire block and start again.
With an investor’s help, Gutenberg invented a new kind of press around 1450. It had slots for words made from metal letters that could be switched around, like Scrabble tiles. This was called “movable type.”
About a year after developing his first prototype, Gutenberg printed a Latin version of the Bible called the Vulgate. Each of more than 1,282 pages in these Bibles had 42 lines. He printed 180 copies. Only 49 remain. The Gutenberg Museum in Mainz, Germany, has two of those Bibles.
Gutenberg’s design sparked a revolution. For the first time, people without much money could buy books. That gave common folk a reason to learn to read. If Gutenberg hadn’t come along, you might not be reading this magazine.
And you likely wouldn’t own a copy of the Bible. In 1466, Johannes Mentelin used Gutenberg’s movable type design to print a Bible in German. That was the first time that a complete Bible had been printed in a language besides Latin.
Before that, people depended on the Roman Catholic Church’s teaching about the Bible since very few people spoke Latin. It was hard to know the teaching was truthful. But soon, people could study Bibles in their own languages. That led many to leave the Catholic Church during the Protestant Reformation.
And it wouldn’t have been possible without Johannes Gutenberg.
by Bekah McCallum in Duluth, Georgia
Why? Without Gutenberg’s printing press, people like you and me probably wouldn’t have our own copies of God’s word.
For more about the printing press, read Johann Gutenburg and the Printing Press by Kay Melchisedech Olson in our Recommended Reading.
