Who made first Bible in book form?

Answer 1

It is not known who made the first Bible in book (or 'folio') form, but it is believed to be before the !st century AD. This is because The Bible is made up of separate Books, and each book was originally hand-written on its own individual scroll. However, they were unwieldy and impractical for personal use, especially when multiple scrolls were involved. For greater practical use and portability, scrolls was hand- copied onto the (many) individual sheets of parchment required, and these were then bound together in folio form, ie just like a modern book with individual pages.

This book-making was even more time-consuming and laborious than that of scrolls, so it could therefore be afforded only by the rich or those who had rich benefactors, but by the end of the 1st Century AD it was increasingly-common for rich people and their churches to have their own copies of the Scriptures.

The Apostle Paul certainly did, and some commentators (such as Adam Clarke) have conjectured that by 'books' he meant the Septuagint (ie the Greek copy of the Hebrew Scriptures) while the parchments comprised his letters :-

2Ti 4:13 Bring the cloak that I left at Troas with Carpus when you come, and the books, especially the parchments.

In Medieval times these Bibles developed to become works of art, with multi-coloured inks, being highly-elaborate, with much decoration, and many paintings, but they were still all printed by hand.

The first Bible in book form, printed with moveable metal type, was the 'Gutenberg Bible' (sometimes called the 'Mazarin' Bible) about 1455 [the exact printing date is unknown]. In his book "Dictionary of World Biography" Barry Jones describes it as

...a magnificent edition (in Latin) of 1282 folio pages in double columns, each of 42 lines of Gothic type, decorated by coloured woodcuts in the margin.