SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Here's a real-life mystery for you. A small-town Texas librarian finds a musty, old Bible and soon realizes it is unlike any she's ever seen. It's hundreds of years old and written in a familiar but dead language. Texas Public Radio's Jack Morgan picks up the story from here.
JACK MORGAN, BYLINE: First off, the town is Boerne, about 20 miles northwest of San Antonio, founded by German immigrants in 1849. It has the oldest oompah band outside of Germany. But this upscale town's library also holds a rare Bible. There's a lot they know about the Bible, but it also holds a secret that no one's been able to crack - how it got there. Elisa McCune knows the Bible well. She wrote her Master's thesis on it.
ELISA MCCUNE: It was a 1614 Low German Bible. But it was rare and that - we have only one of seven copies in the world.
MORGAN: Low German was essentially the common man's German.
MCCUNE: Low German, I think, was kind of considered to be maybe less sophisticated version of German. But High German, essentially, was what turned into what modern-day German is.
MORGAN: The Bible is 12 1/2 pounds and 4 inches thick. Imagine its journey, six to eight weeks on a sailing ship, and then a week on horseback to Boerne from Galveston. Finding its age was simple because publishing info is printed in the Bible itself. Hans Stern published it in 1614.
MCCUNE: And in fact, the Hans Stern publishing house is still in operation today or was at the time that I wrote my dissertation in 2012.
MORGAN: The Stern publishing company still prints Bibles in Luneburg 411 years later. The significance of the 1614 Bible goes beyond its age, though. Most predecessors were printed in Latin. In a sense, printing this Bible in Low German was the first step that would eventually lead to reading for reasons other than religious ones.
MCCUNE: The whole idea of having books that people read for pleasure - eventually you get there, but it all kind of starts with people making Bibles in the vernacular versus in Latin.
MORGAN: When found, Boerne's Bible was in rough shape, so it was sent to an expert who repaired the cover and 20 of its first pages that were highly damaged. Here's Boerne Public Library's Robin Stauber.
ROBIN STAUBER: The Bible came back to the library. A case was created for it, and so it was on display from then on until recently, when we sent it off to the University of North Texas to get digitized.
MORGAN: By early fall, it will be accessible in ways it's never been before.
STAUBER: They are meta tagging it, so they are developing code words and searchable items. And then once they put all that together, it will be online at The Portal to Texas History.
MORGAN: Another factor to consider - this isn't a Bible for personal contemplation. It's huge. Elisa McCune.
MCCUNE: It would not be comfortable to sit with in your lap for a long time. It would probably have been displayed on, like, a lectern at a church, for example.
MORGAN: And that brings us to the name scrawled inside the cover.
STAUBER: It has the name Johan Schwarting. It also has a date of 1660, so that's really great.
MORGAN: 1660 is almost 200 years before any Germans lived in Boerne. So did the Schwartings bring it here?
STAUBER: I've done some digging, and I have not found any evidence of a member of the Schwarting family in Boerne proper. It's very likely that it was brought over from Germany by a member of this family, but it could have been a daughter or somebody who ended up with a different last name.
MORGAN: We may never know who brought the Boerne Bible here, but maybe its digitized contents accessible worldwide will open a portal that didn't exist in the misty past. For NPR News, I'm Jack Morgan in Boerne, Texas.
(SOUNDBITE OF RHIAN SHEEHAN'S "LA BOITE A MUSIQUE") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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