Students from Seminary of the Southwest made a visit to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin on October 2, 2026. This is an annual field trip arranged by Southwest professor Dr. Steve Bishop, Associate Professor of Old Testament. Seminarians enjoyed an informative tour of early Bibles and related manuscripts by Julia O’Keefe, Head of Instruction & Archival Engagement, Harry Ransom Center.
Resources presented included manuscripts, Christian scriptures produced before the invention of moveable type, significant early printed Bibles, and three bon mots: a hand written commentary of a psalm by Isaac Newton, a 1692 copy of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, an early Chinese wood block print of the gospel of Matthew. Among the several important editions of the Bible examined were a page from the Gutenberg Bible (1455), a copy of the first printed full English translation of the Bible by Miles Coverdale (1535-1537), the first complete Spanish Bible (La Biblia Reina-Valera 1569), a first edition of the 1611 Authorized Version (King James), an Ethiopian Bible in a unique Ge’ez typeface, a Douay-Reims Catholic New Testament (1582), and a Biblia sacra polyglottal (The Plantin Polyglot Bible). Students were also fascinated by an early wood block printed Chinese Bible.
The Ransom Center’s large collection of religious texts, particularly those related to Christianity and Judaism, offer a wealth of resources to the seminary’s students, and the Bible faculty of Seminary of the Southwest have been offering this extracurricular event annually for two decades.