Cotton Mather (1663–1728) was a New England minister and scholar who holds the record for the most imprints of an early American writer: he published something more than four hundred editions of his books and pamphlets. One book that Mather never got published, though, was his massive commentary on the Bible. Mather’s Biblia Americana exists in six folio manuscript volumes at the Massachusetts Historical Society. Now an editorial team led by Reiner Smolinski will be publishing the Biblia Americana in ten volumes. The first volume, covering Mather’s commentary on Genesis, will be published in August 2010 by Baker Academic. That one volume will be 1,400 pages, which gives you some idea of the project’s scope. The best source for more information is the project’s website.

Mather’s Biblia will be a tremendous scholarly resource for historians, theologians, and literary scholars when it’s published. Even better, there are plans for an online edition once the print volumes are out.

It’s worth noting too that Jonathan Edwards’s Blank Bible, which was a similar biblical commentary, is available online with introductory essays from the amazing Works of Jonathan Edwards Online, published by the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale University.

Thanks to a Religion in America reader who sent me notes from a recent talk at Yale’s Beinecke Library about Cotton Mather’s Biblia Americana.

Religion in America’s very own Paul Matzko has been accepted as a PhD student at Penn State, where he will continue his study of the history of religion. He will also be serving as a research assistant for Philip Jenkins and Thomas Kidd. Congratulations, Paul!

I recently wrote a blog post about Charles M. Sheldon’s 1897 bestseller, In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do? The focus of the post is on copyright law, not religious history, so I didn’t post it here. Readers of Religion in America may still be interested.

“What Would Jesus Do?”: A Parable About Copyright

Alfred O. Hero, American Religious Groups View Foreign Policy: Trends in Rank-and-File Opinion, 1937-1969 Durham, NC: Duke University, 1973. 552 pages. ISBN: 0822302535 Read the rest of this entry »