Among the manuscripts left by Earl C. Davis were a large collection of manuscripts that concerned various aspects of the history of the Bible. A number of these were organized into numbered lectures. Unfortunately, these did not include lectures 1 and 2. One manuscript, which curiously begins with “Results,” could be the basis for Lecture 1. It introduces the idea that “the Bible” is not a fully finished final document revealed as Scripture at birth, but rather is a text with a long history of creation, and, in particular with the English Bible, a long history tied to translation. This leads quite naturally to another manuscript, which starts with a question about the challenges of translation and moves from there into details about the challenges of “textual criticism.” I believe this could be lecture 2. And this lecture in turn leads into a manuscript identified as “lecture 3” that delves into detail on modern (c. 1900) textual criticism.

To complicate matters, in addition to the manuscript that begins with “Results,” were several other separate manuscripts, all of which deal with various aspects to the history of the translation and birth of the English Bible.
(1) “Septuagint”
(2) “Historical Setting of the Translation,” which includes two pages of important dates
(3) “John Wycliffe”
(4) “Tyndale”
(5) “Coverdale’s Bible”
(6) “Important Dates”
(7) “Outline of Points on the English Bible”

I have assembled these disparate manuscripts into a single narrative. This clearly is not the lecture Davis wrote. But it does bring together in a sensible way these various manuscripts.

Here is my created “Lecture I: The English Bible:”

16Lecture1OriginsOfTheBible1916Transcribed

Here are scans of the various documents that I have assembled together into this lecture:

16Lecture1OriginsOfTheBible1916 Septuagint Sec4HistoricalSetting Sec5Wycliffe Sec7Coverdale ImportantDates