The history of the earliest Czech translation of the Bible begins in the 18th century´s last quarter by first studies about the Old Czech translation of the Bible by V. F. Durych and J. Dobrovský and it ends in springtime 2010 by publishing the last volume of the critical edition Staročeská Bible drážďanská a olomoucká (Old Czech Bible of Dresden and Olomouc). It took nearly 30 years to publish the complete edition.
The history of the earliest Czech translation of the Bible begins in the 18th century´s last quarter by first studies about the Old Czech translation of the Bible by V. F. Durych and J. Dobrovský and it ends in springtime 2010 by publishing the last volume of the critical edition Staročeská Bible drážďanská a olomoucká (Old Czech Bible of Dresden and Olomouc). It took nearly 30 years to publish the complete edition.
Václav Koranda the Younger (1422-1516) was a traditional Utraquist, who carried on the thinking and the struggle of the Rokycana era whereby the Church offered communion under both kinds. He never moved outside the world of ideas derived from his university education, but at the same time he was strongly influenced by the growing Hussite tradition, seeing the focus of the truth revealed by Christ in the chalice and in other peculiarities of the Utraquist church. The finding of the Krnov Bible moves our knowledge of Koranda's conception of Scripture and of his then common knowledge of biblical exegesis and work with traditional aids for interpreting the Bible. This enables us to conceive Koranda's work with Holy Scripture and his understanding of the Bible as a whole through the interpretational key of "the eternal truth of Jesus Christ".
The Krnov Town Museum collections include two medieval manuscripts – a Latin Bible and a German gospel postilla by Nikolaus von Dinkelbühl. Neither manuscript has previously been known to specialist circles. The Bible contains the text of the Latin Vulgate with prologues on most books of the Bible, and it was completed in 1433 by an unknown scribe. From the ownership notes and monograms it was possible to ascertain that its owner was in the second half of the fifteenth century the administrator of the Utraquist Consistory and Chancellor of Prague University Václav Koranda the Younger. The number of manuscripts known today preserved from Koranda's library has come to forty. The Bible was acquired by the museum collections from the Minorite Monastery Library in Krnov in the early 1950s. The second medieval manuscript is the German gospel postilla by Nikolaus von Dinkelsbühl, which is the only known example of this work housed in Czech libraries.