The oldest printed Finnish there is. When Mikael Agricola published Se Wsi Testamenti in 1548, Finnish had almost never been set in type — his own ABC-book of a few years earlier was the first Finnish book at all. Between the two came the prayer book of 1544 — a substantial volume, and one that already carried psalm translations. To print scripture he first had to decide how the language should be written, and the decisions he made — the spelling, the loan words, the cadence — are where written Finnish begins. The New Testament took him and his Turku circle over a decade; the Psalter followed in 1551, and selections from the prophets and the books of Moses in 1551 and 1552.
He never translated the whole Bible, and this reader does not pretend otherwise. The New Testament and all 150 psalms are complete; the prophets and the books of Moses appear in selection. What he rendered elsewhere is here too: his prayer book of 1544 and his Käsikirja and Messu of 1549 carry Bible text of their own — among it the chapters of Genesis printed under the heading "Genesist mutomat Lughut" — and 685 verses come from there. They are used only where the scripture volumes have no verse at that address, and only where the text runs continuously rather than standing as a single quotation inside a prayer. So Genesis is here after all, in part: chapters 1–4, 22, 28 and 32. Judges, Ruth, 1 Chronicles and Esther are absent altogether. A complete Finnish Old Testament had to wait for the Biblia of 1642, one rung up the chain.
In this reader Agricola is the oldest Finnish rung. Open one rung beneath a Biblia 1642 verse and his text appears beside Luther's German — the two sources the 1642 committee actually had open. Beneath Agricola himself the chain leaves Finnish for good: he worked from Erasmus's Greek and from the Latin Erasmus printed beside it, from Luther's German and from the Vulgate. Three of those are recorded here as his parents; Erasmus's Latin, and the Swedish Bible of Gustav Vasa of 1541 which he also used, are not in this corpus. The text is the Kotus VKS corpus's, in the 1548 printing's own spelling: "Algusa oli Sana / Ja se Sana oli Jumalan tykene".