Actually, it’s almost exactly the other way around. The Gutenberg Bible may be famous as the first thing printed but publishing exploded in the second half of the fifteenth century across all genres.

The competition was intense and with no copyright law, it was a race to find and publish as many works as possible before they were picked up by competitors and copies flooded the market. In order to keep the presses profitable the printers published tons of material that went against Church doctrine. Anti-Church material was often the most profitable because the printers didn’t have to pay the authors for the content. The printers were driven by economics and the Church couldn’t reign them in.

The first copyright laws established regional monopolies so that printers could be controlled for the benefit of God and country but governments did it by freeing them from the laissez fare competition that dominated the early printing industry. By giving printers exclusive rights and banning foreign copies, governments created stable revenue streams for the printers so that they had the option of saying “no” to new authors. The Church exploited “for the economy” rhetoric from the beginning.

The Wiki article is something I wish I had time to edit. Yes, there was an attempt to ensure that the right sort of thing be printed, but it was also about making sure that no one else could print certain documents. You'd license a bible text to be able to regulate that it's the correct type of bible being printed, yes. You'd then see who else was printing bibles and shut them down. Okay, that's all correct, but there's more to its foundation than that. For example, in the UK, one individual had the sole right to profit off the last testaments of people to be hanged in Newgate Prison. In the 17th C, Parliament gave this power was to a preacher who in turn designated a specific printer. That power is what allowed the preacher (and the printer) to profit: no one could (legally) copy it. Regulating printers was the only way to ensure profit for an author and it was an attempt to guarantee conformity.

I don't think anyone has ever asserted copyright on the bible. I'm not quite sure what you're talking about? As for pamphlets, copyright can never prevent you from printing something that you created.

I'll have to brush up on my history of the protestant reformation, but I'm under the impression that for a very long time the church had a monopoly on people with enough dedication and support to sit around copying books by hand. There was no need for copyright law because it was totally legal to kick the rabble rousers out of the monastery for any old reason.

In this way, the church had been asserting copyright on the Bible for hundreds of years. It wasn't until the invention of the printing press that they needed a law for it.

It's easy to find legal text today that says it's for one thing but if you're in the know it's clear that its purpose--the side effect without which it wouldn't exist--is unstated or hidden. I'm skeptical that our picture of the 1700's is good enough to solve the same puzzle that far in retrospect, but my hypothesis is that if it was, we'd find things were a bit less about protecting authors economically than a surface-level read would lead us to believe.

There are some interesting vestiges of the origin of copyright, still floating around in contemporary legal systems.

In the UK, and in other countries patterned after the UK constitution, works of the government are technically under royal prerogative. It's usually called "Crown copyright" but it isn't regulated by normal copyright law. Traditionally, the monarch reserved the right to ensure that laws were duplicated exactly, etc. It's the inherent right of the monarch, and that right has never actually been explicitly curtailed by law. For example, Canada's Copyright Act has a clause, asserting the Act does not curtail any rights or privileges of the Crown.

It's probably the purest form of "intellectual property" that exists. Anything the Crown creates is under Crown copyright. The copyright term is forever. There is no fair use or fair dealing with Crown copyrighted works. [1] The justification for the copyright is not derived from statute but, within the legal conceit we're working with here anyway, rather literally from God and traditional since time immemorial.

Speaking of which, The King James Bible is still under Crown copyright in the United Kingdom. James I paid for it and his heirs insist on their due. The Crown issued letters patent to several printers, those letters were acquired and now Cambridge University Press has the right to print the KJV Bible in England. It's one of the very few letters patent to somehow slip through the 19th and 20th century overhauls; nearly all have been abolished by acts of legislation.

Letters patent are the granting of an office or title or right or property by the state to an individual. The granting of such rights was historically, also another royal prerogative. Scope-limited monopolies were very common. A monopoly on farming salt on a particular beach. A monopoly on collecting taxes in a particular county. A monopoly on dying wool a certain colour in a particular town. Such letters were considered a form of property by the courts, and they could in some cases be traded.

This is, as I understand it, largely the intellectual/legal origin of modern copyright in the Anglo-American tradition. It was, at first, not focused on the work, the text, so much as the economic right of a printer, to have a monopoly on a specific work, and to not have that right infringed with unseemly competition. As more and more letters patent regarding printing were issued, it eventually became formalized and then regulated by statute, taking it out of the Crown's arbitrary hands. At the same time (I think we're at about 1750 AD now?) the proliferation of printing started reducing the economic significance of the book itself vs. the contents of the book, and we started to think more about the author than the printer.

[1] Of course, practically speaking, in modern times, the Crown has issued various directives over the years, culminating in a whole department to manage Crown copyrighted works, and it's policy that verbatim duplication and etc. of laws are just fine. But very technically, that privilege could be rescinded at any time by royal decree, though of course that won't actually happen.