Development of the English Bible – The Geneva Bible

While Henry VIII was known for his excesses and liberalities the development of the Bible in English had reached a new height.  The Great Bible saw 3 revisions and updates and most noted was that it was “approved” to read by the king himself.  Yet, Henry began to see that enabling the “common folk” to read the scripture on their own also began to empower them.  An era of tension began to arise, but was quelled beneath the desire for spiritual freedom.  Henry was the new self-appointed “Divine Head” of the Church of England.  Considering itself neither Protestant nor Catholic, it was still at the time considered an enemy of the church in Rome and therefore heretical and therefore by default thrown into the Protestant category.  This however did not stop Henry, nor the burgeoning development of the English Bible. By age 55 Henry’s health deteriorated and he died. In 1547 his son Edward (Known as Edward VI) assumed the throne at age 9. As such he could not exercise actual power and Henry’s will designated that should this be so there was to be appointed a council of 16 Regents  that would rule until Edward turned 18 years old.  Although Henry had severed the link between the Church of England and Rome, he never permitted the renunciation of Catholic doctrine or ceremony. It was during Edward's reign that Protestantism was established for the first time in England with reforms that included the abolition of clerical celibacy and Mass along with the imposition of compulsory services in English.  When his sickness was discovered he and his Council drew up a "Devise for the Succession," attempting to prevent the country returning to Catholicism. Edward named his cousin Lady Jane Grey as his heir and excluded his half sisters, Mary and Elizabeth. However, this was disputed following Edward's death and Jane Grey was queen for only nine days before Edward's half-sister, Mary, was proclaimed Queen.  She was the only surviving child born of the ill-fated marriage of Henry VIII and his first wife Catherine of Aragon, was raised Catholic and is remembered for her restoration of Roman Catholicism.  She had always rejected the break with Rome instituted by her father and the establishment of Protestantism by Edward VI. She and her husband Prince Phillip of Spain wanted England to reconcile with Rome. Philip persuaded Parliament to repeal the Protestant religious laws passed by Mary's father, thus returning the English church to Roman jurisdiction.  With this, began a reign of tyranny which continued until her death and exacerbated anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish feeling among the English people. The victims of the persecutions became lauded as martyrs and many went into exile.

During Mary’s reign, a number of Protestant scholars fled from England to Geneva in Switzerland, which was then ruled as a republic in which John Calvin and Theodore Beza provided the primary spiritual and theological leadership. Among these scholars was William Whittingham, who supervised the Geneva Bible, in collaboration with Miles Coverdale, Christopher Goodman, Anthony Gilby, Thomas Sampson, and William Cole. Whittingham was directly responsible for the New Testament, which was complete and published in 1557, while Gilby oversaw the Old Testament. The Geneva Bible was translated from scholarly editions of the Greek New Testament and the Hebrew Scriptures of the day. The English rendering was substantially based on the earlier translations by Tyndale and Coverdale (more than 80 percent of the language in the Geneva Bible is from Tyndale). However, the Geneva Bible was the first English version in which all of the Old Testament was translated directly from the Hebrew.  It was the first Bible to be mechanically printed and was issued in more convenient and affordable sizes than earlier versions. The 1560 Bible Geneva New Testament cost less than a week's wages even for the lowest-paid laborers.  It contained a number of study aids produced by Reformation Leaders of the day and therefore is predominantly Calvinist and Puritan in character. It included woodcut illustrations, maps and explanatory 'tables', i.e. indexes of names and topics, in addition to the famous marginal notes that had never been seen previous.  Each book was preceded by an introduction and each chapter by a list of contents giving verse numbers. This preceded the King James Version by 51 years and was the Bible that came to America on the Mayflower. It was a pivotal Bible of the Reformation Period and allowed the common man to advance against what was considered to be “abuses of the church (Catholic – JH).”  The side notes and marginal notes were highly Calvanistic and in the view of King James I very demeaning  to the power of the English monarchy. This led to the development of yet another version that shall be explored in coming articles, the King James “authorized” version. In the meantime, the Catholics launch their own volley in the midst of the fervor of “Protestantism,” The Douay-Rhemes Bible.

Jim