When William Tyndale was executed in 1536, there was no English Bible that could lawfully be read in England (see William Tyndale and the English New Testament). Two years later, every parish church in England was required to have one. By the end of the century English readers could choose between several translations, each with its own character, its own supporters, and its own politics.

This article follows those Bibles in order: Coverdale’s, Matthew’s, the Great Bible, the Geneva Bible, the Bishops’ Bible, and the Catholic Rheims-Douai. All of them fed into the King James Version of 1611.

Coverdale’s Bible, 1535

The first complete printed Bible in English was the work of Miles Coverdale, a former Augustinian friar who had worked with Tyndale on the Continent. It appeared in 1535. The place of printing was long debated, with Cologne, Marburg and Zurich all suggested; most scholars now accept that it was printed in Antwerp by Merten de Keyser.

Coverdale did not claim to work from Hebrew and Greek. His title page says the Bible was translated “out of Douche and Latyn,” that is, from German and Latin. Where Tyndale’s translations existed, Coverdale used them, revising lightly. For the rest of the Old Testament he relied on Luther’s German, the Zurich Bible, the Latin Vulgate and the Latin of the scholar Santes Pagnini. His gift was for English rhythm rather than scholarship. His translation of the Psalms, revised for the Great Bible, was taken into the Book of Common Prayer, and it is still sung in Anglican churches today.

Coverdale’s Bible was dedicated to Henry VIII, who had by then broken with Rome. It was not formally authorised, but it was not suppressed either.

Matthew’s Bible, 1537

Two years later came a Bible under the name of “Thomas Matthew.” This was a pen name for John Rogers, another associate of Tyndale. Matthew’s Bible was the first to print Tyndale’s unpublished translation of the historical books, Joshua to 2 Chronicles, which Rogers seems to have obtained after Tyndale’s arrest. The rest was Tyndale’s published work and Coverdale’s.

Remarkably, Matthew’s Bible was licensed by the king. So within a year of Tyndale’s death, most of the Bible that the crown permitted to be sold in England was his. Rogers later became the first Protestant burned in the reign of Mary I, in 1555.

The Great Bible, 1539

Henry’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, wanted an official Bible for the churches. In 1538 he issued injunctions requiring every parish to set up “one book of the whole Bible of the largest volume in English” where people could read it. Coverdale was asked to revise Matthew’s Bible, and the result, printed in 1539, was called the Great Bible for its size.

The second edition of 1540 carried a preface by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, so it is sometimes called Cranmer’s Bible. Copies were often chained to a desk or pillar in the church, not to keep them from the people but to keep them from being stolen. For the first time, ordinary English people could hear the whole Bible read in their own language, or read it themselves, in church.

The freedom did not last unchanged. In 1543 an Act of Parliament restricted private Bible reading by women and by men below a certain social rank. Under Mary I, from 1553, Protestant Bible publishing in England stopped, and many Protestants fled abroad.

The Geneva Bible, 1560

Some of those exiles settled in Geneva, where John Calvin and Theodore Beza were leading the Reformed church. There a group of English scholars, led by William Whittingham, produced a New Testament in 1557 and a complete Bible in 1560. It was dedicated to Elizabeth I, who had come to the throne in 1558.

The Geneva Bible was a new kind of book for English readers:

  • It was the first English Bible translated throughout from Hebrew and Greek, revising earlier English versions against the originals and drawing on the best scholarship of Geneva.
  • It was the first complete English Bible to divide the text into numbered verses, following the verse divisions Robert Estienne (Stephanus) had introduced in his Greek New Testament of 1551.
  • It was printed in clear roman type rather than black-letter, usually in an affordable quarto size, with maps, woodcuts, chapter summaries and cross-references.
  • It had extensive marginal notes, explaining hard words, giving alternative renderings and offering Reformed interpretation.

It became the household Bible of English Protestants for about eighty years. It was the Bible of Shakespeare, whose quotations and allusions, after his earliest plays, most often match Geneva; of John Bunyan; and of the Puritans who sailed on the Mayflower in 1620. It is sometimes called the Breeches Bible, because in Genesis 3:7 it says that Adam and Eve sewed fig leaves together “and made themselves breeches,” where the World English Bible has “made coverings for themselves.” The word was not new to Geneva, but the nickname stuck.

Some of the notes troubled those in authority, because a few could be read as allowing disobedience to rulers. King James I later complained of notes he thought “seditious,” and the Geneva Bible’s popularity was one reason he supported a new translation.

The Bishops’ Bible, 1568

The Church of England’s bishops did not want the Geneva Bible’s notes in their pulpits, but the Great Bible was clearly inferior. Archbishop Matthew Parker organised a revision of the Great Bible by a team of bishops and scholars, published in 1568 and revised in 1572. This Bishops’ Bible became the official Bible read in churches.

It was uneven, because different revisers worked with different degrees of care, and it never won over private readers, who kept buying Geneva Bibles. But it mattered for one reason above all: when the King James translators began their work, they were instructed to take the Bishops’ Bible as their base (see The King James Version).

Rheims and Douai: the Catholic translation

English Catholics in exile also produced a Bible. At the English College, founded by William Allen at Douai and later moved for a time to Rheims, the scholar Gregory Martin translated the whole Bible, with help from colleagues. The New Testament was published at Rheims in 1582, and the Old Testament at Douai in 1609–10, delayed by lack of funds.

The Rheims-Douai Bible was translated from the Latin Vulgate, which the Council of Trent had declared authentic (see Jerome and the Latin Vulgate), though Martin compared the Greek and Hebrew. Its preface explained that it kept close to the Latin, even at the cost of smoothness, so as not to lose anything of the meaning. It kept many Latin words, such as pasch for Passover, azymes for unleavened bread, and in the Lord’s Prayer “supersubstantial bread” where the World English Bible has “our daily bread.” Its notes answered Protestant arguments, just as the Geneva notes answered Catholic ones.

It has often been dismissed as stiff, and some of it is. But it was a careful translation, and it supplied a number of Latin-derived words to English. The King James translators consulted it, and their New Testament sometimes follows its vocabulary, a debt shown in detail by James Carleton’s study of 1902. In the eighteenth century Bishop Richard Challoner revised it thoroughly, and Challoner’s revision remained the standard English Catholic Bible until the twentieth century.

What the King James translators inherited

By 1604, then, there were three main English Bibles in use: the Bishops’ Bible in the churches, the Geneva Bible in homes, and the Rheims New Testament among Catholics. All of them, except Rheims, rested heavily on Tyndale. They had been made by exiles and bishops, Puritans and Catholics, sometimes under persecution and sometimes under royal licence. When the King James translators wrote in their preface that they had not set out to make a bad translation good, but “to make a good one better,” it was this long line of English Bibles they had in mind.

Many translations, one text

For a modern reader, the most striking thing about this period may be how much each translation was shaped by its notes and its sponsors. The same Greek word could be “church” or “congregation,” “elder” or “priest,” depending on who was translating and why; a Geneva reader and a Rheims reader met very different explanations in the margin.

Open Word Bible tries to put those choices in the open rather than in partisan notes. Each meaning decision is recorded with the alternatives that were considered and the reasons for the choice, so a reader can disagree with it knowingly. The drafts are AI-assisted and await named human reviewers, so nothing is yet marked reviewed. Like the Geneva translators, the project works from the Hebrew and Greek; unlike them, it puts no restriction on who may copy or reuse the result.

Sources

  • Bruce, F. F. History of the Bible in English. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.
  • Carleton, James G. The Part of Rheims in the Making of the English Bible. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902.
  • Daniell, David. The Bible in English: Its History and Influence. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.
  • Herbert, A. S. Historical Catalogue of Printed Editions of the English Bible, 1525–1961. London: British and Foreign Bible Society; New York: American Bible Society, 1968.
  • Norton, David. The King James Bible: A Short History from Tyndale to Today. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
  • Pollard, Alfred W., ed. Records of the English Bible. London: Oxford University Press, 1911.
  • Shaheen, Naseeb. Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999.
  • Greenslade, S. L., ed. The Cambridge History of the Bible. Vol. 3, The West from the Reformation to the Present Day. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963.
  • Bible quotations are from the World English Bible (public domain), except where the article quotes a historic translation.