parliament, 1543; at the same time it was enacted that all notes and marginal commentaries in other copies should be obliterated, and that “no woman (unless she be a noble or gentle woman), no artificers, apprentices, journeymen, servingmen, under the degree of yeomen . . . husbandmen or labourers” should read or use any part of the Bible under pain of fines and imprisonment.[1]
In 1546 Coverdale’s Bible was included in the proscription, the Great Bible being the only translation not interdicted. During Edward VI.’s reign there was a brief respite, but with the accession of Mary the persecutions of the English Bible and its friends were renewed. Cranmer William Whittingham.suffered martyrdom at the stake, as John Rogers had done before him. Other prominent reformers, amongst them Coverdale, sought refuge in Geneva, the town of Calvin and Beza, where they employed their enforced leisure in planning and carrying out a new revision of the Bible. The first fruits of these labours was a New Testament issued in June 1557, with an introduction by Calvin, probably the work of William Whittingham.[2] The volume, in a convenient quarto size, printed in clear Roman type, and provided with marginal annotations, gained immediate popularity in England, where a Bible suited for household demands had long been needed. It was the first Bible which had the text divided into “verses and sections according to the best editions in other languages.”[3]
Whittingham’s enterprise was, however, soon superseded by an issue of the whole Bible, which appeared in 1560, the so-called Genevan Bible, popularly also known as the Breeches Bible, from its rendering of Gen. iii. 7, “They sewed fig leaves together and made themselves breeches.” The Genevan Bible.This edition was mainly due to the combined efforts of William Whittingham, Anthony Gilby and Thomas Sampson, and the expenses towards printing and publication were borne by members of the congregation at Geneva. It represented in the Old Testament a thorough and independent revision of the text of the Great Bible with the help of the Hebrew original, the Latin versions of Leo Judä (1543), Pagninus (1528), Sebastian Münster (1534–1535), and the French versions of Olivetan. The New Testament consisted of Tyndale’s latest text revised to a great extent in accordance with Beza’s translation and commentary. The changes introduced by the Genevan translators were, as a rule, a great improvement, and the version received a ready welcome and immediate popularity, not only on account of its intrinsic merits, but because of its handy size, usually that of a small quarto, and of its being printed, like Whittingham’s New Testament, in a readable Roman type instead of black letter. Like this earlier publication, it had the division of the chapters into verses, and a marginal commentary which proved a great attraction to the Puritans. The popularity of the Genevan Bible was so great that between 1560 and 1644 at least 140 editions of it were published,[4] and this in spite of its not being allowed for use in the churches.
In 1576 the New Testament of the Genevan Bible was again revised by Lawrence Tomson and provided with a new commentary mainly translated from Beza. It soon became popular and even replaced the Genevan New Testament in later editions of this Bible.
Some time after the accession of Queen Elizabeth an attempt was made to improve the authorized Great Bible, and in this way to challenge the ever growing popularity of the Calvinistic Genevan Bible. The initiative was taken by Archbishop Parker, about 1563–1565, who, according The Bishops’ Bible.to Strype (Parker i. 414) “took upon him the labour to contrive and set the whole work a going . . . by sorting out the whole Bible into parcels . . . and distributing these parcels to able bishops and other learned men, to peruse and collate each the book or books allotted them . . . and they to add some short marginal notes for the illustration or correction of the text.”
The rules upon which they proceeded were these:—
1. “To follow the common English translation used in the churches, and not to recede from it, but where it varieth manifestly from the Hebrew or Greek original. 2. To use sections and divisions in the text as Pagnine in his translation useth, and for the verity of the Hebrew to follow the said Pagnine and Münster specially, and generally others learned in the tongues. 3. To make no bitter notes upon any text, or yet to set down any determination in places of controversy. 4. To note such chapters and places as contain matters of genealogies, or other such places not edifying, with some strike or note, that the reader may eschew them in his public reading. 5. That all such words as sound in the old translation to any offence of lightness or obscenity be expressed with more convenient terms and phrases.”
The work was pushed forward with energy, and on the 5th of October 1568 the volume was ready for publication. It was a magnificent folio, generally known as the Bishops’ Bible, since not less than eight of these dignitaries took part in the revision. But the detached and piecemeal way in which the revision had been carried out naturally caused certain inequalities in the execution of the work. The different parts of the Bible vary considerably in merit, the alterations in the New Testament, for instance, showing freshness and vigour, whereas most of the changes introduced in the Old Testament have been condemned as “arbitrary and at variance with the exact sense of the Hebrew text” (Westcott, op. cit. p. 237). Several editions of the Bishops’ Bible were afterwards published, but it is doubtful whether the ecclesiastical authorities in spite of repeated enactments (Cardwell, Synodalia, pp. 115, 123, 210, 292) ever succeeded in entirely enforcing its public use in the churches. After 1569 the Great Bible ceased, however, to be reprinted. But in the homes the Genevan version still maintained its supremacy. One thing is certain, that the book of Psalms of the new revision had fairly soon to give way before the well-known and smooth rendering of the Great Bible. In the second edition of the Bishops’ Bible, 1572, the two texts were actually printed side by side; in all later editions except one (1585) the older Psalter alone remained.
From the time of Tyndale onwards the translation of the Scriptures into English had been more or less an outcome of the great reformatory movements within the church. It was not until Queen Elizabeth’s reign that members of the Romanist party found it expedient to translate the The Reims and Douai Version.Bible into the vernacular “for the more speedy abolishing of a number of false and impious translations put forth by sundry sectes, and for the better preseruation or reclaime of many good soules endangered thereby” (Preface to the Rhemish Version).
According to the title-page the New Testament was “translated faithfvlly into English ovt of the authentical Latin, according to the best corrected copies of the same, diligently conferred vvith the Greeke and other editions in diuers languages. . . . In the English College of Rhemes, 1582.” The Old Testament had been “long since” completed, but “for lacke of good meanes” (Preface to the New Testament), its appearance was delayed till 1609–1610, when it was published at Douai. The complete work, known as the Rhemes and Douay Version, was reprinted in Rouen in 1635, and after a considerable time revised by Dr Challoner (1749–1750). The translation is really anonymous, but there seems to be little doubt that it was carried out by some of the Romanist refugees connected with the Seminary at Douai and the English college at Reims, the chief amongst them being Gregory Martin, William Allen, Richard Bristow and J. Reynolds. Like the Wycliffite Versions it is merely a secondary rendering from the Latin Vulgate, and it suffered from many of the defects which characterized these versions, extreme literalness, often stilted, ambiguous renderings, at times unintelligible except by a reference to the Latin original, as in Luke xxii. 18, “I will not drink of the generation of the vine,” or Phil. ii. 7, “But he exinanited himself.”
- ↑ Cf. Burnet’s Ref. i. 584.
- ↑ Printed in Bagster’s Hexapla, 1841, reprinted separately in 1842.
- ↑ See “Address to the Reader.” The division into verses of the New Testament was first found in R. Stephanus’ Greek-Latin New Testament (4th ed., 1551), whereas these divisions already existed in the Hebrew Old Testament.
- ↑ See T. H. Darlow and H. F. Moule, Historical Catal. of the Printed Editions of Holy Scripture in the Libr. of the Brit, and Foreign Bible Soc. (London, 1903).
