Geneva Bible

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http://www.reformedreader.org/gbn/igb.htm (The History of the Geneva Bible)
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NOVEMBER 16, 2020

The History of the Geneva Bible

We have set out to create a beautiful, functional, modernized version of
the Geneva Bible, the English Bible translated in Geneva under the
direction of John Calvin in 1560.

The History

Surprisingly, although this is one of the most important historical

translations of the Bible into English, translated before the King James
Version, and was popular with the Puritans, nobody reads this Bible
anymore. What is the story of this translation and why was it forgotten?

The story of the translation of a complete Bible into English begins with
Tyndale. Tyndale famously vowed that he would make sure that even a
lowly plowboy would be able to know more Scripture than the average
theologian. He translated the entire New Testament, the Pentateuch,
and various other books in the Old Testament before he was captured
by the authorities and executed.

However, before he was strangled at the stake, changes had already

taken place in his native land. Henry VIII, king of England, broke from
the Roman Catholic Church, famously so that he could divorce his wife.
Tyndale’s own friend Miles Coverdale managed to get the king to
authorize an English translation of the Bible based largely upon
Tyndale’s translation. It was published in 1539, and the king commanded
that large copies be displayed in churches.
Despite that, the situation in England was precarious. After Henry VIII
and his son died, the very Catholic Mary brought the nation back to
Catholicism and killed the most prominent Protestant leaders. Anyone
who wanted to escape martyrdom had to flee to the European continent.
Many English Protestants fled to Geneva, where John Calvin was
reforming the city and making it increasingly Protestant. While there, the
English exiles made a new and improved English translation. The
translators were William Whitingham (an Englishman who married
Calvin’s sister), Christopher Goodman, Anthony Gilby, Thomas
Sampson, and Miles Coverdale.

Although the Geneva Bible built upon Tyndale and the Great Bible, it
was a huge advance in scholarship, and it was very much the first
reader-friendly text. It was the first with chapter/verse divisions, the first
with a legible font and a reasonable size, the first with italics to show
what words were not in the original languages, and the first to include
maps, marginal notes, chronologies and indices. Most exciting of all, it
was the first Bible entirely translated from the Hebrew and the Greek. It
was a book suitable, not just for displaying in churches, but for family
reading.

And read it they did. For the next few centuries, the Geneva Bible would
be the English Bible. In 1579 the Scottish parliament commanded that
every household with adequate means should buy a Geneva Bible.
When the Pilgrims went to America, they took Geneva Bibles with them.
When the Puritans fought in the English civil war, it was the English Bible
they took into battle. It was the Bible for brave men, and it was the Bible
for families.

However, the Geneva Bible lost in the long run, and it was due to all
those helpful marginal notes. Several of them spoke very fiercely about
the right of subjects to resist their king, and King James was not happy
with this and commissioned a new translation.

Decades after James' ban, Christians were still printing it with fake
identifications like putting Geneva notes on KJBs, dating Geneva Bibles
1599, and printing Geneva Bibles with KJB covers. Even James'
translators continued to prefer the Geneva Bible, quoting it in the KJB
preface and preaching from it decades later.
Here's what the Geneva Bible of 1560 said about Pharoah: "The more
the tyranny of the wicked raged against his Church, the more his heavy
judgments increased against them, till Pharaoh and his army were
drowned in the sea, which gave an entry and passage to the children of
God." The Geneva Bible even says when dealing with tyrants,
"disobedience was lawful". Disobedience to tyrants was obedience to
God. The men of Geneva included many study notes on the "all the hard
places" because "errors, sects, and heresies grow daily for lack of true
knowledge" of God's Word.

However, James' translation without these notes did not catch on and we
might still be reading Geneva Bibles to this day, if it were not for the fact
that the English Civil War happened. Rebels tended to use the Geneva
Bible, and royalists both used the King James Bible and at times banned
it. The Church of England promoted their Bible and after they won the
war, the translation that got imported to the English colonies was, not
surprisingly, the King James Bible. It was the authorized version indeed.

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HISTORICAL

The Geneva Bible, A Bible of Firsts

When it was first printed, the Geneva Bible was the most reader-friendly version of the Bible ever translated.
Its numerous innovations made it ideal for the common reader. What sets the Geneva Bible apart? I recently
sat down with Dr. David A. Bennett, a local antique Bible collector and amateur historian of Bible history, to
find out.

An Interview with Dr. David A Bennett:

Q: Can you give us a brief history of the Geneva Bible?
From 1555 to 1558
During Queen Mary’s reign, from 1555 and 1558, she burned 288 Protestant ministers at the stake for their
denial of one tenet or another of the Roman religion. During the 1550s, when the Protestants of England were
under such fierce persecution, many of their minsters fled to Geneva, Switzerland, to a theocracy maintained
by Calvin and his contemporaries. Such a blessed company of Protestant theologians and scholars produced a
Bible in 1560 aptly called the Geneva Bible. John Calvin, John Knox, Myles Coverdale, John Foxe, and
several other Reformers may have collaborated on the Bible. However, William Whittingham did most of the
work. He was the pastor of the Geneva Church and a dear friend of John Calvin.

1558 and Beyond

The Geneva New Testament of 1558 was barely off the press when work began on a revision of the entire
Bible. This process took two more years. The new translation was checked with Theodore Beza’s earlier work
and with the Greek text. In 1560, a complete revised Bible was published, “translated according to the Hebrew
and Greek, and conferred with the best translations in divers languages”.

Not only was the Geneva Bible innovative and influential, it has a remarkable history. The Geneva Bible came
out of vicious persecution endured by the English reformers. Its marginal notes edified the people and
infuriated a King. While previous English translations failed to capture the hearts of the reading public, the
Geneva Bible was instantly popular. Between 1560 and 1644 at least 144 editions appeared. Even forty years
after the publication of the King James Bible, the Geneva Bible continued to be the Bible of the home.

Two of the prime attractions of the Geneva Bible were its cost – the average cost of this printed Bible was less
than a week’s wages for a working man – and the commentary amply interspersed throughout the Bible. The
Geneva Bible was the first study Bible ever printed, a fact which both endeared it to the laity and irritated the
clergy and monarchy, as neither archbishop nor king was allotted the god-like status each sought. The Bible
brought to the American colonies by the Pilgrims in 1620 was their much-beloved 1599 Geneva Bible.

During the decades following the publication of the King James Bible in 1611, both political and commercial
meddling by monarch and bishop was implemented to finally subvert the influence of the Geneva Bible.

Q: What sets the Geneva Bible apart from other translations?

The Geneva Bible was a Bible of firsts. It was the first..

 Entire Bible in English translated from the original languages, not depending upon the Latin
Vulgate at all
 English Bible translation intended for use by lay Christians, following on the heels of Martin
Luther’s 1534 German Bible for the German laity
 Bible in English to use contemporary verse divisions
 To use italicized words where English required more than a literal Greek rendering
 Bible in the English language with commentary, so it’s the first study Bible
 English Bible translated by a committee and not an individual
Q: Besides the study notes, are there any substantial ways in which the
Geneva text differs from that of the KJV?
Using the verbiage of types and antitypes, the Geneva Bible was the antitype or fulfillment of Tyndale’s
pioneering work. Additionally, it was the type or prototype of the King James Bible to come 50 years later.
Fully 80% of the books Tyndale translated into English are present in the Geneva Bible. Also, 80% of the King
James Bible is attributed to the Geneva Bible – minus the marginal commentary!

Quite frankly, its marginal notes both fanned the flames of the Geneva Bible’s success, but also resulted in its
eventual demise and the succession of the King James Bible as the de facto English Bible for centuries to
come. Had not the marginal commentary been so polarizing, there is good reason to suspect that neither the
Bishop’s Bible nor even the King James Bible would ever have been conceived.

Q: How does the Tolle Lege edition that Olive Tree is releasing differ from
the original 1599 Geneva Bible?
Today’s readers will find it difficult to read the original print edition. This is due to its archaic typography and
outdated spellings and word usage. For example, it is quite interesting to notice the progression of the English
language, during which English acquired the use of the letter “j” to use in appropriate places where only “i”
had been used before, and the consistent delineation of “v” and “u” as we know today.

The Tolle Lege Press edition removes the major obstacles for the contemporary reader. It returns this historic
Bible to its rightful place of influence and importance. The original 1599 Geneva Bible gave God’s Word back
to the people, and Tolle Lege Press desires that the tradition continue.

Thanks to Dr. Bennett for his time and insights into the 1599 Geneva Bible.
Get Your Own Copy!

You can find the 1599 Geneva Bible in our store. Get your own copy today to keep learning more about it!

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The Original Geneva Bible

Roger Nicole
5 Min Read

Christianity is the religion of the Incarnate Word, Jesus Christ, and of the
written Word, the Bible. Wherever Christianity has gone, it has developed
translations of Scripture as a necessity. The promise of Pentecost, where
people of various origin heard of “the wonders of God in their own tongues”
(Acts 2:11), has been fulfilled and continues to be increasingly fulfilled in the
process of Bible translation. The whole Bible, or portions thereof, is now
available in print in more than 2,000 languages.

In the British Isles, turbulent times accompanied the work of translating

Scripture, but the first written translation of the whole Bible was made under
the influence of John Wycliffe (c. 1330–1384). Even though it had to be copied
by hand, and in spite of a prohibition against English translations, there are
still some two hundred manuscripts of it extant.

The first published text was William Tyndale’s translation of the New
Testament (1526), based on the Greek and Hebrew texts, in Worms,
Germany. He had completed the translation of the Pentateuch, Jonah, and
Joshua-2 Chronicles before being martyred in 1536.

Miles Coverdale, encouraged by Archbishop Cramner and Secretary Thomas

Cromwell, undertook to translate the whole Bible from the Vulgate (Latin) with
the help of certain other translators in Latin or German and of Tyndale’s own
version. This was published in 1535 in Germany. In 1537 it was republished in
Southwark, the first complete English Bible to be printed in England.

When Mary Tudor ascended the British throne (1553), she did her utmost to
restore the Roman Catholic faith. Little did she realize that her anti-Protestant
stance would indirectly foster the production of the most important 16th-
century Bible, the “Geneva Bible,” precipitated by the exile of a number of the
influential Protestant leaders to Geneva. Notable among these were John
Knox and William Whittingham. After establishing an English church in 1555,
the refugees agreed that the most significant work they could do was to
prepare and publish a new English translation of the whole Bible made in such
a way that it would have a maximum accessibility to the common people of
Britain. Whittingham was an excellent scholar in Greek, and Anthony Gilby
and Christopher Goodman in Hebrew. Furthermore, there were at that time in
Geneva a number of gifted scholars and printers.

The English refugees made ample use of these resources, and Whittingham
and his associates labored day and night to perform the task of preparing an
English translation of the whole Bible. Earlier editions of the Bible had
marginal notes, but the Geneva Bible accommodated them in a much greater
proportion. Written in a Puritanic spirit, there was language that angered the
royal family and some of the bishops of the Anglican Church who sought to
impede the distribution and use of this Bible.

On June 10, 1557, the New Testament appeared as follows:

“The New Testament of our Lord Jesus Christ. Conferred diligently with the
Greke, and best approved translations. With the arguments, aswel before the
chapters, as for every Boke & Epistle, also diversities of readings, and most
proffitable annotations of all harde places: wherunto is added a copious Table.
At Geneva Printed By Conrad Badius. M.D.LVII.”

Mary Tudor died on November 17, 1558. Her successor, Queen Elizabeth,
was favorable to the reformation initiated by her father, Henry VIII. Many of
those who were exiles under Mary hastened to return to the British Isles.
Whittingham, however, and some of his associates remained in Geneva until
1560 to finish the publication of their edition of the Bible.

Inasmuch as the translation of the book of Psalms was completed, the

Geneva group decided to publish it separately and to dedicate this work to
Elizabeth. They prefixed a flowery letter to her, declaring that her accession to
the throne was a special blessing from God. They established a parallel
between her and King David in that both were enthroned after years of life-
threatening persecutions. The queen was admonished to cling to the Lord and
to His Word even as David did. An epistle to the reader was placed at the end.

After the publication of the Psalms in 1559, Whittingham and his associates
labored diligently to bring to completion this momentous work. When one
holds in his hands the large volume, one cannot fail to be impressed by the
gigantic task involved in translating, annotating, printing, proofreading, and
binding this book. The marginal annotations, written in exceedingly small type,
are very unevenly distributed—relatively scanty in the Pentateuch and the
historical books of the Old Testament, and very full in Job, Psalms, and the
Prophets, as well as some Epistles and Revelation.

The New Testament was also published separately in 1560. The desire to
make God’s Word available to English-speaking people is apparent. Those
who could not afford to buy the whole Bible might at least purchase the New
Testament.

Between 1560 and 1644, there were more than 140 editions of the Geneva
Bible. In 1599 alone ten editions appeared. The first Geneva Bible to be
printed in Britain was published in London by Christopher Berkes in 1575. The
first printing in Scotland appeared in 1575.

The Genevan exiles labored with great earnestness for five years in order to
give to their country a Bible that would reflect the best scholarship and yet be
accessible even to those with moderate financial means. Challenged by
others in Geneva who were publishing Bibles or New Testaments in Latin
(1556, 1567), Italian (1555), French (22 editions in the 1550s), Spanish (1556,
1557), and Greek (1551) and by the success of the German Bibles (Luther
1534, Zwingli 1527–29), they worked untiringly to produce the Geneva Bible in
1560. Thereafter, for more than 80 years, it dominated the field, surpassing
greatly the official Bishops’ Bible and giving great incentive to King James I.
The Genevan marginal notes did not sit well with him, and so he provided the
funds and assembled the scholars for preparation of the magnificent edition in
1611 of a New Authorized Version, known as the King James Version. Even
so it took many years for the latter to catch up with the production of the
Geneva Bible, and it must be noted that at many places the 1611 translation
was influenced by the work of the exiles. The Geneva Bible was the Bible of
Shakespeare; it was the Bible of the Puritans; it was the Bible carried on their
ships by the Jamestown settlers (1607) and the Plymouth Pilgrims (1620).
Harvard University treasures the copy that Governor Bradford brought with
him on the Mayflower. Nothing else that the exiles could have done would
possibly approximate the boon to Britain and the influence in the world which
the Genevan Bible turned out to be.

And now a new Geneva Bible is to appear, ironically enough with the text of
the New King James Bible, but once again with notes intended to emphasize
the Reformed character of Holy Scripture. What its influence may be no one
yet knows, but those who produced it are confident that “their labor will not be
in vain in the Lord” (1 Cor. 15:58).
Originally published in Tabletalk, our daily Bible study magazine.

LEARN MORE

History: The Geneva Bible

 An Introduction to the Geneva Bible

For the last three centuries Protestants have fancied themselves the heirs of the
Reformation, the Puritans, the Calvinists, and the Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth
Rock. This assumption is one of history's greatest ironies. Today's Protestants laboring
under that assumption use the King James Bible. Most of the newer Bibles such as the
Revised Standard Version are simply updates of the King James.

The irony is that none of the groups named in the preceding paragraph used a King
James Bible nor would they have used it if it had been given to them free. The Bible
in use by those groups until it went out of print in 1644, was the Geneva Bible. The
first Geneva Bible, both Old and New Testaments, was first published in English in
1560 in what is now Geneva, Switzerland,* William Shakespeare, John Bunyan, John
Milton, the Pilgrims who landed on Plymouth Rock in 1620, and other luminaries of
that era used the Geneva Bible exclusively.

Until he had his own version named after him, so did King James I of England. James
I later tried to disclaim any knowledge of the Geneva Bible, though he quotes the
Geneva Bible in his own writing, As a Professor Eadie reported it:

". . . his virtual disclaimer of all knowledge up to a late period of the Genevan notes
and version was simply a bold, unblushing falsehood, a clumsy attempt to sever
himself and his earlier Scottish beliefs and usages that he might win favor with his
English churchmen." 1

The irony goes further. King James did not encourage a translation of the Bible in
order to enlighten the common people. His sole intent was to deny them the marginal
notes of the Geneva Bible. The marginal notes of the Geneva version were what made
it so popular with the common people.

The King James Bible was, and is for all practical purposes, a government
publication. There were several reasons for the King James Bible being a government
publication.

First, King James I of England was a devout believer in the "divine right of kings," a
philosophy ingrained in him by his mother, Mary Stuart. 2 Mary Stuart may have been
having an affair with her Italian secretary, David Rizzio, at the time she conceived
James. There is a better than even chance that James was the product of adultery*
(G.P.V. Alerigg Jacobean Pageant p.6.). Apparently, enough evidence of such conduct
on the part of Mary Stuart and David Rizzio existed to cause various Scot nobles,
including Mary's own husband, King Henry, to drag David Rizzio from Mary's supper
table and execute him. The Scot nobles hacked and slashed at the screaming Rizzio
with knives and swords, and then threw him off a balcony to the courtyard below
where he landed with a sickening smack. In the phrase of that day, he had been
scotched. 3

Mary did have affairs with other men, such as the Earl of Bothwell. She later tried to
execute her husband in a gunpowder explosion that shook all of Edinburg. King
Henry survived the explosion, only to be suffocated later that same night. The
murderers were never discovered. Mary was eventually beheaded at the order of her
cousin, Elizabeth I of England. 4

To such individuals as James and his mother, Mary, the "divine right of kings" meant
that since a king's power came from God, the king then had to answer to no one but
God. This lack of responsibility extended to evil kings. The reasoning was that if a
king was evil, that was a punishment sent from God. The citizens should then suffer in
silence. If a king was good, that was a blessing sent from God.

This is why the Geneva Bible annoyed King James I. The Geneva Bible had marginal
notes that simply didn't conform to that point of view. Those marginal notes had been,
to a great extent placed in the Geneva Bible by the leaders of the Reformation
including John Knox and John Calvin. Knox and Calvin could not and cannot be
dismissed lightly or their opinions passed off to the public as the mere dithering of
dissidents.

First, notes such as, "When tyrants cannot prevail by craft, they burst forth into open
rage," (Note i, Exodus 1:22) really bothered King James

Second, religion in James' time was not what it is today. In that era, religion was
controlled by the government. If someone lived in Spain at the time, he had three
religious "choices":

1. Roman Catholicism
2. Silence.
3. The Inquisition.

The third "option" was reserved for "heretics," or people who didn't think the way the
government wanted them to. To governments of that era heresy and treason were
synonymous.

England wasn't much different. From the time of Henry VIII on, an Englishman had
three choices:

1. The Anglican Church.

2. Silence.
3. The rack, burning at the stake, being drawn and quartered, or some other form of
persuasion.

The hapless individuals who fell into the hands of the government for holding
religious opinions of their own were simply punished according to the royal whim.

Henry VIII, once he had appointed himself head of all the English churches, kept the
Roman Catholic system of bishops, deacons and the like for a very good reason. That
system allowed him a "chain of command" necessary for any bureaucracy to function.
This system passed intact to his heirs.

This system became a little confusing for English citizens when Bloody Mary *
ascended to the throne. Mary wanted everyone to switch back to Roman Catholicism.
Those who proved intransigent and wanted to remain Protestant she burned at the
stake - about 300 people in all. She intended to bum a lot more, but the rest of her
intended victims escaped by leaving the country.

A tremendous number of those intended victims settled in Geneva. Religious refugees

from other countries in Western Europe, including the French theologian Jean
Chauvin, better known as John Calvin, also settled there.

Mary died and was succeeded to the throne by her Protestant cousin, Elizabeth. The
Anglican bureaucracy returned, less a few notables such as Archbishop Cranmer and
Hugh Latimer (both having been burned at the stake by Bloody Mary). In Scotland,
John Knox led the Reformation.

The Reformation prospered in Geneva. Many of those who had fled Bloody Mary
started a congregation there. Their greatest effort and contribution to the Reformation
was the first Geneva Bible.

More marginal notes were added to later editions.

* Daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. She became queen in 1553 after
her brother, Edward VI, died.

By the end of the 16th Century, the Geneva Bible had about all the marginal notes
there was space available to put them in.
Geneva was an anomaly in 16th Century Europe. In the days of absolute despotism
and constant warfare, Geneva achieved her independence primarily by constant
negotiation, playing off one stronger power against another. While other governments
allowed lawyers to drag out cases and took months and years to get rid of corrupt
officials, the City of Geneva dispatched most civil and criminal cases within a month
and threw corrupt officials into jail the day after they were found out. The academy
that John Calvin founded there in 1559 later became the University of Geneva.

Religious wars wracked Europe. The Spanish fought to restore Roman Catholicism to
Western Europe. The Dutch fought for the Reformation and religious freedom.
England, a small country with only 4 ? million people, managed to stay aloof because
of the natural advantage of the English Channel.

The Dutch declared religious freedom for everybody. Amsterdam became an open
city*. English Puritans arrived by the boatload. The 1599 Edition of the Geneva Bible
was printed in Amsterdam and London in large quantities until well into the 17th
Century.

*At the time Geneva, was a city-state. Geneva did not become part of Switzerland
until 1815.

King James, before he became James I of England, made it plain that he had no use
for the "Dutch" rebel who had rebelled against their Spanish King.

Another of the ironies left us from the 16th Century is that freedom of religion and
freedom of the press did not originate in England, as many people commonly assume
today. Those freedoms were first given to Protestants by the Dutch, as the records of
that era plainly show. England today does not have freedom of the press the way we
understand it (There are things in England such as the Official Secrets Act that often
land journalists in jail.)

England was relatively peaceful in the time of Elizabeth I. There was the problem of
the Spanish Armada, but that was brief Elizabeth later became known as "Good
Queen Bess," not because she was so good, but because her successor was so bad.

Elizabeth died in 1603 and her cousin, James Stuart, son of Mary Stuart, who up until
that time had been King James VI of Scotland, ascended the throne and became
known as King James I of England.
James ascended the throne of England with the "divine right of kings" firmly
embedded in his mind. Unfortunately, that wasn't his only mental problem.

* In those days an "open city' was one in which the inhabitants were allowed to
believe in or print what they preferred

King James I, among his many other faults, preferred young boys to adult women. He
was a flaming homosexual. His activities in that regard have been recorded in
numerous books and public records; so much so, that there is no room for debate on
the subject.

The King was queer. The very people who use the King James Bible today would be
the first ones to throw such a deviant out of their congregations.

The depravity of King James I didn't end with sodomy. James enjoyed killing animals.
He called it "hunting." Once he killed an animal, he would literally roll about in its
blood. Some believe that he practiced bestiality while the animal lay dying.

James was a sadist as well as a sodomite: he enjoyed torturing people. While King of
Scotland in 1591, he personally supervised the torture of poor wretches caught up in
the witchcraft trials of Scotland. James would even suggest new tortures to the
examiners.

One "witch" Barbara Napier, was acquitted. That event so angered James that he
wrote personally to the court on May 10, 1591, ordering a sentence of death, and had
the jury called into custody. To make sure they understood their particular offense, the
King himself presided at a new hearing (which could hardly be called a trial) and was
gracious enough to release them without punishment when they reversed their verdict.

History has it that James was also a great coward. On January 7, 1591, the King was
in Edinburgh and emerged from the toll booth. A retinue followed that included the
Duke of Lennox and Lord Hume. They fell into an argument with the laird of Logie
and pulled their swords. James looked behind, saw the steel flashing, and fled into the
nearest refuge which turned out to be a skinner's booth. There, to his shame, he
"fouled his breeches in fear." 5

In short, King James I was the kind of despicable creature honorable men loathed,
Christians would not associate with, and the Bible itself orders to be put to death. 6

Knowing what King James was we can easily discern his motives.
James ascended the English throne in 1603. He wasted no time in ordering a new
edition of the Bible in order to deny the common people the marginal notes they so
valued in the Geneva Bible. That James I wasn't going to have any marginal notes to
annoy him and lead English citizens away from what he wanted them to think is a
matter of public record. In an account corrected with his own hand dated February 10,
1604, he ordained:

That a translation be made of the whole Bible, as consonant as can be to the original
Hebrew and Greek; and this to be set out and printed without any marginal notes, and
only to be used in all churches of England in time of divine service.

James then set up rules that made it impossible for anyone involved in the project to
make an honest translation, some of which follow:

1. The ordinary Bible read in the church, commonly called the Bishop's Bible to be
followed and as little altered as the truth of the original will permit.

Or, since the common people preferred the Geneva Bible to the existing government
publication, let's see if we can slip a superseding government publication onto their
bookshelves, altered as little as possible.

2. The old Ecclesiastical words to be kept, viz. the word "church" not to be translated
"congregation," etc.

That is, if a word should be translated a certain way, let's deliberately mistranslate it to
make the people think God still belongs to the Anglican Church - exclusively.

3. No marginal notes at all to be affixed, but only for the explanation of the Hebrew or
Greek words, which cannot without some circumlocution, so briefly and fitly be
expressed in the text.

James didn't want those pesky marginal notes cropping up, not even once. That was
fine for the common herd, but not for James' own bishops. Many of their writings and
sermons alluded to the Geneva Bible and its marginal notes decades after the King
James Bible was published.

The bishops had good reason to be confused. They needed those marginal notes.
James had just obliterated a procedure that kings and governments had used for
thousands of years. Because words and phrases quite often had several meanings all
important state or royal decrees, treaties, and agreements contained marginal
explanations or commentaries in order to remove all doubt from the mind of the
reader. In the 16th century those marginal notes were called "glosses." Today the
members of the legal profession use almost the same system in the form of footnotes
and case cites.

The King James Bible was finally printed in 1611. It was not technically a translation.
What the flunkies employed by King James did was revise and compare other
translations of which they simply plagiarized about 20% of the Geneva Bible. *

* Translations from one language to another almost never come out word-for word
identically.

In their New Testament translation, the King James "translators" didn't even revise
and compare. What they did was simply copy – almost word for word - William
Tyndales' 1525 New Testament. At the time of his translation Tyndales' New
Testament had been labeled as "seditious material" by Henry VIII and copies
discovered on ships reaching English ports were confiscated and destroyed. William
Warham, archbishop of Canterbury, even went so far as to buy all the copies he could
get in Europe in order to destroy them.

Tyndale was hounded from London to Cologne to Worms. He settled in Marburg

under the protection of Philip, landgrave of Hesse. Nobody messed with Big Phil.

Philip didn't care what anyone thought. If he felt like telling the emperor to "stuff it,"
he did. If neighboring royalty wanted to rumble, Philip showed up with troops. If
Philip decided one wife wasn't enough for him, he just took another one. In March of
1540, after Martin Luther and other prominent Protestant theologians had expressly
approved polygamy according to the Scriptures, Philip became Europe's best- known
bigamist.

Unfortunately, even Philip couldn't cope with treachery. Tyndale was betrayed by his
personal Judas, Henry Phillips. He was tried for heresy, condemned, strangled at the
stake, and his body afterwards burnt.

It is interesting to note that the Geneva Reformers- men such as John Calvin -
expressed opinions in the marginal notes that would be simply unacceptable to the
"scholars" of today. For example, the passage in Genesis 12:2-3, that reads:

"And I will make of thee a great nation, and will bless thee, and make thy name great,
and thou shalt be a blessing.I will also bless them that bless thee, and curse them that
curse thee, and in thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed."

Our ministers today tell us this refers to Jews. That isn't the way the Geneva
translators understood it:
The world shall recover by thy seed, which is Christ, the blessings that were lost in
Adam. 7

Twentieth century scholarly works, such as the Scofield Reference Bible, published
by Oxford University Press, hold that the 38th Chapter of Ezekiel refers to an invasion
of Jerusalem by Russian armies leading the Northern European powers. John Calvin
and his cohorts, who annotated the Geneva Bible, understood it a little differently:

Signifying all the people of the world should assemble themselves against the Church
and Christ their head. 8

The Reverend Scofield and his fellow "scholars" hold up Satan as some sort of
boogey-man. The Geneva translators, as in Psalm 109:6, simply translated the word,
"adversary." In Mark 8:33, Christ said to Peter, "Get thee behind me, Satan." The
Geneva translators understood exactly what the word meant and apparently didn't
figure anyone else would be dumb enough to equate Peter with the Evil One. On that,
the Geneva and King James translate the word the same.

James did not stop at censoring the Bible. He carried his "divine right of kings" to the
point that he dissolved Parliament. That institution was to James simply a
convenience he needed to raise money for his endless pursuit of pleasure and
depravity. When Parliament balked at his requests for money James dissolved it
Magna Carta and the liberties of Englishmen were mere frivolities in the mind of
James. As an illustration of the loathing and contempt Christians of that era held for
the government of James I, it is interesting to note that after the first bitter weather in
New England, when half their number were dead, not one of the Pilgrim survivors
wanted to be taken back to the England of James I aboard the Mayflower.

James' oldest son died and his second son, Charles, ascended to the throne after the
death of James I, Charles also believed in the "divine right of kings." By 1642,
English patience was at an end and civil war erupted. By 1649, the English Parliament
had had enough of Charles, who apparently believed that one of his "divine rights"
was to sign agreements and then break them any time he felt the urge. Charles was
beheaded. Oliver Cromwell took over the government.

Oliver Cromwell, of Celtic and Welsh ancestry, made the same basic mistake that
James I and his son, Charles, made. Cromwell believed, as James had professed to,
that governments were for the common wealth (good) and not the common will. He
tried to legislate moral codes that very few could handle. The prisons overflowed with
his critics. During his invasion of Ireland, he slaughtered enough women and children
to fill entire graveyard& Cromwell died in 1658. The English had had quite enough of
his form of government and acquired another king, Charles II.

The last run of Geneva Bibles was printed in 1644. That was the year John Milton was
invited to instruct the English Parliament on the actual teachings of the Bible
regarding divorce (it was allowed). What Milton understood that none of our modern
"experts" seem to was that "He who divorces his wife and marries another," was not a
prohibition of divorce, it was a prohibition against throw-away people. As John
Milton in his On Christian Doctrine and Martin Luther in his essay on Deuteronomy
21:15 pointed out, having more than one wife was Scriptural. You just weren't
supposed to throw them away when you got bored with them.

Four years after the last Geneva Bible was printed, the Thirty Years War (the last of
the great religious wars of Europe) ground to a halt. Millions had died. Germany was
so depopulated it took her two centuries to recover. The Reformation had survived. It
didn't survive for long.

After several generations of English speakers grew up without the stabilizing

influence of the Geneva marginal notes, the "interpret it any way you want" school of
thought came into fashion. The "charismatic" movement was in full swing by 1730.

A few men here and there tried to show people what the religion of their ancestors
actually was. A man named Ferrar Fenton published his own translation of the Bible
in 1906, complete with a history lesson at the beginning of each set of books in the
Bible. Another man named George Lamsa wrote "Idioms of the Bible Explained," and
tried to show the errors of the modem scholars. They were drowned by the works of
others.

Of course, there were those that went the other way. A backwoods preacher, Noah
Fredericks, wrote a book titled, Pilgrim Ships, in which he claimed the people of the
Old Testament came from outer space, Moses's rod was an electronic control used to
open a fortress (mistranslated, "rock"), Elijah introduced a path for current to flow
from the ionosphere to the ground in order to fry two platoons of Ahab's infantry, and
other theological positions that will probably never be taken seriously by anybody
(unfortunately).

During the 16th Century and the one preceding it, the Spanish Empire, a colossus
larger than the Roman Empire, had been unable to stamp out the Reformation with the
world's finest and most well equipped armies. The Spaniards needn't have bothered.
What the armies of Catholic Spain were unable to make a dent in, one sadistic
sodomite, James I, did with a pair of censoring scissors.
The Reformation, and the blood of millions who fought for it, apparently went for
nothing. Protestant churches of today hardly resemble the churches of the
Reformation.

Today's preachers study the Scofield Reference Edition of the King James, a volume
that contains marginal notes that would seem no more accurate to John Calvin and
John Knox than Mother Goose. The blind are once more leading the blind. This
reprinted edition of the 1599.

Geneva Bible is probably the last sputtering flame of the Reformation. The works of
John Milton, John Calvin, John Knox, George Buchanan, William Tyndale, and the
rest can still be found on the shelves in the public libraries. Such works are checked
out by uninterested college students on an average of about one volume every ten
years, no one in today's churches reads them.

Michael H. Brown - 1988

Footnotes:

1 Luther A, Weigle, The English New Testament, P.24. [back]

2 Otto J. Scott, James I, Passim [back]
3 lbid [back]
4 Ibid, p. 212 [back]
5 Ibid, p. 211 [back]
6 Leviticus, 20:13 [back]
7 Genesis 12:2 note c 1599 Geneva Bible [back]
8 Ezekiel 38:7. note e 1599 Geneva Bible [back]

http://www.tyndale.org/tsj21/daniell.html

Geneva Tyndale Conference Papers

The Geneva English Bible: The Shocking Truth

© David Daniell
A lecture given at the Geneva Tyndale Conference in October 2001. Professor
 Daniell’s pioneering material on the Geneva Bibles will appear in greater
detail in his forthcoming book The Bible in English: Its History and
Influence (Yale UP, 1 May 2003).

The Geneva New Testament, 1557.

After the Great Bible of 1539, the next newly prepared English New Testament was
printed in Geneva in June 1557. It marked both a great contrast to the Great Bible, and
— though at first it might not seem so today — a long stride forward.

For one thing, it is small, an octavo for the hand or pocket (roughly the size of a Prayer
Book in a church pew) as editions of the New Testament had been since Tyndale’s and
Coverdale’s over twenty years before. That made a contrast to Henry VIII’s original huge
folio Great Bible, or Matthew’s before that: but the contrast was not only in the pleasing
small size. It is also handsome. For the first time, an English bible text was printed not
in heavy ‘Gothic’ Black Letter in northern Europe by printers in Antwerp or London, but
in Switzerland, by Conrad Badius, the son of the master-printer of Paris, in a clean, clear
Roman, a French style also influenced by Italian printers trained in the more refined
humanist manner.[1] Its pages are uncluttered, the text ruled off with red lines, with
wide margins at the sides, top and bottom, giving an attractive sense of space. The paper
shows signs of having been carefully selected: some surviving copies remain unusually
fresh; one of the two copies in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and the copy in Lambeth
Palace Library, have paper of still remarkable whiteness, as no doubt do others. The
neat notes, an average of two per page, are in the outer margins in roman, with
occasional references in italic on inside margins. The thickest cluster of marginal notes
accompanies the opening chapters of Matthew’s Gospel. Some pages, even of the Epistle
to the Romans, have no notes at all. Also for the first time in an English Bible, while the
traditional markers A,B,C, and so on are retained in the margins, the text is divided into
numbered verses, following the Greek New Testament by Stephanus made in Geneva in
1551, ultimately from Pagninus’s edition of the Vulgate made at Lyon in 1527, though —
also for the first time in this 1557 New Testament — each verse starts a fresh line with its
number, whether it is the beginning a new sentence or not.[2] This again was new, for
the first time outside Latin or Greek. Again for the first time in an English Bible, words
not in the Greek, thought to be necessary additions for English clarity, are in italic.
The title page is another contrast to that of the Great Bible. Instead of announcing its
authority by declaring it to be the result of ‘the diligent study of diverse excellent learned
men, expert in the ... tongues’, it states:

The New Testament of our Lord Jesus Christ. Conferred diligently with the Greek, and best
approved translations. With the arguments, as well before the chapters, as for every Book
and Epistle, also diversities of readings, and most profitable annotations of all hard places:
whereunto is added a copious Table.

In other words, critical study is invited. Further, the title page does not announce
absolute royal power, as in the Great Bible, in the later Bishops’ Bibles, and in the first
KJV with massive constructions that block the entrance of the reader. It will be noticed
that there are no names, unlike the central panel of KJV, where King James and Robert
Barker are prominent. Here, inviting the reader in, is a small, simple engraving in the
middle of the page. It is in the manner of an emblem, showing Time leading Truth up
out of a cavern. Modern eyes are used to sixteenth-century Bible title pages being
architecturally organised for essential weight, with pillars and statues. The crowded title
page of Henry VIII’s Great Bible is dominated by the King (God, above him, has to
squeeze to get in) and his largesse in giving — in Latin, note — the Verbum Dei to the
inattentive people below. The title page of the King James Version of 1611 is essentially
an unbroken wall forbidding entrance, dominated partly by two judgmental saints, Peter
and Paul, but above all by the names of the King, James I, and the printer, Robert
Barker. For printers making an English New Testament in the 1550s, the new style for
this 1557 New Testament spoke strongly. This can be demonstrated. That very device
was the inspiration for a pageant held in Cheapside at the celebration of Elizabeth’s
succession. On 14 February 1558 the Queen proceeded to a place between two hills
where there had been contrived a cave with a door and a lock. At her approach an old
man, scythe in hand, and ‘having wings artificially made’, was seen to come forth. He
was leading

a person of lesser stature than himself, which was finely and well apparelled, all clad in
white silk, and directly over her head was set her name and title in Latin and
English, Temporis filia, the Daughter of Time. Which two so appointed went forward toward
the South-side of the pageant. And on her breast was written her proper name, which
was Veritas, Truth, who held a book in her hand upon which was written verbum veritas,
the word of Truth.

After a recitation by a small child ‘he reached the book to the Queen, who thereupon
kissed it, held it aloft for all to see, and so ‘laid it upon her breast, with great thanks to
the City therefor’ ... the Queen said that ‘she would often read over that book.’[3] One
might have difficulty thinking of the slightly-built Queen clutching a massive folio or
thick quarto and at the same time retaining her dignity. It is easy to contemplate that
little 1557 New Testament volume as it was being ‘laid ... upon her breast’.

1557 and Geneva were both the time and the place for a new English translation. For
twenty years, revisions of Olivetan’s French New Testament had been published in
Geneva, revised by Calvin and Genevan ministers, the latest in 1556. Italian exiles there
printed a revised Italian New Testament in 1555, on the way to a whole Bible. A revised
New Testament in Spanish was printed there in 1556. The last new English Bible had
been made, in England, eighteen years before, and that was Coverdale’s revision of his
work four years before that, nearly a quarter of century distant.

The first Geneva translators

After the coronation of Queen Mary on 19 July 1553, the great movement of Protestants
to the continent in January and February 1554 happened before the most serious
persecution got under way: the first burning, of John Rogers, maker of Matthew’s Bible,
took place on 4 February 1555. In the eighteen months before that martyrdom, the
migration was carefully organised. The dangers in England were real; the restrictions of
Protestants began within a few days of Mary’s accession. Before Mary died in November
1558 over three hundred Protestants had been burned alive in England.

The work of preparation of this New Testament was anonymous. So was the Preface,
which was less customary: evidence points to it being the singlehanded work of William
Whittingham, an English gentleman and Oxford scholar. A manuscript Life of
Whittingham in the Bodleian Library in Oxford tells of a group of ‘learned men’ in
Geneva meeting to ‘peruse’ the existing English versions of the New Testament (thus
making the first such revising committee in English Bible history.) The ‘learned men’
mentioned were indeed learned: Miles Coverdale; Christopher Goodman, another
Oxford man from Brasenose and then Christ Church, who had become Lady Margaret
Professor of Divinity; Anthony Gilbey; Thomas Sampson, from Oxford and Cambridge,
who went on to be Dean of Christ Church, Oxford — he had most recently been close to
the Hebrew scholar Immanuel Tremellius at Cambridge and Strasbourg; Dr William
Cole; and William Whittingham himself. They were possibly joined in committee by
John Knox, and certainly later for the whole Bible by William Kette (or Kethe), John
Baron, John Pullain, John Bodley and W. Williams.[4] Knox had been chosen as
minister from its first day by the English-speaking congregation at Geneva, but did not
arrive there until September 1556. He left for Scotland in 1557, but returned early in
1558, finally departing in January 1559, having received the freedom of the city of
Geneva.

If William Tyndale had survived, and gone to Geneva as a Marian exile in 1553 at the age
of 59 — not an impossibility — he would have found a city humming with Bible activity.
In many ways he would have been a happy man. Even more than in Antwerp, in his day
the northern centre of translating and printing Scripture, he would have found areas of
the city life of Geneva given to scholarship and fine printing (it is estimated that between
1550 and 1600 some two and a half thousand titles were printed in Geneva[5]). Much
more, he would have found a new university at the heart of the work: the Academy of
Geneva was formally inaugurated on 5 June 1555, with Theodore de Beze, or Beza, as its
first rector. Geneva’s new Reformed university, with its new fields of knowledge and
study, became rapidly famous for scholarly enterprise, which included the establishment
of good texts of classical writers of all kinds — Virgil, Cicero, even Catullus — and
translating them, as well as the Scriptures, into French, Italian and Spanish. Tyndale
would have been content to be a senior engineer in that powerhouse.
How much the ‘learned men’ who were in Geneva contributed to the New Testament (as
opposed to the whole Bible that followed) is unclear: there has been persistence in the
statement, certainly implied in the Preface, that one man, Whittingham, did it all alone.

Prefatory matter by Calvin and Whittingham

Not only is the whole work anonymous; but how much Calvin associated himself with
this New Testament, if he did at all, is also unclear. He apparently wrote an eight-page
introductory Epistle, declaring with good Epistle-to-the-Romans force ‘that Christ is the
end of the Law’, an important endorsement of this new work. Yet this Epistle Dedicatory
is a translation of a piece written twenty years before, and Calvin’s second published
work, his Preface (in Latin) to the New Testament in Olivetan’s Bible of 1535, the first
French Protestant Bible (Olivetan was Calvin’s cousin). The unsigned three page
address, probably by Whittingham, ‘To the Reader Mercy and peace through Christ our
Saviour’ echoes Tyndale’s Obedience of a Christian Man in its awareness of opposition
to the Bible, and of Jesus’s Parable of the Sower at Matthew 13, Mark 4 and Luke 8. It
continues:

For this cause we see that in the Church of Christ there are three kinds of men: some are
malicious despisers of the word, and graces of God, who turn all things into poison, and a
farther hardening of their hearts: others do not openly resist and contemn the Gospel,
because they are stroken as it were in a trance with the majesty thereof, yet either they
quarrel and cavil, or else deride and mock at whatsoever thing is done for the advancement
of the same. The third sort are the simple lambs, which partly are already in the fold of
Christ, and so hear willingly their Shepherd’s voice, and partly wandering astray by
ignorance, tarry the time till the Shepherd find them and bring them unto his flock. To this
kind of people, in this translation I chiefly had respect, as moved with zeal, counselled by
the godly, and drawn by occasion, both of the place where God hath appointed us to dwell,
and also of the store of heavenly learning and judgement, which so aboundeth in this city of
Geneva, that justly it may be called the patron and mirror of true religion and godliness.[6]

On his annotations, Whittingham (if he was the author) risks a boast:

I have endeavoured so to profit all [help everyone] thereby, that both the learned and
others might be holpen: for to my knowledge I have omitted nothing unexpounded,
whereby he that is exercised in the Scriptures of God, might justly complain of hardness ...
[7]

Indeed, so comprehensive has he been, that readers have no need of ‘the

Commentaries’. He is rightly proud of his ‘arguments the summaries of the contents at
the head of each book, or of the four Gospels together, made ‘with plainness and
brevity’[8] to be understood and remembered, which ‘may serve instead of a
Commentary to the Reader’.[9] The idea of such summaries was not new: Coverdale in
1535 had a page of ‘The first book of Moses, called Genesis what this book containeth’,
though only that page: Matthew’s Bible had in the preliminary leaves two large pages of
‘The sum and content of all the holy Scripture ...’. What was in this 1557 volume was
fresh.

The Geneva Bible, 1560

This compact volume, in size ‘a moderate quarto’,[10] with its excellent text generally
always in roman type, the numbered verses set out in two columns, had in addition what
amounted to an encyclopaedia of Bible information. It was very popular and successful
indeed. It was a masterpiece of Renaissance scholarship and printing, and Reformation
Bible-thoroughness.[11] Having been the people’s Bible in the later sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries, it was driven out by political and commercial interests from 1611,
and forced out of the public view from 1660. It was made an object of horror by the
Victorian High Church, which invented for it a myth of unacceptably total and
aggressive Calvinist colouring, not easy to refute as copies were scarce. That ‘shocking
truth’ is still kept alive, as is the notion that Geneva Bibles were popularly disliked
before 1600, for which there is no evidence. The value of this remarkable volume in all
its wealth, and all its editions, and all its influence, was reduced to a single schoolchild
snigger by referring to it only as ‘The Breeches Bible’, because in Genesis 3 Adam and
Eve are given ‘breeches’ (as in Wyclif and Caxton’s Golden Legend, incidentally) instead
of the KJV’s ‘aprons’.

The work of the Geneva Academy

The Academy of Geneva under Beza was based on the model established at Strasbourg.
The aim was the specialised one of educating men, in large numbers: a learned ministry
was always the goal of the reformers, in whatever country. The Academy began with 162
students, but five years later, in 1560, it had 1,500.[12]

The educational ideal was much broader than studying theology. The Strasbourg
Academy had nine faculties, Geneva many more: the academics there became what
would now be called ‘European leaders in a centre of excellence with best practice in
teaching and research right across the humanities.’ In the last decades of the sixteenth
century Geneva became for many distinguished Englishmen a necessary place in which
to study. Beza’s scholars were the ‘specialist experts’ in the ‘humane’ work of editing
ancient texts. The first texts that Calvin edited were classical, and his love for, and
knowledge of, the Greek and Roman writers, were profound. The weightiest work,
however, was the making of vernacular bibles from the best Hebrew and Greek texts.

The scholar-printers in Geneva — Robert Estienne, Conrad Badius, Jean Crespin, Jean
Girard, Nicholas Barbier, Thomas Courteau, Jean Rivery — made 22 French Bibles.
[13] This was the context in which there appeared in April 1560 the first English Geneva
Bible.

Geneva printing in English

Two, at least, of the English exiles were printers. One of them, Rowland Hall, an original
member of the Stationers’ Company in London, set up his press in Geneva in 1558. One
of the ministers of the English Church at Geneva was the Hebrew scholar Anthony
Gilbey. Another scholar was Thomas Sampson. William Whittingham, New Testament
translator, was there. Miles Coverdale received permission to settle in Geneva in
October 1558. The ‘simple lambs’ on the continent and in England, so helped by
Whittingham’s New Testament, surely needed a complete Bible on the same model. It
was begun a few months after the 1557 New Testament was published and continued, we
are told, ‘for the space of two years and more day and night’.[14]

So the first Geneva Bible was made, printed by Hall in Geneva on his press in April
1560. The costs of the making were borne by the English congregation generally, and by
one member in particular, the wealthy merchant John Bodley, whose son Thomas would
later found the Bodleian Library at Oxford. Though Queen Mary had died on 17
November 1558, and all over the continent exiles (said to number 800 in total during
Mary’s reign) returned to Protestant England under Good Queen Bess, some of the men
who made the Geneva Bible remained there until it was completed in April 1560 —
[15] probably Whittingham, Gilbey and Sampson, and probably Cole, Kethe and Baron.
An early copy was presented to the Queen.

This remarkable volume, ‘the first great achievement in Elizabeth’s reign’,[16] printed in

London and in Edinburgh after 1575, and always in large quantities, became at once the
Bible of the English people. It remained so, through 140 editions — editions, not simple
reprintings — before 1644. The New Testament was revised by Laurence Tomson in
1576, and new notes by ‘Junius’ replaced those to Revelation in 1599. In 1610, fifty years
after the first making, all three versions were in full printing flood, 120 editions of all
sizes having been made. It seemed that nothing would stop them. The translators
working for King James after 1604, aiming ‘to make a good one, better’ referred to the
Geneva versions, and in that wonderful long Preface to KJV, ‘The Translators to the
Reader’, quoted Scripture almost always from a Geneva Bible. But politics ruled. Even
the inception, in January 1604, of the 1611 KJV was a political act by reactionary bishops
against Geneva Bibles. As will be seen, the large printing of that ‘King James’ version, in
spite of its immediate unpopularity, was organised in order to push out the Geneva
Bibles. Ugly and inaccurate quarto editions of the Geneva Bible, all falsely dated 1599,
were printed in Amsterdam, and possibly elsewhere in the Low Countries, up to 1640,
and smuggled into England and Scotland against Establishment wishes. The last with
full text and notes in England was printed in 1644. Between 1642 and 1715, eight
editions of KJV were published with Geneva notes, seven of them in folio, and two of
them in one year (1679), statistics which tell their own story.

The influence of the Geneva Bible is incalculable. Before the London printings, it was
freely in England in large enough numbers to stir Archbishop Parker into initiating his
rival Bishops’ Bible in 1568. For over fifty years it was sometimes second to that in
Anglican pulpits and on Anglican lecterns. Even so, a study of more than fifty sermons
by bishops between 1611 and 1630, including Andrewes, the chief of the KJV revisers,
and Laud, the enemy of all things evangelical, shows that in twenty-seven sermons the
preacher took his text from the Geneva version, and only in five from the Bishops’.
[17] Of the remaining twenty-odd, only about half quote from KJV, and half seem to
have made their own version.[18]

The Geneva Bible was, however, the Bible of the English and the Scots at home, and in
local reading-groups and ‘prophesyings’. What arrived in April 1560, and was rapidly
developed, was the first complete study guide to the Bible in English, intended to
illuminate at every point. In Scotland, the Edinburgh ‘Bassandyne Bible’ of 1579, the
first Bible printed in Scotland, a straight reprint of the first Geneva Bible in folio, made
in 1561, was ordered to be in each parish kirk. It was dedicated to ‘Prince James’ — so
much for his reported claim at the Hampton Court Conference in 1604 that he had only
recently been shown a copy.

The triumph of the Geneva Old Testament text (and Apocrypha), can be shown in detail
to be based on Coverdale’s revisions in the Great Bible, but now with corrections from
the Hebrew and Latin, freshly compared with Leo Juda’s Latin version made in Zurich
in 1543, and other helps — Geneva was rich in resources — particularly Olivetan’s
frequently revised French Bible, from the 1559 revision of which the ‘Arguments’ before
Job and Psalms were directly translated. The Geneva translators’ aim, successfully
achieved, was to reproduce what the original says from Genesis to Malachi. It is more
important to note that the KJV translators’ denial of marginal notes removed at a stroke
that essential element of understanding Hebrew, the openness to engagement, the in-
and-out movement between literal sense and meaning, the many kinds of explanations,
which the Geneva annotators so constantly used. Often the best that King James’s
workers could do was to lift ‘the literal Hebrew phrase from Geneva’s margin into its
own text’.[19] Gerald Hammond writes:

These notes [in the Geneva Old Testament margins], constantly explaining and interpreting,
have a significant effect upon the nature of the translation. Because the translators could
always use them to clear up ambiguities, explain obscurities, and fill in ellipses, it meant
that the actual translation could afford to retain, to a great degree, the ambiguities,
obscurities, and ellipses of the original. While the margin is specific and discursive, the text
can stand as an evocatively simple rendering of the Hebrew images and metaphors.[20]

Hammond’s fifty pages of examination of the Geneva translators at work with the
Hebrew remain the best introduction to the subject.[21]

For what has often been overlooked is that the Geneva scholars translated the poetic and
prophetic books of the Old Testament into English from Hebrew for the first time.
Working from Genesis to 2 Chronicles, they had, besides Coverdale’s two versions, the
translations of Tyndale directly from Hebrew. But Coverdale thereafter, from Job to
Malachi, half the Old Testament, did not translate from Hebrew.

The gain in the sense of Hebrew idiom in English is startling. In the Geneva Old
Testament there are more notes in the poetic and prophetic books than in the narrative
histories and laws. Here the Geneva translators show two advantages. First, the sheer
strangeness of Hebrew poetry needs interpretative help if it is to mean anything in
English, and they have felt free to use whatever kind of comment is best. Sometimes the
literal meaning is in the text, and metaphor is in the margin, and sometimes the other
way round — but in both cases the strategy is made clear. The KJV panels deserve
commendation in their frequent preservation of Geneva’s richness of internal Scriptural
reference. (The Geneva translators did not, of course, invent cross-referring; but they
developed it.) This makes it all the more depressing that the KJV panels so dogmatically
dropped all the Geneva notes.
The other advantage that the Geneva translators took for their poetic and prophetic
books was the division into verses. Paragraphs suited Tyndale’s excellent understanding
of Hebrew narrative drive. Hebrew poetry works differently. The complex and
cumulative imagery, and above all the parallelisms, are more than weakened if printed
as a paragraph.

Additional matter

Almost every chapter begins with a brief summary, numbered to verses, longer in the
New Testament. Each Old Testament book begins with a quite extensive precis, ‘The
Argument’. (It is not explained why Whittingham’s fine New Testament ‘Arguments’
were dropped.) Titles run across the top of every page, and summaries of every column.
Books begin with an ornamental letter. There are pages of tables and concordances.
There are maps, one at the beginning large, across a double page, and full of detail,
followed, or enclosed, by a two-page ‘Description of CANAAN and the bordering
Countries.’ The map presumes close and lengthy attention. Some pages later, a half-page
map of a large area north of the Gulf, with a long note, explains ‘The Situation of the
Garden of Eden.’ Before the New Testament is a map of the Holy Land. In Exodus and
elsewhere, woodcut illustrations are inset where what is being described is particularly
baffling, like the fittings of the Tabernacle or the clothing of the priests. At the beginning
of 1 Kings, there are effectively five pages of pictures of, or relating to, the Temple. In
1560, the first edition had twenty-six engravings. In other words, the commonly
repeated observation that there are no illustrations in Geneva Bible is not true.

The preliminary matter in later editions can fill many pages, including thirty-two pages
of charts of the genealogies of the patriarchs. Many editions begin with the full Book of
Common Prayer, including, as standard, all the Psalms in Coverdale’s translation. So,
between the covers, the complete Psalms appear three times: at the front, as Coverdale
made them, in the Prayer Book; in the middle, as the Geneva translators made them;
and at the end, as Sternhold and Hopkins made them.

The first edition began with an Epistle to the Queen, and an address, ‘To our beloved in
the Lord the brethren of England, Scotland, Ireland &c ‘, both dated ‘From Geneva. 10.
April 1560.’ The address is an expanded version of Whittingham’s to his New Testament.
[22] Later editions added a twopage address ‘To the Christian Reader’, a poem and a
prayer, and a full-page scheme of ‘How to take profit in reading of the Holy Scripture’.

The 1560 Geneva Bible has 33 illustrations, most of which went forward into most
following editions: some later editions varied this.[23] Two of these are title page
emblems, and five are maps four of them being spread over two pages. The rest are to
illuminate details in the Tabernacle or Temple, or of the visions of Ezekiel, again one
being spread over two pages. The intention is edification rather than titillation: unlike
other Bibles of the time, there are no jolly pictures of a half-clad Potiphar’s wife reaching
out to catch the coat of a fleeing Joseph, of David watching Bathsheba bathing, or a
naked Susannah being spied on by lascivious elders.[24]
Between 1568 and the last printed in 1715 (a KJV with Geneva notes), it was precisely
the Geneva Bible which carried the tradition forward. Tyndale’s Pentateuch had
pictures, and his 1534 New Testament had a heavily illustrated Revelation. Continental
Bibles were often lavishly illustrated. What historians should have noted is that there
are no illustrations in the 1611 KJV, nor in the 1610 Douai Bible. The Reformation
interest in pictures in Bibles became pushed to one side into the making of Children’s
Bibles.[25]

The Geneva Bible notes

Throughout this volume the margins make what can best be described as a running
commentary on the whole Bible. It has been commonplace among historians that the
Geneva Bible had to be replaced in 1611, or was later absolutely to be rejected, because
of the ‘unacceptable Calvinism’ of its notes. Nineteenth and twentieth-century rejection
of the ‘objectionable Calvinism’ ignored the Elizabethan theological context, when
Elizabeth’s court read Calvin, when the nation followed Calvin in much of its theology
(as in the Book of Common Prayer, particularly the Thirty-Nine Articles), its philosophy
and literature, as did Sidney, Spenser and Shakespeare — Hamlet demands Calvin’s
help in understanding the play.[26] It is important to recognise two things: first, that in
sixteenth-century England Calvin’s emphasis on the word, living with the emphasis on
the Word, contributed to the liberation of poetry, and particularly the flowering of
drama; and second, that Calvin was not a ‘Calvinist’. Many of the fiercer doctrines were
later developments. (What happened in South Africa throughout the twentieth century,
in social deeds originating in the beliefs of the Dutch Reformed Church, should not be
laid at the door of the Calvin of the Institutes.) Under Elizabeth, the works of John
Calvin were much printed and bought. A translator of his sermons, Arthur Golding, first
gave the world Ovid’s complete Metamorphoses in English verse (plundered by
Shakespeare) in Calvin’s colours.

Ignorance of the period making the Geneva Bible ‘unacceptable’ because it is ‘Calvinist’
is one thing: distorting the Geneva Bible itself is quite another. Everyone knows that the
Geneva marginal notes are ‘bitter’ and ‘regrettable’. Like most things that everyone
knows, it is plain wrong.

The later history of the Geneva Bible

In histories written in the last 150 years, with some rare exceptions, the Geneva Bible
has generally been treated briefly, if mentioned at all, and condemned. A complete list of
such dismissals and omissions would be a long, sad and depressing revelation of
ignorance or bias. It was too shockingly Calvinist for the British, who wisely rejected it.
The overwhelming evidence is of overwhelming popularity at every level of British life.
In 1868 and 1905, Bishop Westcott and W. A. Wright observed of the Geneva ‘marginal
commentary ... if slightly tinged with Calvinistic doctrine, [it is] on the whole neither
unjust nor illiberal.’

Let us look for a moment at the ‘failure’. In 1610, when it was fifty years old, it was, in
three versions, apparently unstoppable. The publication figures show the opposite of
‘failure’. It was the Bible of the poets, politicians and preachers, even anti-’puritan’
preachers like Laud.

Distortion began with the report of King James’s seemingly hostile remarks at his
Hampton Court Conference in 1604. At that conference there was apparently agreed
denunciation of the badness of the Geneva Bibles. Closer observation reveals the heavy
bias of the official reporter, Richard Bancroft, Bishop of London. Already noted was the
Victorian reduction of this masterpiece of Renaissance and Reformation scholarship to a
snigger in the term ‘Breeches Bible’, still current. The Victorian hostility to this version
can be further shown.

Virginia Woolf ’s father, Sir Leslie Stephen, whose multi-volume Dictionary of National

Biography, became, with the Oxford English Dictionary, the eighth and ninth wonders
of the world is not without blame. Some of the biographical essays in Sir
Leslie’s DNB revealed, to put it mildly, marked bias: Two of the worst entries, not
previously noted, are those by ‘Miss Bradley’ about the Marian exiles who made the
Geneva Bible. Christopher Goodman is ‘said to have become Lady Margaret Professor of
Divinity’. ‘Said to have become?’ That is like saying ‘Mary Tudor is said to have become
Queen of England’. The ‘violence’ of his ‘very acrimonious tracts ... was generally
disapproved.’ On his commentary on Amos, ‘so bitter was the feeling’ that Goodman ‘did
not dare to return’. For this extraordinary statement, no evidence is given: her case is
weakened by the absence of any record of any such commentary, by Goodman or anyone
else. There is no mention of all his work on the Geneva Bible. It does get ten words in
her entry on Anthony Gilbey, described as ‘one of the most acrimonious and illiberal
writers ...’ of ‘two original works of bitter invective.’ ‘Bitter’ is used of Thomas Sampson,
though there, as in the entries for William Cole and William Kethe, the Geneva Bible is
ignored. This is all in the supposedly standard reference work, DNB.

Readers in later ages need not feel smug, however. The hostility to the Geneva Bible
persists. It is possible to accumulate pages of references to books (and broadcasts) in
which what has become the standard negative description is stated, or in which the
Geneva Bible and its massive popularity have been omitted. Here, to avoid tedium, are
but two random examples from the later twentieth century. A useful survey published in
1992, dealing thoroughly under the heading of ‘Reformation-era English translations’,
with Wyclif, Tyndale, Coverdale, Matthew’s, the Great Bible, KJV and so on, even
discussing the fragments from William Roye, and official failed attempts, makes
absolutely no mention whatsoever of any Geneva Bible.[27]

The few lines about the Geneva Bible in a popular history of the English Bible published
in 1996 conclude with the remark, ‘Its notes and commentary, for all their scholarliness,
were peppered with barbs and ill will.’[28] ‘Peppered’ is simply untrue.

Hebrew into English for the first time

Most significant is the most sophisticated element of all in the 1560 complete Bible.
Here, in the second half of the Old Testament, is the translation into English of the
twenty-five books after the end of 2 Chronicles, for the first time directly with reference
to the Hebrew.

How this important fact has been allowed to be obscured is an enigma. The Geneva
translators used the Hebraist Tyndale closely for the first half of the Old Testament.
Throughout, they had an eye to Coverdale in his own 1535 Bible, as transmitted also
through Matthews Bible of 1537, and the revision of it that he made into Henry Vlll’s
Great Bible. But Coverdale knew no Hebrew. Attempts to challenge his own statement
and show that he did, all fail, and quickly. The books from Ezra to Malachi were
translated from the Hebrew into English by no one else before 1560. Christopher
Goodman, Anthony Gilbey and their colleagues were first. They were, it is now clear,
exceptional Hebrew scholars. They were the first to use at first hand the Hebrew
commentary of David Kimshi, followed in those readings in many places in KJV.
[29] They had also a remarkable, almost Tyndalian, grasp of English; the knowledge to
use available helps in at least five languages (Aramaic, Latin, Greek, German and
French); and the ability to work fast. Why are they not better known?

A translation of Hebrew poetry demands marginal notes. The impression given by the
authorities who insisted that they be absent (from the Great Bible, the Bishops’ Bible
and KJV) is that they are political and ‘bitter’, and only political and ‘bitter’. This
judgement is passed down, still, from writer to modern writer, obviously without any of
them having studied even a page.

A faithful translation of Hebrew poetry deals in ellipses and ambiguities, and downright
obscurities. The margins can make plain, and can also open up. There can be — and in
the Geneva Bible there was — a continual and fruitful dialogue between text and
margins. The KJV’s occasional printing of the literal sense of a Hebrew metaphor is not
adequate. Stripping away Geneva’s marginal notes to the prophets can produce in a
reader of KJV a nearly total lack of understanding, something often close to gibberish,
though one has not been encouraged to say so.

An example of purely factual help, entirely as KJV fell open at random, is Hosea 12:11.

Is there iniquity in Gilead? surely they are vanity: they sacrifice bullocks in Gilgal; yea, their
altars are as heaps in the furrows of the fields.

Read out at Morning Prayer, those words might not convey very much. The Geneva text
is identical, except that it italicises only the second are, and gives the final word as
‘field’. Whereas, however, the margin of KJV has cross-references to 4:15 and 9:15,
which are simply to the presence of ‘Gilgal’ in the text, the Geneva margin has:

The people thought that no man durst have spoken against Gilead, that holy place, and yet
the Prophet sayeth, that all their religion was but vanity.

The poetic and prophetic books which make up those twenty-five are for the most part
in Hebrew which is difficult to very difficult. Even so, half a century later the work of
Goodman and Gilbey and the others was good enough to be taken forward into KJV,
when King James’s revisers were not following the inferior Bishops’ Bible. Four entire
centuries later, their work was good enough to be the basis of quite a number of modern
versions.

Enough has been written perhaps barely to suggest the wonderful richness of Geneva’s
Old Testament. Britain was truly blessed in the men who made it. They make a notable
contrast with the experience of KJV. The first two and a quarter pages of KJV are to
modern eyes almost unbearably oleaginous flattery of ‘The Most High and Mighty
Prince James, by the Grace of God, King of Great Britain, France and Ireland, Defender
of the Faith, Etc’, extending even to naming him, doubly erroneously, with one meaning
blasphemous, ‘Author of the work’. Such oil and butter were lacking from the dedication
of the Geneva Bible to Queen Elizabeth. Ever after, that odd fellow James lives on
everyone’s lips, as the 1611 version has carried his name, particularly in America, where
he is often raised to impossible authorship of the translation and to an even more
impossible sainthood. The makers of the 1560 Geneva Bible remain out of sight, in the
shadows. We are not even certain how many, or who, they were. They were clearly fine
Hebrew scholars. There seem to have been not many of them, perhaps no more than two
or three Hebraists. Their sense of ministry, of what ‘the lambs’ needed, and in what kind
of English, was strong. They did all their work in three years

Isaiah 40 as an example

There is space here for only one fuller illustration of their excellence. Isaiah chapter 40
is the beginning of the words of an unknown prophet, a poet and man of genius, whose
name or details we do not know, except that he was with the people in captivity in
Babylon. From the position of his writing, chapters 40-55 in Isaiah, he is named most
prosaically ‘Second Isaiah’, or ‘Deutero-Isaiah’. What follows here is the Geneva Bible
rendering of the first eleven verses of Isaiah 40 and then some of the remaining twenty
in the chapter, with a selection of the marginal notes. Tyndale did not live to translate
any of the poetic books — Job, Psalms, or the prophets (except Jonah). The last time
these verses had appeared in English had been in Miles Coverdale’s revision for the
Great Bible of 1539 of his Bible of 1535, made from five contemporary versions:
Coverdale knew no Hebrew. This is the first time that these words have been in English
direct from the Hebrew. Moreover, Coverdale had written in long paragraphs. The
Geneva translators both numbered the verses and separated them out, so that
Hebrewpoetry- in-English is immediately visible, and even audible. Moreover again, it is
English poetry that these undeclared translators, working in a room in a house
somewhere in Geneva, achieved. ‘The crooked shall be straight, and the rough places
plain’ is not only accurate to the Hebrew but it is fine English, in rhythm, and in the
increasing chime of the parallel words ‘crooked — rough’/ ‘shall ... straight’/ ‘places
plain’. Not for nothing did Handel’s librettist, the gifted Jennens, working with these
words as they had been taken over almost exactly into KJV, understand how well the
verses would go with music, nor Handel fail to set them, in Messiah, so that many
people cannot hear them without also hearing tenor solo, choir and orchestra. But the
point is the musical poetry, and that it is here in the Geneva Bible in English for the first
time, and for the first time, directly from the Hebrew.
Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, will your God say.

2 Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is
accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned: for she hath received of the Lord’s hand
double for all her sins.

3 A voice crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord: make straight in the
desert a path for our God.

4 Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the
crooked shall be straight, and the rough places plain.

5 And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together: for the
mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.

6 A voice said, Cry. And he said, What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the grace
thereof is as the flower of the field.

7 The grass withereth, the flower fadeth, because the Spirit of the Lord bloweth upon it:
surely the people is grass.

8 The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.

9 O Zion, that bringest good tidings, get thee up into the high mountain: O Jerusalem,
that bringeth good tidings, lift up thy voice with strength: lift it up, be not afraid: say
unto the cities of Judah, Behold, your God. ...

11 He shall feed his flock like a shepherd: he shall gather the lambs with his arm, and
carry them in his bosom, and shall guide them with young. ...

18 To whom will ye liken God? Or what similitude will ye set upon him? ...

22 He sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as
grasshoppers, he stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a
tent to dwell in.

23 He bringeth the princes to nothing, and maketh the judges of the earth, as vanity. ...

26 Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who hath created these things, and bringeth
out their armies by number, and calleth them all by names? by the greatness of his
power and mighty strength nothing faileth.

27 Why sayest thou, O Jacob, and speakest, O Israel, My way is hid from the Lord, and
my judgement is passed over my God?
28 Knowest thou not? or hast thou not heard, that the everlasting God, the Lord hath
created the ends of the earth? he neither fainteth, nor is weary: there is no searching of
his understanding.

29 But he giveth strength unto him that fainteth, and unto him that hath no strength, he
increaseth power.

30 Even the young men shall faint, and be weary, and the young men shall stumble and
fall.

31 But they that wait upon the Lord, shall renew their strength: they shall lift up the
wings as the eagles: they shall run, and not be weary, and they shall walk, and not faint.

The first marginal note, to ‘Comfort ye’, is

This is a consolation for the Church, assuring them that they shall be never destitute of
Prophets, whereby he exhorteth the true ministers of God that then were, and those also
that should come after him, to comfort the poor and afflicted, and to assure them of their
deliverance both of body and soul.

Five notes later, to ‘Prepare ye the way of the Lord’, is:

Meaning Cyrus and Darius which should deliver Gods people out of captivity, and make
them a ready way to Jerusalem: and this was fully accomplished, when John the Baptist
brought tidings of Jesus Christ’s coming, who was the true deliverer of his Church from sin
and Satan, Matthew 3.3.

Two notes later, to ‘All flesh shall see it together’, is:

This miracle shall be so great, that it shall be known through all the world.

The final note to the chapter, out of 32, against ‘Even the young men shall faint’, is

They that trust in their own virtue, & do not acknowledge that all cometh of God.

What the chapter is about is the power of God, the sovereignty of God, the impossibility
of ‘figuring’ the scale of him, as the heading to the Geneva page has it, and yet his
concern for his people cosmically, strategically and personally. This is the point of the
Hebrew now in English. This is the point of the Geneva Bible.

Gerald Hammond, the wisest writer on the Geneva Old Testament, observed of it that it
was so good that it might reasonably have stood as the definitive English version, as the
KJV was destined to do for three hundred years.[30] There is indeed something
shocking about the Geneva English Bible. It is not its Calvinism, which in the theology of
the supremacy of the sovereignty of God is its glory: nor its supposed failure, which is a
lie. What is shocking is, from 1611, the systematic destruction of it for political, and
above all, crude commercial, reasons.
It could never, however, be destroyed. Now, apart from some copies in private hands or
specialist libraries, it only exists with the full notes for twenty- first century readers in
two modern facsimiles (of the 1560 and 1602 editions) both also generally confined to
libraries, and the first of them long out of print.[31] But it is still alive. So much of it
went, flatly against King James’s wishes, into the KJV, a story still untold. It affected our
greatest writers, Shakespeare and Milton. It lit the beacon of liberty in the English
seventeenth century. Its notes were even added to seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury
KJVs. The Geneva Bible was ‘killed’: but it is alive.

Tyndale, on an early page in his Obedience of a Christian Man, wrote about the power of
God. He explained how the enemies of Christ had the power to arrest Christ, to put him
on trial and condemn him to death, with the whole might of Roman and Jewish law, and
crucify him.

Finally when they had done all they could and that they thought sufficient, and when Christ
was in the heart of the earth and so many bills and poleaxes about him, to keep him down,
and when it was past man’s help: then holp God. When man could not bring him again,
God’s truth fetched him again.[32]

Notes and References (Endnotes)

For the first time, that is, apart from Exodus, Leviticus and Deuteronomy
[1]
in Tyndale’s 1530 Pentateuch.
‘The Hebrew Old Testament had long been divided into verses, but not
chapters; the New Testament into chapters, not verses. The compilation of
[2] dictionaries and concordances led inevitably to chapter and verse divisions
in both by the 1550s.’ (Gerald Hammond, The Making of the English Bible,
(Manchester, 1982), 238).
John Nichols, The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen
[3]
Elizabeth (1823), l. 35.
[4] Christina H. Garrett, The Marian Exiles (CUP, 1938), passim.
Paul Chaix, Alain Dufour and Gustave Moeckli, Les Livres Imprimes a
[5]
Geneve de 1550 a1600 (1959).
[6] Printed in A. W. Pollard Records of the English Bible (OUP, 1911), 275-6.
[7] Pollard, 277.
[8] Pollard, 278.
[9] Pollard, 277.
B.F. Westcott, A General View of the History of the English Bible, 3rd.
[10]
edit. revised W. A. Wright (Macmillan, 1905), 93.
[11] The best general account remains the 28 pages of introduction by Lloyd
E. Berry to the facsimile of the 1560 Geneva Bible published by the
University of Wisconsin Press in 1969. Thorough as he was, Berry
remarked how much remained to be done; little has changed since 1969.
 Lewis Lupton left unfinished at his death in 1995 his 25-volume, lavishly
illustrated but curiously produced, The History of the Geneva Bible (The
Olive Tree Press, 1968 foll.): though one commends the intention, the title
is misleading, as a great deal of pre-Reformation and Reformation
English Bible material is described volume by volume, not always
accurately.
Euan Cameron, The European Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press
[12]
1991), 394-5.
Berry, 7. See also Paul Chaix, Alain Dufour and Gustave Moeckli, Les
[13]
Livres Imprimes a Geneve de 1550 a 1600 (1959).
[14] Pollard, 280.
Some evidence from a letter from Miles Coverdale to William Cole:
[15]
Alexander, ii, and Mozley, Coverdale, 316.
Gerald Hammond, The Making of the English Bible (Manchester:
[16]
Carcanet Press, 1982), 89.
See Randall T.Davidson, ‘The Authorisation of the English
[17]
Bible’, Macmillan’s Magazine, xliv (1881), 436-444.
[18] Randall T Davidson, quoted by Berry, 19.
[19] Hammond, 101.
[20] Hammond, 106
[21] Hammond, chapters 4 and 5, pp. 89-136.
[22] It is reprinted in Pollard, 279-83.
The 1602 folio edition, for example, has a dozen illustrations in the early
[23]
chapters of Exodus.
See Ruth B. Bottigheimer, The Bible for Children: From the Age of
[24] Gutenberg to the Present (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1996), 116
foll.
[25] Bottigheimer, passim.
Alan Sinfield, ‘Hamlet’s Special Providence’, Shakespeare Survey, 33,
[26]
(1980), 89-97.
R.H.Worth Jr., Bible Translations: A History through Source
Books (Jefferson NC, 1992). In a small-print note ‘Breeches Bibles’ are
[27]
mentioned in a collection of ‘Singular Renderings’: otherwise there is no
mention at all.
Mary Metzner Tramell and William G.Dawley, The Reforming Power of
[28] the Scriptures (Boston, Mass.: The Christian Science Publishing Society
1996), 163.
Berry, 11. See David Daiches, The King James Version (1941), 179 foll.
[29]
For their translation methods see David Alexander, 100-175.
[30] Hammond, 137.
 Berry, op. cit; and The Geneva Bible: The Annotated New Testament,
[31] 1602 edition, ed. by Gerald T. Sheppard (New York: The Pilgrim Press,
1989)
[32] Tyndale, The Obedience of a Christian Man (Penguin Classics, 2000), 5.