The Bishops’ Bible

Every other English Bible in this sequence was made by hunted men. This one was made by bishops, in comfort, with a queen’s portrait on its title page.

It is the least loved of the sixteenth-century versions and the easiest to dismiss. It never displaced the Geneva Bible in a single English home. Its original renderings, as one critic put it, stand neglected on the disused pages of the Bishops’ version and on the pages of that version only.

And yet it matters more than its reputation suggests, for one reason: when the King James translators sat down in 1607, the Bishops’ Bible was the text they were instructed to revise. Every page of the Authorized Version begins here.

Elizabeth and the Two Bibles

When Elizabeth passed through London at her accession in 1558, the city greeted her with pageants. At the Little Conduit in Cheapside an old man appeared with scythe and wings — Father Time — leading his daughter Truth, who carried an English Bible inscribed Verbum Veritatis, the Word of Truth, and delivered it to the Queen.

“But she, as soon as she had received the book, kissed it,” and thanking the city for the gift said she would often read it over — to the great comfort, the account adds, of the lookers-on.¹

Elizabeth was on the whole consistent with that gesture. She never displayed the religious zeal the more ardent Reformers hoped for, but she left the circulation of the Scriptures open and uncontrolled. In 1559 she enacted, as Edward VI had done, that one book of the whole Bible of the largest volume in English should be set up in every parish. The following year she accepted the dedication of the Bible produced by the exiles at Geneva.

That left England with two Bibles and a problem.

The Great Bible was the official version, set in the churches by royal injunction since 1539. The Geneva Bible of 1560 was better — better in scholarship, better in style, cheap and portable, and rapidly becoming the Bible of the English household. Its superiority could not be contested.

But it came out of Calvin’s city, and it came with notes. The successors of Cromwell and Cranmer could not reasonably be expected to look with favor on a Bible from the school of Geneva carrying, as they saw it, so many prejudicial annotations.²

So the establishment faced a version it could not endorse and could not answer. The old project of a translation made by the bishops was revived to fill the gap.

Parker’s Commission

Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, was himself a scholar and took up the task with interest. Milligan dates the beginning of his effort to about 1563–64.

His method was simple and, as it turned out, the source of the version’s central weakness. He sorted the whole Bible into parcels and distributed them among qualified scholars — most of whom either were or became bishops, which gave the version its name — to peruse and collate. He exercised a general supervision, but there does not appear to have been any organized system of collaboration or revision, and the results were naturally unequal.³

Two instructions governed the work, and both deserve attention:

• The revisers were “to follow the common English translation used in the churches” — the Great Bible — “and not to recede from it, but where it varieth manifestly from the Hebrew or Greek original.”
• They were “to make no bitter notes upon any text, or yet to set down any determination in places of controversy.”

The second instruction is the whole answer to Geneva in a single sentence, and it is worth saying that it is not a foolish rule. A Bible for reading aloud in a parish church, to a congregation containing every shade of opinion in the realm, has a genuine reason to avoid a margin that settles contested questions for the reader. The same instinct produced the far better rule James gave his translators forty years later.

The first instruction is the problem. It bound the revisers to a text that was itself a revision of a revision, made by Coverdale from Münster and Erasmus, and it bound them to change it as little as possible — at the very moment when a demonstrably superior version lay open on the table in front of them.

The Men and Their Letters

The letters the revisers sent back to Parker survive, and they are the most revealing documents connected with this Bible.

Bishop Parkhurst of Norwich pledged to travel in the work with such diligence and expedition as he might. Bishop Sandys thought Parker would do well to have the whole Bible diligently surveyed by some well-learned man before it went to press — advice that was not taken, and that would have saved the version much of its unevenness.

Bishop Cox expressed a hope that any translator would recognize:

Such usual words as we English people be acquainted with might still remain in their form and sound, so far forth as the Hebrew will well bear. Ink-horn terms to be avoided.⁴ Bishop Cox

That is exactly right, and it makes what follows harder to explain. The same bishop proposed that the verbs in the Psalms should all be translated uniformly in one tense — flattening Hebrew verbal aspect for the sake of a consistency the original does not have.

Bishop Guest and the Psalter

And then there is the letter that ought to be read by every preacher who handles an Old Testament quotation in the New.

The Psalter had been assigned to Bishop Guest of Rochester. Writing to apologize for his “rude handling” of it, he explained his governing principle:

Where in the New Testament one piece of a Psalm is reported, I translate it in the Psalms according to the translation thereof in the New Testament, for the avoiding of the offence that may rise to the people upon divers translations.⁵ Bishop Guest

Read that again. Where an apostle quotes a psalm, Guest translated the psalm to match the apostle’s quotation — not because the Hebrew warranted it, but so that ordinary people would not be troubled by finding the two places worded differently.

Dr. Plumptre’s comment is the right one, and it has lost none of its edge:

The principle of pious frauds, of distorting the truth for the sake of edification, has perhaps often been acted on by other translators. It has not often been so explicitly avowed. Dr. Plumptre

The pastoral point is worth drawing out, because the temptation did not die in 1568. The apostles frequently quote the Septuagint, and the Greek of a New Testament citation will sometimes differ from the Hebrew of the psalm it draws on. That difference is data. It tells us something real about how the apostles read their Bible and about the text they had in front of them. A translator who smooths it away to spare the congregation a difficulty has not protected anyone; he has removed the evidence and taught his readers that Scripture is tidier than it is.

The Book

The original edition was a splendid folio — slightly exceeding even the dimensions of the Great Bible — set forth with every attraction of paper and printing, with woodcuts, a description of the Holy Land, and a chart of Paul’s journeys.⁶

The title was striking in its simplicity. It read only:

The Holie Bible

The one other line on the page was Romans 1 in Latin: I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth.

There was no dedication. In the center of the title page was an engraving of Elizabeth; a portrait of the Earl of Leicester was set at the beginning of Joshua, and one of Cecil at the Psalms. Cranmer’s Prologue was reprinted from the Great Bible, and Parker supplied two new prefaces of his own, one for each Testament.

Parker’s preface is generous about what it replaced. The revision was undertaken, he wrote, “not as condemning the former translation” — the Great Bible — “which was followed mostly of any other translation except the original text.” He cited Augustine to the effect that divers translations have many times made the harder and darker sentences the more open and plain, and quoted Fisher, once Bishop of Rochester, on the confidence that things yet unknown in the Gospel shall hereafter be made open to the later wits of our posterity.

The printer was Richard Jugge, printer to the Queen’s Majesty. His device closes the volume: a pelican feeding her young with her own blood, the old emblem of the love of Christ for his people.

Two curiosities. The books of Scripture were classified as “some legal, some historical, some sapiential, some prophetical” — which works tolerably in the Old Testament and produces odd results in the New, where the Synoptics come out “legal” while John and Acts are “historical.” And in an edition of 1574, following one of Parker’s instructions, “places not edifying” were marked in the text so that the reader might eschew them in his public reading.

The Authority That Never Came

On October 5, 1568, a completed copy was ready for presentation to the Queen. Parker wrote to Cecil with it, hoping his honor would obtain from her Highness that this edition might be licensed, “and only commended in public reading in churches, to draw to one uniformity.”

So far as the record shows, that license was never granted.⁷

The Great Bible went on bearing its mandate — according to the translation appointed to be read in churches — and not until 1573 was an edition of Parker’s announced as “Set foorth by aucthoritie,” and that by episcopal authority, not royal.

What the version did have was Convocation. The Constitutions and Canons of 1571 enacted that every archbishop and bishop should keep at his house a copy of the Holy Bible of the largest volume as lately printed in London, and that it should be placed in the hall or large dining room, that it might be useful to their servants or to strangers — an order extended to every cathedral and, as far as could conveniently be done, to all churches.

It was enough. The Bishops’ Bible superseded the Great Bible as the official version, and the Great Bible ceased to be reprinted. But it is worth being clear about what happened: the Bishops’ Bible became the Bible of the English pulpit by ecclesiastical requirement, never by royal authorization, and never by the affection of the people who had to listen to it.

The Translation

The basis throughout was the Great Bible, to be altered as little as possible. With so many hands at work and no central review, that instruction was very variously understood, and some sections are far more changed than others.

In the Old Testament the alterations are mainly verbal and show little originality. The historical books follow the Great Bible closely; the prophetical books vary more, and many of those changes are traceable to the Geneva Bible.

And here Milligan puts his finger on the version’s defining failure:

The striking thing however is, not that so many improved Genevan renderings have been adopted, as that so many have been neglected.⁸ Milligan

His explanation is charitable and devastating at once. The bishops could hardly be expected to display on every page their indebtedness to the very version they were seeking to supplant. But this unwillingness to use the undoubted scholarship of the Genevan exiles seriously marred their own work and cost it any permanent place.

Isaiah 53, side by side

The comparison Milligan prints makes the point better than any argument. Geneva on the left, the Bishops’ on the right:⁹

Three of the Bishops’ readings here are in any real sense original: the omission of the last clause of verse 3, the singular “infirmity” in verse 4, and the omission of the last two words of that verse. Not one of the three has met with acceptance.

Look at what verse 3 cost them. Geneva has “a man full of sorrows” and closes with “he was despised, and we esteemed him not.” The Bishops’ give “such a man as hath good experience of sorrows” and drop the closing clause entirely. The phrase that every English-speaking Christian knows — a man of sorrows — is nowhere in their column, and the line Handel would set is gone.

That is what happens when a committee is told to depart as little as possible from an inferior base text and cannot bring itself to borrow openly from a better one.

What they did get right

The account should not stop there, because it would be unjust. Three phrases we still use came into English through the Bishops’ Bible:

• “He that hath a bountiful eye shall be blessed” (Proverbs 22:9)
• “Rend your heart, and not your garments” (Joel 2:13)
• “Now we call the proud happy” (Malachi 3:15)

And the New Testament is a different and much better book than the Old. The scholarship there is on a considerably higher level, with real independence of style and judgment and many passages bearing traces of careful, first-hand study of the Greek. In a single short passage — Ephesians 4:7–16 — Westcott counted twenty-six variations from the Great Bible, of which sixteen were new, and four of those found their way into the Authorized Version.¹⁰

Anyone studying the relation of this version to the King James Bible should work not from the 1568 edition but from the revision of 1572, where the New Testament improvements are concentrated.

Where the Style Fails

The version’s besetting fault is a love of mouth-filling phrases. Set its Psalm 23 beside the one you know:

God is my shepherd, therefore I can lack nothing: He will cause me to repose myself in pasture full of grass, and He will lead me unto calm waters. Bishops’ Bible1568, Psalm 23

Or 2 Corinthians 9:5, where the Corinthians are exhorted to “prepare your fore-promised beneficence, that it might be ready as a beneficence and not as an extortion.”

Bishop Cox had warned against ink-horn terms. The warning did not take.

The Notes

The marginal notes are fewer than Geneva’s and unevenly spread across the books. Most concern interpretation; a few are doctrinal. Parker’s instruction against bitter notes and determinations in places of controversy was substantially kept.

A sample of both kinds:

Genesis 2:19 — “Man shewed himself lord of all beasts, by giving them names.”

Deuteronomy 7:12 — “This covenant is grounded upon His free grace, therefore in recompensing their obedience He hath respect to His mercy, and not to their merits.”

Luke 4:29, at “top of the hill” — “The Greek readeth brow of the hill.”

Philippians 2:12 — “Our health hangeth not on our works, and yet are they said to work out their health who do run in the race of justice. For although we be saved freely in Christ by faith, yet must we walk by the way of justice unto our health.”¹¹

The note on Philippians 2 is sound and carefully balanced — salvation freely in Christ by faith, and a walk of righteousness that follows from it rather than founding it.

The note on Deuteronomy 7 is worth a second look for a different reason. It is taken directly from the Geneva Bible, as many others throughout the volume are. The bishops would not acknowledge Geneva on their title page, and quietly lifted its annotations into their margin.

Editions and Reception

A second edition followed in 1569 with a considerable number of alterations, partly resulting from the criticisms of Giles Laurence, professor of Greek at Oxford. The third edition of 1572 is the important one, chiefly in the New Testament, though in some places it reverts to the readings of 1568. In that form the version continued in official use until 1611.

About thirty editions were published in all, the last in 1606. It remained in use alongside the Geneva Bible for some while after that.

It never won the people. Kenyon’s summary is exact: the Bishops’ Bible superseded the Great Bible as the official version, but it never attained the popularity and influence of the Geneva Bible.¹² Milligan is blunter — it owed its position rather to external authority than to any independent merits as a translation.

One small afterlife is worth noting. When William Fulke set out to expose the errors of the Rheims New Testament of 1582, he printed it in parallel columns against the Bishops’ version of 1572, with the Rheims annotations and his own refutations facing them. The book had a considerable vogue — which means that a good many English readers met the Bishops’ Bible chiefly as the Protestant column in an anti-Catholic polemic.

Legacy

And then, in 1604, John Rainolds asked James for a new translation, and the Bishops’ Bible got its second life.

The King James translators were instructed to follow the Bishops’ Bible as their basic text and to alter it only where the Hebrew or Greek required, consulting Tyndale, Matthew, Coverdale, the Great Bible, and Geneva where those came nearer the original. In practice they drew heavily on Tyndale and Geneva and on the Rheims New Testament. But the Bishops’ Bible was the text on the desk, and it formed the immediate basis of the version of 1611.

Eadie states the whole line of descent in a sentence:

The edition of Matthew or Rogers of 1537 became on revision the Great Bible in 1539–1540, it on revision took the name of the Bishops’ Bible in 1568, and the Bishops’ Bible, on being again revised, took its lasting place as our English Bible in 1611.¹³ John Eadie

So the version that no household wanted became the frame on which the greatest of them was built. It is a strange kind of usefulness, and it is real.

An Honest Estimate

It is tempting to be harsher with this Bible than the evidence warrants, and one recent writer has called it the most unsatisfactory and useless of all the old translations. That goes too far.

Dr. Moulton’s verdict on the 1572 New Testament is the one to keep:

The verdict of the student will vary according to the portion which he is examining. Again and again he will wonder at the retention of an early rendering which had been corrected by a later translator, or the preference shown for a roundabout phrase … but he will meet with many proofs of close study of the original text, and an earnest desire to represent it with all fairness to the English reader.¹⁴ Dr. Moulton

What the Bishops’ Bible finally illustrates is a lesson about how Scripture comes to a people. It had everything the Geneva Bible lacked: official standing, a queen’s portrait, the wealth of the establishment, an archbishop’s oversight, and a place commanded by canon in every cathedral in the land. Geneva had none of that. Geneva had refugees, better scholarship, and notes that meant something.

Geneva won the English home for a full century, and kept it until 1644.

A Bible is not carried by the authority set over it. It is carried by whether it is true, and clear, and worth the reading. The bishops were not wrong to want uniformity, and they were not wrong to want a margin that did not settle every controversy for the reader. They were wrong to think those things could substitute for the labor of going to the Hebrew and the Greek and saying plainly what is there — especially when men who had done that labor, at the cost of exile, were sitting on the same shelf.

A Note on the Dates and Claims

Four points where the sources in this collection differ, worth knowing before any of this is preached or printed.

• When Parker began. Tony Lane says Parker proposed the new translation in 1561 and that it was completed in 1566. Milligan places the beginning of his effort at about 1563–64. The presentation copy went to the Queen on October 5, 1568, and that date is firm.
• Who the translators were. Lane says all the translators either were or became bishops. Milligan says Parker distributed the parcels among “qualified scholars,” and Kenyon that the majority were bishops. The name of the version comes from the number of bishops involved, not from a rule that everyone had to be one.
• Whether it was authorized. Lane says it received official sanction. Milligan and Kenyon both state that Parker applied for a royal license through Cecil and never obtained it, and that the first edition described as “set foorth by aucthoritie” was the 1573, by episcopal authority. What is certain is the Convocation requirement of 1571. The careful statement is that the Bishops’ Bible held official standing in the churches without ever receiving a royal license.
• Which edition to cite. The 1568, 1569, and 1572 editions differ substantially, especially in the New Testament, and 1572 sometimes reverts to 1568. Any quotation from “the Bishops’ Bible” should name its edition.

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