The Coverdale Bible (1535) - Reformation Stewards

The Coverdale Bible

1535 — The First Complete Printed English Bible

On the fourth of October, 1535, a small folio was finished at a press somewhere on the Continent — no one is certain where. It bore no printer’s name and no place of publication. It was set in an angular Swiss or German type, illustrated with woodcuts, and dedicated with considerable flattery to Henry VIII. It was the first complete printed Bible in the English language.

Its translator did not claim to be a Hebrew or Greek scholar and never pretended otherwise. He worked from Latin, German, and the English of better men, and said so plainly in his preface. He has been patronized for it ever since.

That judgment is too quick. Coverdale did what Tyndale could not finish and what no one else attempted: he put a whole Bible, Genesis to Revelation, into English and got it into print while Tyndale was still in a prison cell at Vilvoorde. Whether Tyndale ever learned of it is unknown. He was strangled and burned a year later.

The Man

Miles Coverdale (1488–1569) was a Cambridge graduate and an Augustinian friar at Cambridge who came under the influence of the prior, Robert Barnes, and through him of Luther. He began preaching against Roman doctrine, and like Tyndale found England untenable.

He met Tyndale abroad in 1529 and is said to have assisted him in translating the Pentateuch.¹ That apprenticeship matters: it explains both why Coverdale’s Bible leans so heavily on Tyndale where Tyndale was available, and why he was later the natural choice to edit the Great Bible.

He survived where Tyndale did not. He became bishop of Exeter in 1551, was deprived and arrested under Mary, was released and fled to Geneva, and had a hand in the Geneva Bible before returning to England. He died in 1569, thirty-three years after the man who taught him.

The Opening

The timing was not accidental. In 1534 the English church had broken with Rome. That December the Canterbury Convocation, under Cranmer’s leading, petitioned the king for an English Bible. Coverdale’s work was done under the patronage of Thomas Cromwell, who wanted such a Bible published.²

The conditions of 1535 were simply not the conditions of 1525. Tyndale had produced an illegal book and paid for it. Coverdale produced a tolerated one. The difference was not in the men but in the politics, and it is worth naming plainly rather than treating Coverdale’s success as a verdict on his scholarship or Tyndale’s failure as a verdict on his.

Two features made the volume acceptable where Tyndale’s had not been: it carried no contentious prefaces or polemical marginal notes, and it opened with an obsequious dedication to the king.³

Where Was It Printed?

The book gives no answer. It names neither place nor printer, and the question has been argued for centuries.

Zurich, Frankfurt, and most of the principal German cities have each been proposed. The only evidence that can settle such a question is a match between the type or woodcuts and the known output of an identified press. A case has been made for Frankfurt, where Christian Egenolph printed works in 1533, 1539, and 1551 containing similar woodcuts — but on close examination these prove to be different blocks, copies of one another rather than the same cuts, and the argument collapses. The resemblance of the type led Wanley to conclude for Zurich, but similar type is found in books printed in several places.

The bibliographer’s conclusion is that Zurich should keep the honor long ascribed to it until a rival brings better proof, noting that the only other foreign edition of this Bible, printed in 1550, came from Froschover’s house at Zurich in a similar though smaller and sharper type.⁴ Kenyon likewise says it was probably printed by Froschover at Zurich, while adding that this has never been absolutely demonstrated.⁵

Both of these are nineteenth- and early twentieth-century judgments, and the question has continued to move since. Anyone writing on this for publication should check the current state of the argument before asserting a printing place; the honest summary from the sources in this collection is that Zurich is the traditional attribution, Frankfurt has been proposed and answered, and neither has been proved.

The Book Itself

It is a small folio, printed in a peculiar angular Swiss or German type, fifty-seven lines to a full page. The title reads:

“Biblia. The Bible, that is, the holy Scripture of the Olde and New Testament, faithfully and truly translated out of Douche and Latyn in to Englishe. M.D.XXXV.”

Beneath it stand three texts — 2 Thessalonians 3, that the word of God may have free passage and be glorified; Colossians 3, that the word of Christ may dwell in you plenteously; and Joshua 1, that the book of this law depart not out of thy mouth.

The title sits inside a compartment of six woodcuts. The top cut shows original sin and Christ’s resurrection. The bottom shows the king enthroned, bishops kneeling on his right and peers on his left, the bishops presenting the Bible to his Majesty, which he graciously receives, with the royal arms beneath. The four remaining cuts show Moses receiving the tables, Aaron reading the law to the people, Christ giving his disciples power to preach and heal, and Paul preaching. The cuts throughout are well executed and were most probably the work of Sebald Behem of Nuremberg; some of the initial letters are from designs by Holbein.⁶

Six woodcuts describing the six days of creation open Genesis. A large cut of the tabernacle and its contents appears twice in the first part.

On the reverse of the last leaf: printed in the year of our Lord 1535, and finished the fourth day of October.

A bibliographical curiosity worth knowing. The dedication names Henry’s queen — and the copies disagree. The British Museum, Bodleian, and one other copy read “Quene Anne”; Sion College reads “Quene Jane”; Lambeth holds one of each; All Souls’ and Dr. Coombe’s have neither. Anne Boleyn was executed in May 1536 and Jane Seymour married within days. The sheets were altered mid-life to keep pace with the king’s marriages.

“Out of Douche and Latyn”

The title page says the Bible was translated out of Dutch (that is, German) and Latin into English. It says nothing about Hebrew or Greek, and that silence is honest.

Coverdale worked from the Zurich German Bible of Zwingli and his colleagues (1524–1529), the Latin version of Pagninus, the Vulgate, Luther, and — most importantly — Tyndale. In the New Testament, Tyndale’s version is the basis of Coverdale’s, and to a somewhat lesser extent this holds for the Pentateuch and Jonah as well. In the parts of the Old Testament that Tyndale never published, Coverdale appears to have translated mainly from the Zurich Bible. He explicitly disclaims originality as a translator, and there is no sign that he made any noticeable use of the Greek and Hebrew — but he used the Latin, German, and English versions available to him with judgment.⁷

Why advertise the German connection on the title page at all? The bibliographer’s suggestion is that it was a bookselling artifice. Reformed doctrine was popularly known as German or Dutch doctrine, and early reformers were commonly called Germans on that account; naming Douche on the title page signaled where the book stood.⁸ Whatever the motive, a slight comparison of texts is enough to show that Coverdale did not simply follow Luther.

The Dedication

The dedication to Henry VIII is five pages of sustained flattery, and it is also a piece of Reformation polemic aimed squarely at Rome.

Coverdale takes the title Defender of the Faith — which Leo X had granted Henry in 1521 for writing against Luther — and turns it inside out. He compares the pope to Caiaphas, who prophesied truly without understanding what he said. The bishop of Rome, he argues, gave Henry that title only because the king had let his bishops burn God’s Word and persecute its ministers. But like Balaam, the blind bishop prophesied better than he knew: by Henry’s own diligence the faith should indeed be defended, so that God’s Word would have free course throughout Christendom, and especially in his realm.⁹

He then presses the argument the English crown most wanted to hear — that Scripture sets the temporal sword above all other powers, and that Rome keeps Scripture from the mother tongue precisely so that kings will not reclaim the authority it has usurped.

Modern readers find this dedication distasteful, and there is something to the complaint. But the argument is not merely servile. Coverdale is making a Reformation case — that the suppression of vernacular Scripture serves an illegitimate ecclesiastical power — and he is making it to the one man in England who could act on it. He was not wrong about the effect. Within four years an English Bible stood chained in every parish church in the realm.

The Prologue

If the dedication is Coverdale at his most political, the prologue is Coverdale at his best, and it is the most attractive thing he wrote.

He opens by admitting what he is not. Considering how excellent a knowledge of the tongues an interpreter of Scripture ought to have, and pondering his own insufficiency therein, he was the more loath to meddle with the work. He took it up because it grieved him that other nations should be more plenteously provided with Scripture in their mother tongue than his own.

He then answers the objection that many translations breed division — an objection still in circulation five centuries later — and the answer is worth having in full force. It was never better with the church of God, he says, than when almost every church had the Bible of a different translation. Among the Greeks, Origen had his own version, and Vulgarius, and Chrysostom; besides the Seventy there were Aquila, Theodotion, and Symmachus. Among the Latins nearly every bishop who knew the tongues made his own. The Fathers do not read the text all alike.

Divers translations understand one another, and that in the head articles and ground of our most blessed faith, though they use sundry words. Wherefore methink we have great occasion to give thanks unto God, that he hath opened unto his church the gift of interpretation and of printing.¹⁰ Miles Coverdale

Then the image that has outlived everything else he wrote. Translators are like many men shooting together at a mark: every one does his best to come nearest, and though they cannot all attain it, one shoots nearer than another and hits it better than another. Who is so unreasonable or envious as to abhor the man who does all his diligence to hit the prick, though he miss?

He wrote that about his own work, knowing his was not the best shot in the field.

How to Read Scripture

The prologue closes with counsel that would not be out of place in a hermeneutics lecture.

If you find something you do not understand, or that appears repugnant, give no hasty judgment of it: ascribe it to your own ignorance rather than to the Scripture. And then the rule proper:

It shall greatly help thee to understand Scripture, if thou mark not only what is spoken or written, but of whom, and unto whom, with what words, at what time, where, to what intent, with what circumstance, considering what goeth before and what followeth after.¹¹ Miles Coverdale

He adds a distinction preachers still need: some things are written that we should do likewise — as when Abraham believes God and defends Lot from violent wrong. Some things are written that we should shun the like — as when David lies with Uriah’s wife and has him killed.

And he tells the reader that the greatest praise he can give the doctrine is to live by it. To live after the law of God, and to lead a virtuous conversation, is the greatest praise that thou canst give unto his doctrine.

The Apocrypha

In one respect Coverdale’s Bible was epoch-making, and it had nothing to do with the quality of his English.

In the Vulgate and the Septuagint, the books now classed as Apocrypha are intermingled with the rest of the Old Testament, and the Church at large had adopted that arrangement — the Council of Carthage in 397, under Augustine’s influence, expressly including them. Jerome had refused to translate them; Athanasius had set them in a class apart; Wycliffe’s Bible, being from the Vulgate, carried them intermingled. Luther recognized them as profitable and good to read but placed them in a class apart.

Coverdale divided his Bible into six parts: the Pentateuch; Joshua to Esther; Job to Solomon’s Ballads; the Prophets; the Apocrypha; and the New Testament. The fifth part carries its own title page and its own description — the books and treatises which among the fathers of old are not reckoned to be of like authority with the other books of the Bible, neither are they found in the canon of the Hebrew.¹²

So far as the English Bible is concerned, Coverdale’s example was decisive. Every subsequent Protestant English Bible followed the practice. The Roman Church moved the opposite way: at Trent in 1546 it adopted by majority the view that all the books of the larger canon are of equal authority, and for the first time made this a dogma enforced by anathema.

A translator who claimed no originality settled the shape of the English canon.

Reception and Later Editions

No record survives of how many copies were printed, though the number must have been considerable — it was the first complete English Bible ever offered to the public, at a moment when readers were eager for it. For comparison, when Grafton published Matthew’s Bible in 1537, a larger and costlier volume, he ventured 1,500 copies.¹³

The 1535 edition received a reprinted title page in 1536. In 1537 it was reprinted in folio and quarto by James Nycolson in Southwark, with a few slight alterations — and this English-printed edition carried on its title page the words Set forth with the Kinges moost gracious licence. In licensing it, Henry probably did not grasp how much of Tyndale he was sanctioning.¹⁴

In 1538 Coverdale published a New Testament with the Latin Vulgate and English in parallel columns, revising his English into conformity with the Latin. It went through three editions with various changes and had no influence on the later history of the English Bible — but it has caused real confusion among careless writers, some of whom have identified this diglot with the New Testament of his 1535 Bible and concluded that the whole English tradition rests on the Vulgate. It does not, and they are two different versions.¹⁵

Further editions appeared in 1550 and 1553.

What Became of the Work

Coverdale’s own translation was superseded quickly. Matthew’s Bible appeared in 1537 — two-thirds Tyndale, one-third Coverdale, with the books from Ezra to Malachi and the whole Apocrypha taken from him.¹⁶

Then Cromwell, satisfied with neither Coverdale’s Bible nor Matthew’s, applied to Coverdale in 1538 to undertake a fresh revision using Matthew’s Bible as its basis. To his credit, Coverdale showed no resentment at seeing his own version set aside; he took up the work and produced the Great Bible of 1539 — the first English Bible authorized for public use in the churches.

And there his English survived. The Psalter of the Great Bible, which is Coverdale’s, passed into the Book of Common Prayer and remained in the liturgical use of the Church of England for centuries after the rest of his work was forgotten. Generations of English-speaking Christians have prayed his Psalms without knowing whose they were.

An Honest Assessment

Coverdale was not the scholar Tyndale was, and he never said he was. He worked at second hand. His Old Testament rests on a German Bible and a Latin one rather than on the Hebrew. Judged as a translation from the originals, his Bible is the weakest of the sixteenth-century English versions.

Judged by what it accomplished, it is hard to overstate. It was the first complete English Bible in print. It settled the arrangement of the canon for every English Protestant Bible that followed. It preserved and carried forward Tyndale’s New Testament at the moment Tyndale himself was in chains. Its editor went on to produce the Great Bible and, in the Psalter, the most widely prayed English prose of the next four hundred years.

And its preface made the argument for translation itself — that many versions do not divide the faith but serve it, that the gift of interpretation and of printing is a mercy to be thanked for, and that a man who shoots at the mark and misses deserves help rather than contempt.

He was talking about himself. He was also right.

And though it be not worthily ministered unto thee in this translation, by reason of my rudeness: yet, if thou be fervent in thy prayer, God shall not only send it thee in a better shape by the ministration of other that began it afore, but shall also move the hearts of them which as yet meddled not withal to take it in hand. Miles Coverdale

He wrote that a few months before Tyndale was put to death. The first half of the hope was not granted. The second half was — in Rogers, in the Great Bible, in Geneva, and at last at Hampton Court.

Sources

James Hastings, ed., “English Versions,” in Dictionary of the Bible (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909), §18. ↩
Hastings, “English Versions,” §18; Tony Lane, “The Crown of English Bibles,” Christian History 43 (1994). ↩
Lane, “The Crown of English Bibles.” ↩
“Bibliographical Description of the Original Edition of this Bible, Printed in 1535,” frontal matter to the nineteenth-century reprint of the Coverdale Bible. ↩
Hastings, “English Versions,” §18. ↩
“Bibliographical Description,” 1535 frontal matter. ↩
Hastings, “English Versions,” §18. ↩
“Bibliographical Description,” 1535 frontal matter. ↩
Miles Coverdale, dedication to Henry VIII, prefixed to the Bible of 1535. ↩
Coverdale, “A Prologe: Myles Couerdale Vnto the Christen Reader,” 1535; quoted also in George Milligan, The English Bible: A Sketch of Its History (London: A. & C. Black, 1895), ch. 8. ↩
Coverdale, Prologue to the Reader, 1535. ↩
Hastings, “English Versions,” §19; “Bibliographical Description,” 1535 frontal matter, for the six-part division and the Apocrypha title page. ↩
“Bibliographical Description,” 1535 frontal matter. ↩
“Bibliographical Description,” 1535 frontal matter; Hastings, “English Versions,” §18. ↩
Hastings, “English Versions,” §19; John Eadie, Tyndale, ch. 9, unravelling Macknight’s confusion of the 1538 diglot with the New Testament of Coverdale’s Bible. ↩
Milligan, The English Bible, ch. 8, §2; John Eadie, The English Bible (London: Macmillan, 1876), ch. 23. ↩