In 1537, within a year of William Tyndale’s execution, a large folio Bible appeared in England bearing on its title page the words Set forth with the Kinges most gracyous lycēce. It was attributed to a translator named Thomas Matthew. No such man has ever been identified.

The book was assembled by John Rogers, and roughly two-thirds of it is the work of William Tyndale — including material Tyndale had never been able to publish. Henry VIII, who had hunted Tyndale to death the previous October, licensed it. The proscribed Prologue to Romans stood in it, in prominence.

Every subsequent English Bible descends from this volume. The Great Bible of 1539 is its revision. The Bishops’ Bible revises the Great Bible. The King James Version revises the Bishops’. Matthew’s Bible, published under a false name to disguise a dead heretic’s work, is the foundation of the English Bible text.

Who Was Thomas Matthew?

The volume carries two names. The dedication to Henry VIII is signed Thomas Matthew. The exhortation to the study of Holy Scripture that follows it ends with the initials I. R. — John Rogers.

Foxe’s explanation is the simplest: it seemed good to those who had the doing of it to change the name of William Tyndale, because that name was odious, and to father the work under the strange name of Thomas Matthew.¹

The identification of Matthew with Rogers was made in his own lifetime and never seriously doubted. The sentence condemning him to the stake calls him four times Johannes Rogers alias Matthew. Mary’s Council Register orders that John Rogers alias Matthew keep his house at Paul’s. A 1542 list of forbidden books specifies the Bible notes as of Thomas Matthew’s doing. In the 1551 reprint, the ornamented initial capital A often carries the letters I. R. within it.²

Eadie presses the difficulty honestly. If Matthew was purely a fiction, why are he and Rogers given distinct names and initials in the same volume, as though two men? And if Matthew was a real coadjutor, how did he fall so completely out of memory that within twenty years lawyers treated the name as a transparent alias? Why that particular name was chosen cannot now be ascertained.³

John Rogers

John Rogers was born about 1500, probably at Deritend, a hamlet now swallowed by Birmingham. He took his Bachelor of Arts at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, in 1525. Foxe says only that he profitably travailed in good learning.

He became rector of Holy Trinity the Less in London on 26 December 1532 and resigned the living voluntarily before the end of 1534 — almost certainly because his convictions had changed. He crossed to Antwerp as chaplain to the Merchant Adventurers, where at first he performed his priestly duties, in Foxe’s phrase, according to the use and custom of the worshippers of idols.

There he met Tyndale and Coverdale. His views ripened, as Foxe puts it, by little and little and day by day, until he embraced evangelical truth in its fulness. The friendship with Tyndale can have lasted only months: Tyndale was arrested in May 1535 and burned on 6 October 1536.⁴

As the token of his final break with Rome, Rogers married — Adriana Pratt or de Weyden, a woman more richly endowed with virtue and soberness of life than with worldly treasures. He then went to Wittenberg, mastered German, and pastored a congregation there for several years before returning to England under Edward VI.

How the Bible Was Made

Matthew’s Bible is not a translation. It is a composite volume, assembled with judgment from the work of two other men.

• The Pentateuch — Tyndale’s published translation, followed almost literally
• Joshua to 2 Chronicles — Tyndale’s unpublished Old Testament work, appearing here for the first time
• Ezra to Malachi, including Jonah — Coverdale
• The Apocrypha — Coverdale
• The New Testament — Tyndale’s final revision

Roughly two-thirds is Tyndale and one-third Coverdale.⁵ At the end of Malachi stand the letters W. T. in large ornamented capitals — the only acknowledgment the volume makes of the man who wrote most of it.

The Evidence for Tyndale’s Hand

That Joshua through 2 Chronicles is Tyndale’s is not a pious guess. It rests on the character of the translation itself, and the argument is worth rehearsing because it is the kind of evidence a preacher can trust.

These books are translated from the Hebrew, in Tyndale’s manner, with the same closeness to the original, the same clearness and precision, the same tone and coloring as the Pentateuch. And Tyndale’s characteristic vocabulary runs straight through them where Coverdale’s does not:⁶

• Tyndale renders a Hebrew term timbrel in both the Pentateuch and the Historical Books; Coverdale has tabret
• Tyndale has Lebanon; Coverdale prefers Libanus
• Tyndale has ephod; Coverdale renders it overbody cote
• Tyndale often has Ark of the Testament and Ark of the appointment of the Lord, both of which appear in Joshua 3 and 4
• A Hebrew noun rendered tribulation at Deuteronomy 4:30 is tribulation again at 2 Samuel 22:7 and 2 Chronicles 15:4; Coverdale has “strately troubled” and “in trouble”
• The phrase prisoned and forsaken at Deuteronomy 32:36 recurs at 1 Kings 14:10 and 21:21; Coverdale has “shut up and remained over” and “the prisoner and forsaken”

Eadie’s conclusion is hard to resist. The work was not done in England, nor by a foreigner. Was there any other man of English blood on the Continent at that moment so absorbed in preparing an English Bible directly from the original tongues, and so equipped to do it?

Behind this lies the request Tyndale made from the cell at Vilvoorde: his Hebrew Bible, Hebrew grammar, and Hebrew dictionary, that he might spend his time in that study. His books and papers were seized at his arrest, but manuscripts may well have been got to safety and left with Rogers or with Thomas Poyntz. It is entirely natural that a man seeing his death approach should hand over everything he had finished to a friend who could use it.⁷

For the New Testament, Rogers did not use the 1534 revision or the ordinary 1535 printing but the edition Eadie designates GH — taking it as the last and best, the crown and culmination of Tyndale’s life work. Francis Fry’s collation of Mark shows Rogers following GH in 778 places. He also carried over one of its errors: at Mark 16:17 the GH reading “these things” for the correct “these signs” of 1534.⁸

The Volume

The title reads: The Byble, which is all the holy Scripture: In whych are contained the Olde and Newe Testament truly and purely translated into Englysh by Thomas Matthew — followed by Isaiah 1, “Hearcken to ye heauens and thou earth geaue eare: for the Lorde speaketh,” and the licence in red.

It is a folio larger than Coverdale’s, 1,110 pages, sixty lines to a full page, printed in black letter of foreign appearance, with nearly eighty woodcuts — two of them, at Psalms and Proverbs, filling the whole breadth of the page. Fifteen hundred copies were printed, the place of printing unnamed but now generally believed to be Antwerp, where Rogers was living.⁹

The first cost was probably borne by merchants who had supported Tyndale, but the London citizens Richard Grafton and Edward Whitechurch stepped in and took the burden on themselves — apparently when printing had reached Isaiah, where a blank page and fresh numbering begin, and where the initials R. G. and E. W. stand at the four corners of the page. Grafton, a cautious man, seems to have staked his whole fortune on it.¹⁰

Grafton had his own view of the bishops’ promises. Writing about the requirement that no book be printed without a bishop’s licence, he suggested that certain men be appointed to read them, since it was now seven years since the bishops had promised to translate and set forth the Bible, and as yet they had had no leisure.

Rogers as Editor

Rogers did not translate and did not attempt a thorough revision. But reducing him to a compiler undersells him; he went over the whole carefully and his editorial judgment is consistently sound.¹¹

He brought the numbering of the Psalms into line with the Hebrew, where Coverdale had followed the Vulgate. He dropped three verses in Psalm 14 which Coverdale had printed despite noting in his own margin that they were not in the Hebrew. He headed the sections of Psalm 119 with the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Where Coverdale left a technical term untranslated, Rogers rendered it — consistently giving to the chaunter for what we now read as “to the chief musician.”

He explained hard terms. On Selah, he tells the reader that after Rabbi Kimchi it was a sign for lifting up the voice, and also a warning to enforce the mind earnestly to the meaning of the verse to which it is added — though some hold it signifies “perpetually” or “verily.”

He supplied chapter headings throughout, and offered alternative renderings among the notes under the formula Some reade. Coverdale, following Luther, had opened books with “These are the Proverbes of Salomon” and “This is the Prophecy of Esay”; Rogers gives the more literal “The Proverbs of Solomon” and “The Prophecy of Esay,” after the Vulgate and Pagninus.

On the Song of Songs he supplied an interpretive apparatus, marking the speakers — the voice of the Church, the spouse to her companions, the voice of the Church in persecution, Christ to the Synagogue, the voice of the Patriarch speaking of Christ. Hereford, Wycliffe’s early colleague, had done something similar; Purvey had removed the headings.

The Notes

Around two thousand marginal notes accompany the text — the most characteristic feature of Rogers’s work, and the reason the volume was eventually singled out for suppression. They are less sharp than Tyndale’s, and most are simply explanatory:¹²

Deuteronomy 1:6 — “Horeb and Sinai are both one.”

Deuteronomy 1:27, at “hateth us” — “God is said to hate a man when He putteth him forth of His heart, and giveth him not of His grace.”

Deuteronomy 1:43, at “ye would not hear” — “Here thou seest the very image of us that live in this most perilous time, for even we likewise, where God’s word is, there believe we not; and where it is not, there be we bold.”

Matthew 1:18, at “Christ” — “In Hebr. Messiah: It signifieth anointed. Jesus Christ, then, is the earnest and pledge of God’s promise, by whom the grace and favour of God is promised to us with the Holy Ghost.”

John 5:2, at “slaughter house” — “The Greek hath sheep house, a place where they killed the beasts that were offered.”

The Protestantism is unmistakable where it matters. At Matthew 5:12 Rogers notes that reward is given to men for their work but is not due to the work. At Matthew 9:2 he describes faith as the righteousness of a Christian man, which sets the conscience at peace and receives the everlasting heritage. At James 2:24 he explains that to be justified by deeds means to be declared just, openly known to be righteous, as a good tree is known by its fruits — and adds that the sentence may not be interpreted otherwise.

That note on James is worth pausing over. Rogers is holding Paul and James together without collapsing either, in a marginal note in a household Bible, four years before Calvin’s Institutes reached its major expansion.

The Table — and the First English Concordance

Among the preliminary matter is a twenty-six page alphabetical table of the principal matters contained in the Bible, taken chiefly from Olivetan’s French Bible, with some 220 articles each supported by a chain of Scripture references. It functions as a rudimentary concordance and dictionary, and is one of the earliest in the language.¹³

Its preface has a fine opening figure: as bees diligently gather the sweet flowers to make by natural craft the sweet honey, so has the compiler gathered the principal sentences contained in the Bible.

Several entries argue by absence, and they are the sharpest things in the book:

Advocate — “Note that I find not in all the Bible this word advocate, but only in 1 John 2, in the which place is said that Christ is our advocate toward the Father.”

Masse — this word is not in the Bible as translated by Jerome, nor in any other we have; and therefore the compiler can note nothing of it, but send the reader to the supper of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Meryte — “In looking over the Bible, as well the new as the old Testament, I have not found this word merit. Merit then is nothing.”

From the study of this Bible came the first English concordance. John Marbeck, an organist of St George’s, Windsor, was too poor to buy a copy and borrowed one, beginning to copy the whole Bible out by hand on fair great paper. He had reached Joshua when his friend Turner came upon him unawares and asked what he meant by it. Told the reason, Turner said he was going about a vain and tedious labour, and that a concordance in English would be a profitable work. Marbeck asked what a concordance was. He borrowed a Latin one, set to work, narrowly escaped martyrdom for his pains, and published the finished book in 1550.¹⁴

Licensed by the King

The Bible reached England toward the end of July 1537, and Cranmer moved at once.

On 4 August he wrote to Cromwell, praising the book and asking him to lay it before the king and obtain a licence that it might be sold and read by every person, without danger of any act or proclamation to the contrary — and then the line for which the letter is remembered:

…until such tyme that we, the Bisshops, shall set forth a better translacion — which I thinke will not be till a day after Domes-day.¹⁵ Thomas Cranmer

The bitterness was earned; Cranmer’s own attempt at an episcopal revision had collapsed in 1534.

Cromwell obtained the licence within days. Cranmer’s thanks are unrestrained: for the contentation of his mind, Cromwell had shown him more pleasure in this than if he had given him a thousand pound. Grafton wrote his own thanks and sent a present of six Bibles.

The royal proclamation ordered the Bible to be taught by the curates and openly laid forth in every parish church, that all the king’s subjects might learn their duties to God and to his majesty. It also contains a clause that repays attention: if any doubt arises in reading, the reader is not to give too much to his own mind, fancies, and opinions, nor to have any open reasoning in taverns or alehouses, but to have recourse to such learned men as are authorized to preach.¹⁶

The English Bible was given to the people and, in the same breath, fenced about with instructions not to argue over it in public houses.

The Irony

Henry can hardly have examined what he licensed. Had he opened the volume he would have recognized Tyndale’s work, which he had repeatedly condemned — and the Prologue to Romans, which had been specifically singled out and proscribed, stands in it prominently.

The timing sharpens it further. The Pilgrimage of Grace had lately alarmed the realm; Aske had been executed. To license at such a moment a Bible so profuse in its homage to the crown and so pointed in its condemnation of papal doctrine was to throw down the gauntlet to a large and turbulent faction.¹⁷

Eadie sets the contrast plainly. Tyndale had been hated by the king, denounced by More, frowned on by Cromwell, and had his books burned by Tunstall; men had gone to the flames for reading him; he was betrayed and burned himself. In less than a year after his martyrdom his translation acquired the royal right of free sale and dispersion, having been mysteriously accepted as the larger portion of an authorized version for the English people.

On “the first authorized version”: both Matthew’s Bible and the 1537 Nycolson printing of Coverdale carried the king’s licence in the same year, and Eadie holds that which had priority cannot now be determined. Matthew’s is the version from which all later revisions descend, and is usually given the title on that ground.

Taverner’s Bible, 1539

Richard Taverner produced a revision of Matthew’s Bible in 1539. He was a competent Greek scholar who had been imprisoned in the cellar of Cardinal College, Oxford, for reading Tyndale’s New Testament, and was released, it is said, because of his skill in music. His revision had limited influence and was quickly overtaken by the Great Bible.¹⁸

The Martyrdom of Rogers

Rogers returned to England under Edward VI with his wife and children. When Mary came to the throne in 1553 he could not expect to escape. In August of that year the Council confined him to his own house; through Bonner’s intervention he was removed to Newgate and held among thieves and murderers for nearly eighteen months.

At his examination before Lord Chancellor Gardiner, no direct charge was laid concerning his publication of the Scriptures — he was not, after all, the translator, and the book had been licensed by the king and had since passed into the Great Bible under royal sanction. But Gardiner named him three times in passing sentence as “Rogers otherwise called Matthew,” and twitted him with the dedication in which he had acknowledged Henry VIII as supreme head of the Church of England.¹⁹

On the morning of Monday, 4 February 1555, he was suddenly awakened and told to prepare for the fire. He received the news with perfect calmness. After being degraded by Bonner he walked towards Smithfield repeating the fifty-first Psalm, the people wonderfully rejoicing at his constancy, with great praises and thanks to God for it. His last words in the flames were, “Lord, receive my spirit.”

He was, Foxe records, the first martyr of all the blessed company that suffered in Queen Mary’s time at the fire, and constantly and cheerfully took his death with wonderful patience in the defence of Christ’s gospel.

Legacy

By Cranmer’s petition, Cromwell’s influence, and Henry’s authority — without any formal ecclesiastical decision — the English people were given the book that is the foundation of the text of our present Bible. From Matthew’s Bible, itself a combination of the labors of Tyndale and Coverdale, all later revisions have been successively formed.²⁰

Cromwell was satisfied with neither Coverdale’s Bible nor Matthew’s — the one unsatisfactory in translation, the other disfigured by its notes — and in 1538 applied to Coverdale to revise Matthew’s Bible afresh. That revision became the Great Bible of 1539. Two of Rogers’s prefatory essays were carried into it.

The line runs unbroken from there: Great Bible to Bishops’, Bishops’ to the Authorized Version. A book published under an invented name, to conceal the work of a man the crown had burned, became the trunk of the English Bible.

A Note on Common Errors

Few English Bibles have attracted as much confident misstatement as this one, and Eadie devotes an entire chapter to clearing it away. Four errors still circulate:²¹

• That Rogers translated the Apocrypha. Foxe says so, but the Apocrypha is beyond question Coverdale’s version, as comparison with his Bible shows at once. Rogers translated none of it.
• That Tyndale completed the whole Old Testament. Offor and Froude both suggest it. The incorporation of Coverdale from 2 Chronicles to Malachi disproves it — had Tyndale’s version existed, Rogers would not have preferred Coverdale’s.
• That Coverdale edited the volume. Coverdale was in England during this period; the Bible was printed abroad. He had no hand in compiling or editing it.
• That it is a new translation. Cranmer called it “a new translation and a new print,” which may be forgiven him in 1537. It is not one, and there is no excuse for repeating it now.

Sources

1. John Foxe, Acts and Monuments, quoted in John Eadie, The English Bible: An External and Critical History of the Various English Translations of Scripture (London: Macmillan, 1876), ch. 21. ↩
2. Eadie, The English Bible, ch. 21; George Milligan, The English Bible: A Sketch of Its History (London: A. & C. Black, 1895), ch. 8, §1. ↩
3. Eadie, The English Bible, ch. 21. ↩
4. Eadie, The English Bible, ch. 21; Milligan, ch. 8, §2, both drawing on Foxe. ↩
5. Eadie, The English Bible, ch. 22; Milligan, ch. 8, §2; James Hastings, ed., “English Versions,” in Dictionary of the Bible (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909), §20. ↩
6. Eadie, The English Bible, ch. 22, setting out the vocabulary evidence in detail. ↩
7. Eadie, The English Bible, ch. 22; Milligan, ch. 8, §2. ↩
8. Eadie, The English Bible, ch. 22, reporting Francis Fry’s collation of Mark. ↩
9. Eadie, The English Bible, ch. 21, for the physical description; Milligan, ch. 8, §1, and Tony Lane, “The Crown of English Bibles,” Christian History 43 (1994), for Antwerp and the run of 1,500. ↩
10. Eadie, The English Bible, ch. 21. ↩
11. Milligan, ch. 8, §2; Eadie, The English Bible, ch. 23. ↩
12. Milligan, ch. 8, §3, for the specimen notes; Lane, “The Crown of English Bibles,” for the figure of some two thousand. ↩
13. Eadie, The English Bible, ch. 23; Milligan, ch. 8, §3. ↩
14. Milligan, ch. 8, §3, giving Marbeck’s own account. ↩
15. Cranmer to Cromwell, 4 August 1537, quoted in Eadie, The English Bible, ch. 24, and Milligan, ch. 8, §4. ↩
16. The royal proclamation, quoted in full in Eadie, The English Bible, ch. 24. ↩
17. Eadie, The English Bible, ch. 24. ↩
18. Milligan, ch. 8, §6; Eadie, The English Bible, ch. 25. ↩
19. Milligan, ch. 8, §5; Eadie, The English Bible, ch. 21. ↩
20. Milligan, ch. 8, §4. ↩
21. Eadie, The English Bible, chs. 21–22, cataloguing and answering the errors of Foxe, Offor, Bale, Fuller, Strype, Whittaker, Hallam, and Froude. ↩

Further Reading

• John Eadie, The English Bible, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1876), chs. 21–25 — the fullest critical treatment
• George Milligan, The English Bible: A Sketch of Its History (London: A. & C. Black, 1895), ch. 8
• Joseph W. Johnson and Ruth Magnusson Davis, eds., The Matthew Bible — modern-spelling editions of the 1537 text
• John Foxe, Acts and Monuments, on the life and martyrdom of John Rogers
• J. F. Mozley, Coverdale and His Bibles (London: Lutterworth Press, 1953)

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