Myles Coverdale

c. 1488 - 1569

Myles Coverdale gave the English-speaking world its first complete printed Bible. He was a Yorkshireman, a Cambridge scholar, and for some thirteen years an Augustinian friar and Roman priest, until the preaching of Robert Barnes and the light of Holy Scripture brought him out of the friary in 1527 and into a life of poverty, exile, and labor. On the fourth day of October 1535 — while William Tyndale sat in a cell at Vilvoorde awaiting death — the whole Bible came off the press in English for the first time, bearing Coverdale’s name. Four years later he edited the Great Bible, the volume Henry VIII ordered set up in every parish church in England. He was thrice driven into exile, once delivered from the fire by the hand of a foreign king, briefly Bishop of Exeter, and at the last a poor and much-loved nonconformist preacher in London whom the people called simply “Father Coverdale.”

John Eadie placed him exactly: “In such a relation stood Paul and Barnabas, Luther and Melanchthon, Calvin and Beza, Tyndale and Coverdale.”1 Tyndale was the genius who gave God an English voice; Coverdale was the servant who finished the sentence Tyndale did not live to finish. J. F. Mozley’s judgment stands: in the line of scholars behind the Authorized Version, “the name of Coverdale stands second only to Tyndale.”2

Three things mark this quiet reformer:

1. A Servant’s Humility

Coverdale never claimed more than he had. His title page confessed that his Bible was “translated out of Douche and Latyn into Englishe”3; his prologue confessed his insufficiency in the original tongues; and his standing offer was to be corrected. “Whereinsoever I can perceive by myself, or by the information of other, that I have failed (as it is no wonder), I shall now by the help of God overlook it better, and amend it.”4 He asked God to send the Bible “in a better shape”5 by a better hand than his own — and then labored on the very editions designed to supersede his own. “So utterly unselfish was he,” wrote Eadie, “that he worked heartily at a new edition intended to supersede his own… Provided the work was done, he did not covet identification with it.”6 Coverdale is the man who was glad to be replaced.

His friend John Bale drew the portrait that best catches him: “The Spirit of God which was present in all for the ministry of his word… which in some was like a powerful wind, overturning rocks and mountains, was in him even as a gentle breath of air, infusing vigour into irresolute and wavering minds.”7 Bale also recorded the sentence that defines his vocation: “While others dedicated themselves in part only, he gave himself wholly up to the preaching of the Gospel.”8

2. A High View of the Written Word

Coverdale traced the darkness of his age to one cause. “What is now the cause of all these untolerable and no more to be suffered abominations? Truly, even the ignorance of the scripture of God. For how had it else been possible, that such blindness should have come into the world, had not the light of God’s word been extinct?”9 And against those who would confine Scripture to Latin he wrote one of the clearest statements of the age for the Bible in the mother tongue:

As though the holy goost were not the authoure of his scripture aswell in the Hebrue, Greke, French, Dutche, and in Englysh, as in Latyn. The scripture and word of God is truly to every christian man of like worthiness and authority, in what language soever the Holy Ghost speaketh it.10 Miles Coverdale

He answered the fear that rival translations would divide the church by arguing the opposite — that they interpret one another: “There cometh more knowledge and understanding of the scripture by their sundry translations, than by all the glosses of our sophistical doctors.”11 His picture of translators is a company of archers at the butts: “Like as when many are shooting together, every one doth his best to be nighest the mark… Who is now then so unreasonable, so despiteful, or envious, as to abhor him that doth all his diligence to hit the mark?”

Four centuries before the hermeneutics textbook, he gave his readers a rule that has never needed improving: “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.” And a rule of humility with it: where Scripture puzzles thee, “give no temerarious nor hasty judgment thereof; but ascribe it to thine own ignorance, not to the scripture.”12

3. A Christ-Centered Aim

The end of all his labor was not literacy but the Lord Jesus Christ. In the prologue to the 1535 Bible he wrote:

Go to now, most dear reader, and sit thee down at the Lord’s feet, and read his words… And, above all things, fashion thy life and conversation according to the doctrine of the Holy Ghost therein, that thou mayest be partaker of the good promises of God in the Bible, and be heir of his blessing in Christ: in whom if thou put thy trust… thou shalt find sweetness therein, and spy wondrous things.13 Miles CoverdalePrologue to the 1535 Bible

He held justification by faith alone without wavering, and would let no man call it license: “Faith, then, neither destroyeth penance nor good works; but is the womb that beareth them both.”14 And his Bible prologue breaks off in the middle of a preface on translation to plead for the destitute: “I beseek thee, thou that hast the riches of this world, and lovest God with thy heart, to lift up thine eyes, and see how great a multitude of poor people run through every town; have pity on thine own flesh, help them with a good heart.”15 John Hooker, who lived in his household at Exeter, testified that this was no rhetoric: he was “verie sober in diet, godlie in life, freendlie to the godly, liberall to the poore, and curteous to all men; void of pride, full of humilitie, abhorring couetousnes.” His house, Hooker added, was “another church, in which was exercised all godlinesse and vertue.”16

A Life in Brief

  • Born about 1488, in Yorkshire — most probably at York; ordained priest in 1514
  • Austin Friar at Cambridge under Prior Robert Barnes; one of the White Horse company with Tyndale, Bilney, Frith, and Latimer
  • Left the friary in 1527 and preached in Essex; fled into his first exile in 1528 and joined Tyndale on the Continent
  • Published the first complete printed English Bible, October 4, 1535
  • Edited the Great Bible of 1539 for Thomas Cromwell — the Bible chained in every English church
  • Second exile, 1540–1548: Strasburg, Denmark, and five years as pastor and schoolmaster at Bergzabern
  • Chaplain to Katherine Parr and to Edward VI; one of the divines who framed the first Book of Common Prayer
  • The only preacher willing to ride west with Lord Russell in the Prayer Book Rebellion of 1549
  • Bishop of Exeter, 1551–1553; deprived and imprisoned under Mary, and twice poisoned at by his enemies in Devon
  • Released in 1555 at the intercession of Christian III of Denmark — alone among the imprisoned Reformation bishops, spared honorably without recanting
  • Third exile: Wesel, Bergzabern, Aarau, and Geneva, where he was made an elder and assisted with the Geneva Bible
  • Returned in 1559; refused his bishopric over the vestments; resigned St Magnus in 1566 rather than conform
  • Died January 20, 1569, in his eighty-first year, and was buried on February 19 amid vast crowds of mourners

Coverdale’s major contributions include:

  • The first complete printed Bible in the English language (1535)
  • The Great Bible of 1539, base text for both the Geneva and Bishops’ Bibles, and so for the Authorized Version of 1611
  • The Psalter of the Book of Common Prayer, prayed with few changes for four centuries
  • A senior adviser’s hand in the Geneva Bible of 1560
  • The first concordance of the New Testament in English (1535)
  • The first English Bible to set the Apocrypha apart as not of like authority with the canonical Scriptures
  • The earliest English metrical psalms and hymns, and an early advocate of congregational singing
  • Translations bringing Luther, Bullinger, Zwingli, and Calvin into English
  • The authority of Scripture over church and tradition (sola scriptura)
  • Justification by faith alone, with good works as its fruit (sola fide)
  • Scripture in the mother tongue for the unlearned and the poor
  • The Letters of the Martyrs (1564), preserving the prison letters of those burned under Mary
  • Faithful preaching under three sovereigns and through three exiles (soli Deo gloria)

Coverdale’s life presses home the truth that Scripture is God-breathed, and therefore no one man’s property. Tyndale was the genius; Coverdale was the servant who took up an unfinished work, confessed openly what he could and could not do, and was content to be superseded. The Word triumphed not because one man was irreplaceable, but because God raised up a second man, and a third, and a hundredth.

Reformers

Notes

  1. John Eadie, The English Bible: An External and Critical History of the Various English Translations of Scripture, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1876), 1:chap. 17. ↩
  2. J. F. Mozley, Coverdale and His Bibles (London: Lutterworth Press, 1953), 109. ↩
  3. Title page of the 1535 Bible, as quoted in Eadie, English Bible, 1:chap. 17. ↩
  4. Myles Coverdale, “Myles Coverdale unto the Christian Reader,” prologue to the 1535 Bible, in Remains of Myles Coverdale, Bishop of Exeter, ed. George Pearson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Parker Society, 1846). ↩
  5. Ibid. ↩
  6. Eadie, English Bible, 1:chap. 17. ↩
  7. John Bale, Illustrium maioris Britanniae scriptorum … summarium (Wesel: D. van der Straten, 1548), as translated in Memorials of the Right Reverend Father in God, Myles Coverdale, Sometime Lord Bishop of Exeter (London: Samuel Bagster, 1838), chap. 10. ↩
  8. Bale, as quoted in Eadie, English Bible, 1:chap. 17. ↩
  9. Myles Coverdale, dedication to Henry VIII, in the 1535 Bible, in Remains of Myles Coverdale, Bishop of Exeter, ed. George Pearson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Parker Society, 1846). ↩
  10. Myles Coverdale, dedication to Henry VIII, in the 1538 New Testament, in Remains of Myles Coverdale, Bishop of Exeter, ed. George Pearson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Parker Society, 1846). ↩
  11. Myles Coverdale, “Myles Coverdale unto the Christian Reader,” prologue to the 1535 Bible, in Remains of Myles Coverdale, Bishop of Exeter, ed. George Pearson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Parker Society, 1846). ↩
  12. Ibid. ↩
  13. Ibid. ↩
  14. Myles Coverdale, A Confutation of that Treatise which one John Standish made against the Protestation of D. Barnes in the Year MDXL, in Remains of Myles Coverdale, Bishop of Exeter, ed. George Pearson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Parker Society, 1846). ↩
  15. Coverdale, prologue to the 1535 Bible, in Remains. ↩
  16. John Hooker (Hoker), account of Coverdale as Bishop of Exeter, as quoted in Memorials of the Right Reverend Father in God, Myles Coverdale, Sometime Lord Bishop of Exeter (London: Samuel Bagster, 1838), chap. 10. ↩