It was substantially revised in 1572, and the 1602 edition was prescribed as the base text for the King James Version that was completed in 1611.

[1] The thorough Calvinism of the Geneva Bible (more evident in the marginal notes than in the translation itself) offended the high-church party of the Church of England, to which almost all of its bishops subscribed.

However, they were aware that the Great Bible of 1539—which was the only version then legally authorized for use in Anglican worship—differed, in that much of the Old Testament and Apocrypha was translated from the Latin Vulgate, rather than from the original Hebrew and Aramaic.

The bishops deputed to revise the Apocrypha appear to have delivered very little, as the text in these books broadly reproduces that of the Great Bible.

In the revision a number of switches were made to the New Testament in the direction of more "ecclesiastical" language (e.g. introducing the term "charity" into I Corinthians 13), but otherwise to bring the text more into line with that found in the Geneva Bible; and in the Old Testament, the Psalms from the Great Bible were printed alongside those in the new translation, which had proved impossible to sing.

The new psalm translation was printed only once more (in 1585) and otherwise dropped altogether; while further incremental changes were made to the text of the New Testament in subsequent editions.

The Bible had the authority of the royal warrant, and was the second version appointed to be read aloud in church services (cf.

The second and subsequent editions were rather smaller, around the same size as the first printing of the King James Bible, and mostly lacked illustrations other than frontispieces and maps.

After it was published in 1611, the King James Version soon took the Bishops' Bible's place as the de facto standard of the Church of England.