The 1537 folio edition carried the royal licence and was therefore the first officially approved Bible translation in English.

Since the discovery of Guido Latré, in 1997, the printer has been identified as Merten de Keyser, in Antwerp.

The publication was partly financed by Jacobus van Meteren, in Antwerp, whose sister-in-law, Adriana de Weyden, married John Rogers.

The other backer of the Coverdale Bible was Jacobus van Meteren's nephew, Leonard Ortels (†1539), the father of Abraham Ortelius (1527–1598), humanist geographer and cartographer.

Coverdale used his working intermediate knowledge of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek; not being a Hebrew or Greek scholar, he worked primarily from German Bibles—Luther's Bible and the Swiss-German version (Zürich Bible) of Huldrych Zwingli[1] and Leo Jud—and Latin sources including the Vulgate.