Early Modern English Bible translations

One was that Henry VIII wanted to avoid the propagation of heresies—a concern subsequently justified by the marginal notes printed in Tyndale's New Testament and the Geneva Bible, for example.

In this period the roles of printer and publisher were not necessarily as now, and the accuracy of the information given on title pages cannot be relied on.

The person named as translator might at most be an editor, since all Bible versions depended heavily on Tyndale's and/or Coverdale's work.

Identification of a particular Bible as belonging to a specific edition is complicated by the flexibility of the whole production process at the time.

The text, being set in movable type, could be corrected or changed in the middle of a print run; thus copies of a given edition may differ on some pages.

Perhaps the most famous faulty edition is the so-called "Wicked Bible", a 1631 printing of the King James version (Herbert #444) in which Exod.

[1] William Tyndale was a scholar who graduated at Oxford, was a student in Cambridge when Martin Luther posted his theses at Wittenberg and was troubled by the problems within the Church.

In 1523, taking advantage of the recent invention of the printing press, Tyndale began to cast the Scriptures into English.

His aims were simple but ambitious (as expressed to an educated man): "I defy the Pope and all his laws: and if God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the Scriptures than thou dost."

A wealthy London merchant subsidized him with the gift of ten pounds, with which he went across the Channel to Hamburg; and there and elsewhere on the Continent, where he could be hid and where printing facilities were more accessible than in England, he brought his translation to completion.

Several times copies of his books were solemnly burned, and his own life was frequently in danger; he was eventually executed for his work.

The Church had objected to Tyndale's translations because offensive notes (the "pestilent glosses") and, in their belief, deliberate mistranslations had been included in the works in order to promote anticlericalism and heretical views.

Several immediately subsequent publications, among them the Matthews and Great Bibles, relied heavily on Tyndale's wording while softening his radical Protestantism.

King Henry VIII became vexed because the sacred words "were disputed, rimed, sung, and jangled in every ale-house".

Finally, the year before his death, all versions were again prohibited except the Great Bible, whose cost and size precluded personal use.

Under Edward VI, the regency cast off all restrictions on translation and publication of the Bible; all the suppressed versions were republished.

The order for a Great Bible in every church was renewed, and there was to be added to it a copy of Erasmus's paraphrase of the four gospels, in an English translation undertaken in part by Princess Mary, the King's Catholic sister.

When Mary herself succeeded to the throne in 1553, she maintained her brother's policy of encouraging public reading of the Great Bible and Paraphrases; but versions with overtly Protestant notes were once again liable to be burned.

The secret use of Reformed translations of the Bible began again, despite official efforts to restore England to Roman Catholic unity.

The only Bible translation published during Mary's reign was the Whittingham New Testament of 1557 printed in Geneva (Herbert #106).

The chapter division was made three centuries earlier, but the verses belong to the Genevan version, and are meant to make the book suitable for responsive use and for reader reference.

Whittingham was married to John Calvin's sister and the translation was viewed as too Calvinist by the Church of England.

The result was that Elizabeth's Archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker, set out to have another official version made.

He selected a revision committee, with instructions to follow closely wherever possible the Great Bible, to avoid contentious notes and to make such a version that it might be freely, easily and naturally read.

Its notes were strongly anti-Protestant, and in its preface it explains its existence by saying that Protestants have been guilty of "casting the holy to dogs and pearls to hogs."

There is a retention of ecclesiastical terms, and an explanation of the passages on which Protestants tended to differ rather sharply from Roman Catholics, as in the matter of the taking of the cup by the people, and elsewhere.

Even though modern scholarship continues to claim problems with some of the translation, it is widely admired for its style and use of language.