Geneva Bible

gigatos | June 7, 2022

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Summary

The Geneva Bible is a translation of the Bible into English published in 1560 in Geneva by Protestant scholars exiled from England during the reign of Mary Tudor. This translation is historically important for its innovative character and for its wide distribution. In addition to an energetic and vigorous style, this Bible included a variety of Bible study guides and aids, parallels that allowed the reader to access the many Bible verses quoted or related to the passage he or she was reading, an introduction to each book of the Bible that summarized the topics covered in that book, maps, tables, illustrations, and indices. Mechanical printing techniques made it possible to distribute industrial quantities of this Bible to the general public at a very moderate price. This Bible thus made Protestant ideas, and more particularly Calvinist ones, especially present in the notes, penetrate very deeply into English society at the end of the 16th century and then into the American colonies, where it was introduced from the beginning by the Pilgrim Fathers of the Mayflower (1620).

As soon as it appeared, the Geneva Bible supplanted the Great Bible of 1539, the first version authorized by the Church of England. In the words of the American Presbyterian theologian Cleland Boyd McAfee, “it put the Great Bible out of the game by the sheer power of excellence”. Despite the royal will to substitute the new authorized version, the King James Bible (1611), the Geneva Bible remained very popular for a long time, especially among dissenters, and was still in use during the English Revolution (1641-1651). The language of the Geneva Bible was to have a significant influence on Shakespeare”s.

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Translation of the Bible by the English exiles in Geneva

During the reign of Queen Mary I (1553-1558), a number of Protestants, including many scholars, fled from England to Geneva, which was then a republic under the spiritual and theological leadership of John Calvin and, later, of Theodore de Bèze. Among these scholars was William Whittingham, who organized the editing of the Geneva Bible, along with Myles Coverdale, Christopher Goodman, Anthony Gilby, Thomas Sampson, and William Cole. Whittingham was directly responsible for the translation of the New Testament, which appeared in 1557, while Gilby supervised the Old Testament.

The first edition of the complete Bible, with a revised version of the New Testament, appeared in Geneva in 1560. (Printing in England had to wait until 1576, the New Testament alone having been printed there separately in 1575).

Some editions from 1576 onwards include Laurence Tomson”s revisions of the New Testament. Some editions from 1599 onward used a new “Junius” version of the Book of Revelation, in which the notes were translated from a Latin commentary by Francis du Jon. The commentary of du Jon, who was personally the victim of several persecutions, is, moreover, very virulent against Catholics.

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Broadcasting

The first edition of the New Testament was printed in Geneva in 1557. The first edition of the complete Geneva Bible, including a revised New Testament, was printed in 1560 but could not be printed in England until 1575 for the New Testament and 1576 for the complete Bible. It was however imported in quantity during the period 1560-1576. It was reprinted more than 150 times; the last reprint was probably in 1644. The Geneva Bible was the very first to be printed in Scotland, in 1579, the year in which a law was passed making it compulsory to have this Bible, at least in every household with sufficient means. It must be said that the probable involvement of John Knox and John Calvin in the translation – for both were present in Geneva during the years of work on the translation – had made the Geneva Bible particularly attractive in Scotland in advance.

Preceding the King James Bible by 51 years, the Geneva Bible was the main version of the Bible used by English Protestants in the sixteenth century, including William Shakespeare, Oliver Cromwell, John Knox, John Donne and John Bunyan, author of the best-selling Pilgrim”s Progress (1678). Because of its distinctly Calvinistic orientation in all its notes and commentaries, it was used by many English dissenters, and was still in use during the English Civil War (1642-1651), in the compact form of the “Cromwell Soldiers” Pocket Bible.”

It was also this Bible that was taken to America by the Pilgrim Fathers of the Mayflower (1620): the Pilgrim Hall Museum has collected several copies that belonged to Mayflower passengers, and Governor William Bradford”s personal Geneva Bible is housed in the Harvard University Library. It was also the Bible of the founders of the Jamestown colony, the oldest English-speaking colony on the continent (1607).

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King James I and the Geneva Bible

In 1604, a year after assuming the throne of England, King James I organized and presided over a conference on religious matters, the Hampton Court Conference. While Calvinist and Puritan Anglicans expected to be rather favoured by this Protestant king of Scottish origin, King James I, who had invited only a few of the more moderate representatives of the Puritan party to Hampton Court, made no secret of his highly critical opinion of the Geneva Bible, declaring at the conference: “I think that of all the English Bibles the Geneva Bible is the worst.” His dislike of the Geneva Bible was not so much about the translation as it was about some of the notes: because of his run-ins in Scotland with Presbyterian (and thus Calvinist) religious leaders, he felt that many of the notes were “very partial, false, seditious, and indulged in too many dangerous and treacherous conceptions…” He found the interpretations provided about certain biblical passages to be tinged with anti-clerical “republicanism,” suggesting that the church hierarchy was unnecessary and thus, hypothetically, that the need for a king as head of state could be questioned. Moreover, the fact that these ideas were printed in the Bible could lead readers to believe that these interpretations were official and permanent.

So when, towards the end of the conference, two Puritans suggested that a new translation of the Bible be produced to better unify the Anglican Church in England and Scotland, James I immediately adopted the idea. He was thus able not only to get rid of those troublesome notes, but also to influence the new translation of the Bible. This new translation, devoid of notes, would become the most famous version of the Bible in the history of the English language and would be called the King James Bible, even though it was originally known as the “Authorized Version” for reading in churches. Initially, the King James, affected by some early flaws and subject to competition from the popular Geneva Bible, did not sell well, prompting King James to forbid reprinting the Geneva Bible. However, to meet demand, the royal printer Robert Barker continued to print Geneva Bibles even after the ban, placing the incorrect date of 1599 on new copies printed between 1616 and 1625.

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Translation

The Geneva Bible was the first English version in which the entire Old Testament was translated directly from the Hebrew text, although some books of the Old Testament had been translated before (see the Tyndale Bible, the Coverdale Bible, or the Matthew Bible). It must be said that the first translator of the Bible into English, William Tyndale, had to go to the Holy Roman Empire to study Hebrew, because in England the Edict of Expulsion outlawed books in Hebrew.

Like most English translations of the time, the New Testament was translated from recent scholarly editions of the Greek New Testament. For the sake of clarity and fidelity to the text, English words that were necessary to add for the sake of understanding but are absent in the original texts are italicized.

Numbering of the verses

The Geneva Bible was the first English Bible to use verse numbers based on the numbering system of Robert Estienne, the famous Parisian printer, then a refugee in Geneva.

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Glosis

It also benefited from an elaborate system of marginal commentaries (or glosses). These annotations were introduced by Laurence Tomson, translating for the Geneva Bible Pierre Loyseleur”s notes on the Gospels, themselves taken from the commentaries of Joachim Camerarius. In 1576, Tomson translated and added Peter Loyseleur”s notes on the epistles, which had appeared in the Greek and Latin edition of the epistles published by Theodore de Bèze. Beginning in 1599, François du Jon”s commentaries on the Apocalypse were added, replacing the original notes derived from John Bale and Heinrich Bullinger. Bale”s The Image of both Churches had a great influence on these notes, as did John Foxe”s Book of Martyrs. The du Jon and Bullinger-Bale annotations are explicitly anti-Roman and representative of the popular Protestant millenarianism common at the time of the Reformation.

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Accessibility

The Geneva Bible of 1560 was printed in Roman type – the typeface regularly used today – while many editions used the older, more difficult-to-read Gothic typeface. Among the various later classical translations of the Bible into English, this innovation was only taken up by the Catholic Douay-Reims translation of 1582 (New Testament) and 1609-1610 (Old Testament).

The Geneva Bible was also published in more convenient and affordable sizes than earlier versions. The 1560 Bible was in quarto (218 × 139 mm), but pocket-sized octavo editions were also published, as well as a few large editions. The New Testament was published at various times in sizes ranging from in-quarto to in-32 (70 × 39 mm). By the end of the sixteenth century, it is likely that the Geneva New Testament cost less than a week”s wages, even for the lowest paid workers.

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Illustrations, maps and index

The Geneva Bible of 1560 contained a number of study aids, including xylographic illustrations, maps and explanatory “tables”, i.e., name and subject indexes, in addition to the famous marginal notes. Each book was preceded by an “argument” or introduction, and each chapter by a list of contents giving verse numbers. Smaller editions may have been unillustrated or without marginal notes, but some larger editions did have additional illustrations, such as one showing Adam and Eve, where Adam wears a typical Elizabethan beard and mustache.

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Nickname

A variant of the Geneva Bible published in 1579 became famous as the “Breeches Bible”, after the name adopted for the first garment of Adam and Eve, described in the book of Genesis, chapter 3, verse 7. The passage is translated as follows: “Then their eyes were opened, and they knew that they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together and made belts for themselves. The word belts is translated as breeches in the Geneva Bible. The King James Bible uses the word “aprons”. Geneva Bibles using the word breeches will nevertheless continue to be printed long after the publication of the King James.

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Influence on the English language

The Geneva Bible first influenced two generations of Britons, between its publication in 1560 and the rise of the King James Version from 1620 onwards, and even three or four generations among the Puritans and non-conformists or in Scotland. Among them were the great writers William Shakespeare (1564-1616), John Milton (1608-1674) and John Bunyan (1628-1688), whose language was peppered with biblical expressions directly derived from their intimate knowledge of the text of the Geneva Bible.

The language of the Geneva Bible also influenced the English of later Bible translations, beginning with the King James Version (see below).

Philological studies have shown that the Geneva Bible had a major influence on the King James. Here is the statement made by Charles C. Butterworth:

Surprisingly, given the original motivation for the creation of the King James (see history above), the notes of the Geneva Bible have also been included in several editions of the King James.

The Geneva Bible, the preferred version of the Bible for Calvinist Anglicans, had already triggered a reaction from Episcopalian Anglican circles in 1568, under the reign of Elizabeth I, who published a new translation, the Bishops” Bible. However, despite the quality of its translation, its often cold and stiff language did not allow it to be very successful. The Geneva Bible thus remained the most popular, and would remain so for a long time, especially among the Puritans. One measure of this phenomenon is the number of re-editions of the different versions: while the Geneva Bible had 120 re-editions between 1560 and 1611, with one more edition per year from 1575 to 1618, seven years after the publication of the King James, the Bishops” Bible had only 22 re-editions between 1568 and 1611. During the same period, the Great Bible was printed only 7 times, barely surpassing Tyndale”s New Testament, 5 times. It is therefore the Geneva Bible and not the King James that was the Bible of William Shakespeare (who died in 1616), Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) and John Bunyan (1628-88).

Similarly, in 1582 for the New Testament, in 1609 for the Old Testament and in 1610 for the complete Bible, the Catholic community published a translation known as the Douai Bible (sometimes called the Douay-Rheims Bible, after the places where it was translated and published). The translation is based as it should be on the Latin text of the Vulgate, but the marginal notes sometimes call upon the Hebrew and Greek sources of the Vulgate. The New Testament was reprinted in 1600, 1621 and 1633, and the two volumes of the Old Testament were reprinted in 1635, but none were published thereafter for about a hundred years. It must be said that the text, translated by clerics steeped in Latin culture, is peppered with borrowings from Latin which are not far from making it incomprehensible to the common man. It is the text revised by Bishop Richard Challoner, published between 1749 and 1752 and greatly improved in this respect, based on the text of the King James Bible, which is known today as the “Douai Bible”. Curiously, it was above all the refutation of the notes (with a very anti-Protestant tone) of this Bible by the Anglican theologian William Fulke of Cambridge University in 1589 that made this Catholic translation known and circulated. Indeed, Fulke had included, opposite the text of the Bishops” Bible and his refutation of the notes of the Douai Bible, the entire text and the offending notes. The considerable popularity of his book certainly exceeded that of the original!

Influence on American Protestantism

The favorite Bible of the Puritans and opponents of the Church of England, it was naturally the Geneva Bible and not the King James that was taken to North America by the Puritan separatists or pilgrim fathers on board the Mayflower in 1620. It had already been the Bible of the Virginia colonists, who settled in Jamestown from 1607 onwards. Historical research has shown that the Geneva Bible was by far the most widely used Bible in New England, and the only one used in the Plymouth colony; its founding influence on American Protestantism is therefore major.

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