A Short History

Jesus said that we are to live by every word which proceedeth out of the mouth of God. But we know that God did not manifest Himself with a mouth until the Incarnation, so what mouth did God use? From the above scriptures, we that God has spoken to us through human vessels from the very beginning. God wrote the very first scripture on tables of clay and used Moses as the first of these human “mouthpieces” to teach and expound His Law to His People. But what has transpired since then? When was the rest of the Bible written? Where was it written and copied? Who decided what should be in it and how it should read? And why is it important for us to know these things? These are the questions I hope to answer through this paper. First I want to present a graph displaying the timeline of the scriptures to get a feel for the whole picture at once.

Timeline of the Bible

Ever since Adam, God has spoken to His people. Since the time of Moses, various men have written down the Word of God that they had received for later generations to read. Some copied what others were inspired to say. In time, these works began to be collected by God’s people, now known (after their slavery in Egypt) as the Israelites, Hebrews, or Jews. The scriptures were divided in three sections: the Torah, the Nebiim, and the Ketubim, or the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings. Their “Bible” was known as the Tanak, sort of an acronym made up of each of the first letters of its three parts. The Torah corresponds to the first five books of our present day Bible. These books are also known as the Pentateuch. The Jews also came to have another book called the Mishnah, which was a collection of explanations of the Law. Then they came to have yet another book called the Gemara which was a collection of explanations of the Mishnah. Together these two became known as the Talmud. However it was understood that the scriptures were the scriptures, and the commentaries were the commentaries.

These various books were written in Hebrew. They were written on parchment (dried and scraped animal skin) scrolls sometimes 30 feet long. At the time of their writing, the Hebrew written language had no vowels and used no spaces between words. Similarly, the language had no punctuation marks and thus no way of marking sentences, paragraphs, or emphasis. Repetition and oral teaching kept the understanding of the scriptures alive. Consider the following sentence:

NTHBGNNNGGDCRTDTHHVNSNDTHRTH

Or even the following:

THMNSGD

How many different sentences could one get from that combination of letters? How many different meanings might be interpreted? Thus when the Northern and Southern Kingdoms of the Israelites fell to the Babylonians, the understanding of the scripture grew dim. As the Jews were kept in captivity, their language began to change. When they finally returned to their homeland some 50 or so years later, between their apostasy and the influence of another culture, their language had substantially changed. They had made an unconscious shift in their speech until it would become known as a Hebrew variant called Aramaic. Under the restoration efforts of Nehemiah, Ezra, the chief priest at the time of the return, directed the hearts and minds of the Hebrews back to the scriptures. However, the ordinary person had very little access to the scriptures due to the scarcity of scrolls (they were very difficult and time-intensive to make) and an unfamiliarity with the Hebrew language. Hebrew was maintained as the language of holy writings, and as time went on, the Jewish people became increasingly dependent on the Scribes and Pharisees to teach them the Law.

The Scribes and Pharisees took their job of copying the scriptures very seriously. They had a great many rules for guiding their efforts. Some of these were:

• Only skins from ceremonially clean animals were used to make the parchment.
• Columns could only be from 48 to 60 lines long.
• They had to use lines to keep the text straight.
• They used a special mixture for the ink.
• They could not use memory: each word was pronounced aloud and copied separately.
• They had to wipe the pen before writing God’s name.
• After finishing, they waited 30 days and gave the scroll a proofreading; if more than 3 errors were found, the scroll was destroyed.
• Every word and letter was counted as a secondary check.

During this “reformation” of Israel’s religious heritage after the captivity, several other books were written in what is known as the Intertestamental Period (the time between the date of the last book of the Old Testament and the first book of the New). These books became known as the Apocrypha. They are mainly apocalyptic, but some are poetic and historical as well. The books that formed the “canon” of the Hebrew Bible were really never questioned until these books began to circulate. Then, caught in the move to establish good copies of the Word of God, they became thought of as good books (though not considered on the level of the Holy Scriptures), and what the Jews had already considered their Bible became even more solidly fixed in their doctrine. They made their position regarding these works official at a meeting called the Council of Jamnia in AD 90. Some of the questions raised about books that are still accepted as canonical are these:

• Jonah: How could the God of Israel (before Jesus Christ) care so much about a heathen nation that He would send one of their sons to them that they might repent and receive His mercy?
• Ester: The feast of Purim? It was never mentioned in the Book of the Law.
• Ecclesiastes: Surely the world isn’t that bad. It just seemed too pessimistic.
• Song of Songs: Simply too explicit!

As witnessed on the day on Pentecost in the second chapter of Acts, the Jews had dispersed to many different nations by the time of Jesus. There were many Jews living and making a living in northern Africa, and they came to speak the language of the natives there. Because of their departure from Hebrew (or even Aramaic) in daily life, a group of Pharisees got together around 100 B.C. and made the first actual translation of the Holy Writings into another language: Greek. This translation is called the Septuagint, which stands for 70. Greek was commonly spoken in New Testament times and it opened the door for the scriptures to go into many different backgrounds and levels of society. Because of the inadequacy of Greek to express the nuances of Hebrew, the Greek language itself was slightly altered (by reason of use and repetition) so that the phrases and words used to translate the Hebrew ideas began to take on slightly new meanings. Even to this day, the English language, as with the rest of the romance languages like French and Spanish that are descendants of Greek, still bears the stamp in its words and expressions of Hebrew. It has been conjectured that there has been no more influential translation of the scriptures because of this reason. At first, the Septuagint was highly praised as being inspired by God from all corners of the Hebrew world. However, by about 100 A.D., the Hebrews in Jerusalem had completed work on a standardized text and this was now viewed as the only Bible permissible for a Jew to read. The Septuagint was now publicly decried and called a work of Satan. However, the literary accomplishment of the Septuagint was solid, and it accomplished the important job of giving the new “Christian” church the old scriptures in a language that they understood.

In the fourth century, a man named Jerome distinguished himself in studying the Latin and Greek classics from a young age. He came to the attention of the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church whereupon they asked him to make a revision of the Bible for them. As he worked, he began to see that a mere revision was less than what he was capable of. He took it as his calling to translate the scriptures from the original Greek and Hebrew into the language of the Catholic Church: Latin. Jerome made a very skillful translation. In addition, because of his education, he made it read very eloquently. As academia moved to Latin for teaching and writing, it filled a definite need of getting the scriptures into the language of learned men of the time. The book was called the Vulgate which comes from the Latin word for common: vulgar. The Catholic Church was very pleased with the result and well they should have been.

However, in keeping with their stranglehold on the politics, family life, and finances of the entire European Continent during the Dark (500-800 A.D.) and Middle Ages (800-1500), they allowed no other translations to be used or made. No studies of other translations or even of new discoveries of ancient texts were tolerated. Any suggestion of changing the Vulgate brought on charges of heresy and — if not recanted of — subsequent persecution. Started in 1233, the Inquisition would keep people from princes to paupers under control of the Roman Catholic Church for some 600 years. Their philosophy was simple really: control the people by controlling their education — by only allowing “safe” people to become learned — and control the education system by controlling its medium — by not permitting anyone who had become learned to use anything but Latin for transmission of their ideas.

It is important to understand the atmosphere that came to cloud the Continent by the time of the Reformation. The Catholic Church had come to dominate every aspect of living through the appeal that all of carnal life was subservient to spiritual life. By the time of the Reformation, the ideal had become reality. Rome, through the person of the Pope, basically ruled Europe by ruling its spirituality. Understand that there was only one church at this time: the Catholic Church. There were no other Christian denominations, at least not overtly. If one was not Catholic, one was basically branded an infidel and subject to punishment if Rome so pleased. If your views did not align with the Pope’s, you could be excommunicated and summarily executed. Certainly, most people who decided not to be Catholic simply lived their lives quietly, unnoticed by Rome. However, there were those few men who dared not only to oppose the theology of the Catholic Church, but to make their opposition known to its leaders and the general public. In time, these men would cause what is now come to be known as the Reformation. Though what they did was and is still today viewed as heresy and division to the Catholic Church, their struggle for independence from Rome has brought about the religious freedom we have in our country today. These grand ideas of liberty had their roots in the fertile soil of the mind of one man who wanted a simple thing: to have the common man be familiar with the Holy Bible in his own language.

The man we are referring to was named John Wycliffe. He was born in 1324. He got his education at Oxford, where he eventually became Professor of the Bible and President of Balloon College of Divinity there. He was well versed in theology, law, philosophy, and logic. He was well respected by Anne of Bohemia, the wife of King Richard, and John of Gaunt, Prince of Wales, monarch in absentia while Richard was away at the Crusades. His dream was that everyone could have the scriptures, so they could read about God’s love directly, and not need anyone (including a priest) to read it for them. His “back to the basics” messages at Oxford eventually got him expelled from the University, though he was so popular with the monarchy that he avoided persecution. He retired to a small parish in Lutterworth in 1375, though he still occasionally taught at Oxford for the rest of his life. At first, he merely translated portions of the new testament. These he would copy and send with traveling preachers so they could spread the Word of God in English. He made a complete translation (into the late middle English tongue) of the New Testament in 1381. However, hand copying was a painfully slow and tedious process for making the general public knowledgeable about the Word. He kept on trying through the rest of his life, and died of natural causes in 1384.

However, his dream lived on and inspired these young preachers of his to begin the movement of the “Lollards.” They were so called by the Catholic Church after a group of monks in the Netherlands who began teaching some unorthodox things about monastic life in the 14th century; it was a derogatory term. They opposed the Catholic Church on four main points:

• Pilgrimages
• Adoration of the Saints
• No allowance for scripture in English
• The doctrine of transubstantiation

They outlined several more points in an official dissension to the English Parliament in 1395. It was basically ignored. In 1399, Henry IV officially allowed the condemnation of heretics, and, in 1401, passed a decree allowing them to be persecuted. The preferred method of said persecution was burning at the stake. In 1408, the Church made an official proclamation condemning the translation of the scriptures into any other language. In essence they maintained that the language of the scriptures was to be Latin. In 1414, a Lollard by the name of Sir John Oldcastle started an uprising in western England against the King and his support of the church. It was quickly and bloodily put down. This did not stop the spread of Lollardism, rather, it merely drove it underground. They formed a group known as the Secret Society that became a backbone of support for the safe passage of other Reformers seeking escape from persecution, and which became the eyes and ears of the Reformation in England.

For nearly a hundred years, the movement to reform the church quieted down. However, it was during this time that the reformist’s greatest weapon came to light. In 1455, a man named Johannes Gutenberg tested a new invention fully for the first time. Many years he had spent, secretly perfecting all of the individual tasks required to perform a small miracle. Many innovations had to be connived: new inks, new papers, new metal for the dies. Many techniques were invented: multiple color capability, combining pictures and text. The miracle was, of course, the printing press. And what was the very first work printed by this new wonder of wonders? That’s right: the Bible. Gutenberg printed the “42-line” Bible in Latin in three volumes at Mainz, Germany. Perhaps no more important invention has ever been made. In the mind of a reformer, it certainly could not have come at any better a time. The invention of the printing press led to the printing of ideas. Ideas of men like Tyndale and Luther, who we will discuss later, now had a cheap and quick method of transportation to the minds of literate men every where. Indeed, this invention did more than anything else to promote the Reformation and start the Renaissance. Fired by the revelation of the thoughts of the Word speaking to them in their native tongue, the people of England and Northern Europe became major proponents of the new learning which led to the Age of Enlightenment. The method by which people could obtain cheap Bibles and thereby learn the Word of God for themselves — apart from what someone — anyone — else might think — was now in place. It remained for someone to champion that cause.

Back again at Oxford, a teacher named Colet served as the inspiration for another important figure in the Reformation: Erasmus. Erasmus was a good scholar of Greek and Latin. He too was expelled — in 1514 — for his heretical beliefs. He then traveled to Basil, Switzerland where he met a man named Froben. Using Froben and his knowledge of the new technology of printing, Erasmus produced a compilation of the Greek New Testament along with his own translation into Latin. This was the first translation into Latin since the Vulgate. Although a cardinal in the Catholic Church was working on a Greek New Testament, Erasmus got his to the press about 2 years sooner. It was a good translation, but not without flaws. Since he did not have the complete NT (some parts of The Revelation and the pastoral letters were missing), he translated the Vulgate back into Greek to make up for it. Surprisingly however, the translation stood up to critique, and Erasmus’ work, through much diplomacy and just plain boot-licking, was approved by Pope Leo X who said, “We are greatly pleased.” Now although Erasmus decided not to use his credibility to lead in the Reformation, his work went on to undergird the most important English contribution to it.

William Tyndale was born in 1494 in Gloucesttershire, England. He too attended Oxford, obtaining his Bachelor’s Degree in 1505 (notice at the age of 11) and his Master’s in 1515. He was one of the most gifted linguists to have lived. He was proficient in: Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, English, French, and German. It was said of him that he could speak any of them as a native. The year was now 1517. The place was Little Park in Coventry, England. Five men and two women were tried for teaching their children the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments in English. They were convicted of heresy and burned at the stake in the town square. Such was the state of ecclesiastical affairs in England. Tyndale was becoming increasingly interested in the scriptures, and, eager to study without the influence of his clerical teachers, he moved on to Cambridge University. There he hooked up with the White Horse Inn, an establishment known to be frequented by members of the Secret Society. The year became 1521 and things were even more tricky at the University. It became difficult to know who one’s friends were. As a result, Tyndale left and went back to his hometown, where he became employed by a noblemen named Sir John Walsh to be a tutor to his two children and chaplain of the house. Many clergymen, including priests and bishops, were common guests of the manor. Lady Walsh considered herself knowledgeable about things ecclesiastic and regarded the clergy very highly. Tyndale butted heads with them many times, challenging their knowledge and understanding of the Bible, and she asked how Tyndale could presume to know more about the scriptures than they did. Tyndale understood her position, but instead of quieting down, he began preaching throughout the surrounding towns. He made the clergy of the area more than a little nervous, and was called in to answer questions. His powerful connection to Sir Walsh and his own defense kept him from being persecuted. Through he started cautiously, it became obvious that the institution of the church was not going to allow him to cause the changes he wanted to see. In one fateful confrontation with an unnamed priest, his true course was set. According to legend, the priest declared, “We were better to be without God’s laws than the Pope’s.” To which Tyndale replied, “I defy the Pope and all his laws. If God spare my life ere many years, I will cause the boy that drives the plow to know more of the Scriptures than you.” He had made up his mind. Perhaps the argument simply caused him to see what he really wanted. He carried with him a letter of recommendation from John Walsh and a sample of a translation of a classical Greek work to London, hoping to find work as a biblical translator for Cardinal Wolsey. However, Wolsey and King Henry VIII were caught up in politics at the time. He became disillusioned with what he was attempting to do. He realized that Wolsey would not — indeed could not — support such work, and in 1524, he set sail for the more tolerant conditions of Germany, never to set foot in England again.

Things in Germany were going much better for the Reformation than in England. Prince Philip II had given his support to the Reformation, headed by the former Augustinian monk Martin Luther. Martin Luther was central in the outcry against the Catholic Church. Without him, there may have been no “Reformation.” He attended school in Wittenberg, Germany. Wittenberg was a walled city complete with a castle, church, and moat. It was also well guarded. The entrance to the church and school was through one large door. It was on this door that announcements and news was posted. Wittenberg was a very popular spot for pilgrims, the majority of which would come for All Saint’s Day, November 1. Now, as a monk, Luther was troubled about many things in the doctrine of the church. One day, while studying the book of Romans, he read of Paul’s discourse on justification by faith alone. He had a great personal experience with God over the revelation that faith alone justified a man – not a priest –, which caused many of his own fears and questions to subside.

This experience might have stayed personal except for Pope Leo X’s idea that he would finance the new St. Peter’s Basilica through indulgences. An indulgence, simply put, is a purchased forgiveness for a premeditated sin. Germany as a whole was not very tolerant of indulgences, so there was a lot of money to be made there by selling them, if only the papacy could somehow get German priests to go along with the idea. In 1514, the bishopric of Mainz (which included Wittenburg) became vacant. A man named Albrecht of Brandenburg, already archbishop of Magdeberg and bishop of Halberstadt, put in for the position. However, he was not able to come up with the money required for an “installation” tax, nor the money required for a tax for holding multiple sees. The total money involved would have been about $47,800 today. He found a bank that would loan him the money if Albrecht would split the proceeds from the indulgences with the bank and Rome 50/50. Pope Leo X, wanting badly the extra cash flow into his depleted coffers, agreed to the arrangement. He sent Dominican John Tetzel into Germany, under Albrecht’s jurisdiction, to preach indulgences in the see of Mainz.

In response to this teaching, Martin Luther wrote the infamous “95″ thesis, and on October 31, 1517, he went public by nailing it to the Wittenberg church door, just in time for the influx of pilgrims to read it on All Saint’s Day. As his thoughts spearheaded the Reformation, he kept writing. In 1520, he wrote three more papers:

• An Appeal to the Nobility of the German Nation
  Three things to reform: that the civil government had no rights over the church, the “superiority” of papal decrees over scripture, & superiority of the pope over councils.
• On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church
  This treatise condemned transubstantiation.
• On Christian Liberty
  Taught primacy of scripture, priesthood of the laity, & justification by faith.

Luther went on to produce a German translation of the Bible for which he is duly appreciated, but these were the works that were to inspire William Tyndale and support his efforts to reform the English church.

In 1524, Tyndale reached Cologne, Germany where he translated the New Testament into English from Erasmus’ Greek compilation. His work was the beginning of the period of the modern English idiom. The way he would word his phrases of the Bible would imprint English speaking people’s manner of speech to this very day. He was discovered by the church and was tipped off to their coming to take him away. He fled to Worms where he finished his printing. In 1526, the first English New Testaments that he had printed began sneaking their way into England, smuggled inside sacks of flour and bales of cloth. Tunstal, Bishop of London, actively preached against this Bible and publicly burned any copies he could get hold of. His contention was that Tyndale had changed the doctrine by substituting words like: elder for priest, church for congregation, and repentance for penance when in fact he was translating correctly. Tunstal’s publicity simply fueled interest in the book. In a classic case of irony, Tunstal made an attempt at stopping the printing of Tyndale’s Bible. He got hold of Augustine Packington, an Antwerp trader and secret friend of Tyndale’s. Augustine agreed to buy up all the copies of Tyndale’s Bible he could find for Tunstal, knowing full well his only intention was to burn them. However, he got such a good price for them, that the money paid to Tyndale financed a second edition and its printing. Later when Sir Thomas More, King Henry’s lawyer, tried a friend of Tyndale’s for heresy, he asked him how it was that so many copies of the Bible had made it into England. In short, he wanted to know who was supporting the printing of these Bibles. The friend honestly answered that it was their very own Bishop Tunstal, the Bible burner!

Tyndale’s New Testament did nothing to engender favor from the Catholic Church. His marginal notes were sometimes caustic. For example, in Exodus 32, where the Israelites are worshipping the golden calf in the desert, Tyndale’s sidebar comment is that, “The Pope’s bull slayeth more than Aaron’s calf.” (A bull is a proclamation, typically excommunicating someone from the church.) Similarly, on the passage which tells that the Israelites had to be restrained from giving any more to the building of the tabernacle, he says, “When will the Pope say ‘Hoo!’ and forbid an offering for the building of St. Peter’s church? … Never until they have it all.” Tyndale went on to translate the Pentateuch and other portions of the Old Testament. He had completed this work in 1528, but on the sailing voyage to the printer, he was caught in a storm which destroyed the ship. With the aid of two scribes, he re-translated and published this abbreviated OT in 1530. Between keeping one step ahead of his enemies and keeping a hand in theological disputes of his day, he never had the time to finish his OT. However, he did keep revising his New Testament. Spurred on by the wedge being driven between the church and King Henry and wanting to drive it deeper, as well as by the desire to clarify his work from impostors of the time, he very carefully edited and printed a revised version in 1534 with a forward which rebuked those who would change his work and leave his name on it. This is held to be his crowning life’s achievement. It is estimated that 9/10′s of this work would go on to be used in the creation of the Authorized — or King James – Version, to be discussed later.

Back home in England, the general populace of England was definitely being stirred up against the church, due in no small way to some other works that Tyndale had authored. He made a translation of Luther’s thesis and titled it The Parable of Wicked Mammon. He wrote two other famous works: The Practice of Prelates and The Obedience of the Christian Man. It was probably the influence of the latter that gave Henry the opening he was looking for. Even though he needed them to shake the church’s hold on England, Henry didn’t hold with Luther and Tyndale’s ideas. As a matter of fact, in response to Luther’s 95 thesis, he wrote a defense of the seven sacraments of the Catholic Church. For this, Pope Leo X awarded him the title “Defender of the Faith.” In the end, though, Henry wanted a divorce from his first wife more than he wanted to be devoutly Catholic. In the theocratic-political turmoil of the day, caused in large part by men he didn’t like, aided by the new Archbishop of England, Thomas Cranmer, Henry made his move. Cranmer officially moved all church-owned monastic land over to Henry’s ownership and declared him to be the head of the new Church of England in 1533. This then gave him the right to declare his first marriage unlawful (for some reason or another), divorce his first wife, and marry another. Henry always fancied himself quite a leader, and although he may have lacked some of the requisite ability, he made up for it with personality. He was comfortable with the new position, and gave himself to deep thinking on theological issues. He finally settled on a compromised agglutination of doctrine that included transubstantiation and the worldly authority of the church along with the idea that one doesn’t need the clergy to be saved.

Tyndale had taken up residence in the merchant city of Antwerp, where, as long as you stayed in your home, you were free from the law. However, in 1534, he was betrayed by a “friend” who talked him into doing a favor and led him into a trap. He was captured and imprisoned for over a year and a half. He was allowed his writing materials and books so that he could continue to study, but it did little more than keep him occupied. He was finally brought forth on charges of heresy. He was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death on October 6, 1536 in Flanders, Netherlands. His final words before strangulation and burning at the stake were, “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes.”

Unbeknownst to Tyndale, God had indeed done just that. Henry allowed the distribution of English Bibles in England. The Bible that was finally legal to circulate was known as Coverdale’s Bible, named for its translator Miles Coverdale, and published in 1535. The ironic twist to the story is that Coverdale was not a scholar. The work was based entirely on Tyndale’s English Bible and Luther’s German Bible! Since the time the monk Augustine landed in “Angleland” in 597, until the first English Bible made by Wycliffe in 1381, England had gone almost 800 years without the scriptures in her native tongue. Now that it had been approved by the Church of England, some 150 years later, many different versions started coming forth. After Coverdale came John Rogers, a friend, student, and scribe of Tyndale’s. Under the pen name of Thomas Matthew, he finished Tyndale’s Old Testament and published the whole Bible – known as Matthew’s Bible — in 1537. In 1539, a man named Taverner produced an edited version of Matthew’s Bible, but this event was completely eclipsed by the publication of the Great Bible, also in 1539.

Up until this time, the Coverdale and Matthew’s Bibles were allowed to be distributed and read, but not allowed to be read in the worship services of the churches. The Great Bible changed all of that. It was called Great not to glorify itself, rather is was simply very large. It measured 16½” by 11″. This was the first fully authoritative English version to be allowed in the church and, as such, a copy of it was distributed to every parish. It was also the first Bible to have the books ordered as we have them now, as well as the first to implement italics to indicate words implied rather than translated. (A technique we will discuss later.) This version too was based on Matthew’s Bible which in turn was basically Tyndale’s Bible. Because a copy was on display in each local church, the poor person – but obviously one who could also read — now had access to the scriptures in English. Public reading of this Bible while the church was having its services became so much of an annoyance that Henry passed a decree prohibiting it.

Seven years later, Henry changed his mind about allowing the common man access to the Bible, and in 1546, he again made it a crime to own one. However, in 1547, a new king, King Edward VI, took the throne and made it legal once again. During his reign, he promoted the English Bible and thousands were printed under him. His reign ended in 1553 when Queen Mary I, daughter of Henry VIII and his first wife, ascended the throne. She would later become known as “Bloody Mary.” It was her dream to restore her wayward England to the Catholic Church. One of her first moves was to again make it a punishable offense to own a Bible. During her 5 year reign, she killed such notables as John Rogers, of Matthew’s Bible fame, and Thomas Cranmer, former Archbishop of England and patron of English versions of the Bible. All told, she sent over 300 people to die at the stake. She died in 1558, childless and grief-stricken over a political marriage to Philip of Spain her country never accepted. The next monarch of England, Queen Elizabeth (reigned 1558 – 1604), was Catholic as well, though not strictly so and not intolerant of others. It was during her reign that the Church of England took on its present day title and doctrine. The Anglican Church – with its Common Book of Prayer and 39 Articles of Faith – was born. (Throughout her long rule, the Catholic Church trained missionary priests for the re-evangelization of England. They were revolutionary in their teachings and dealings, wishing to take back what was once theirs. Elizabeth, not wanting 2 state churches and especially desiring to avoid the conflict it would cause, was “forced” to resort to persecute these evangelizing priests to keep the peace. She killed more than 200.) About the time Elizabeth began to rule, refugees from the reign of Mary gathered at Geneva, Switzerland, published another Bible – the Geneva Bible – in 1560. It was the most popular Bible for Puritans, and many of them came over to America with them. Of course, this version was not looked on favorably by the church. In 1568, they published the Bishop’s Bible, so named because 8 of the 15 translators were bishops. This version never caught the public’s fancy.

In 1582, just 24 years after Queen Mary and hopes of re-establishing its dominance in England, after nearly a century of making it a capital offense to own the scriptures in the native tongue, the Catholic Church made a formal translation of the Bible into English. It was called the Douai-Rhiems Bible, and was named for the two colleges at which the translators worked. They based it almost entirely on the Latin Vulgate; they did not make much use of the original languages. Though the Vulgate was a good translation, it still makes this Bible a translation of a translation. It is expectedly Catholic in its renderings, going back to using priest for elder, church for congregation, and penance for repentance for example.

In 1604, under the rule of King James I of Great Britain, work was begun on a new translation. The men petitioned to do the work on behalf of the king were given free room and board, but did their work for free. Despite this, the project attracted some of the most educated and talented men of the day. Some 47 scholars from 3 English Universities formed 6 translation committees. Three panels worked on the OT (Genesis to 2 Kings, 1 Chronicles to Ecclesiastes, and Isaiah to Malachi), two on the NT (Gospels, Acts, and The Revelation, and the Epistles), and one on the Apocrypha. Two teams worked at Oxford, 2 at Cambridge, and 2 at Westminster. These committees were in turn were governed by 12-member panels made up of two people from each team. These panels were then overseen by bishops and leading churchmen. The guidelines for performing the translation were laid down by James himself. The Bishop’s Bible was to be the starting point, but the best Hebrew and Greek manuscripts available were also consulted. Other versions were also used as references: English, German, Italian, Spanish, and Latin. The translators used different English words to translate the same original word to give the reading some vibrancy. For example, in 1 Corinthians 13:8-13, the Greek word katargeo is translated as “fail,” “vanish away,” “done away,” and “put away.” The effort kept the tradition started with the Great Bible in using italics to add words that are necessary for English grammar style. The spelling of Hebrew names was to follow the common use, not the direct transliteration for the words. Older ecclesiastical words were to be retained however, and they used “church” for ekklesia instead of Tyndale’s “congregation” and the Latin-based “charity” instead of his “love” for agape. They finished the work and dedicated it to James in 1611. James was involved in the translating as well. At first he was looked on as a nuisance, but he came to impress the theologians with his theological learning.

Several errors were introduced by the printing process during its first few runs through the press. One edition dropped the “not” in the seventh commandment, thereby exhorting to commit adultery. A later edition suggested that the children should first be “killed” rather than “filled.” In 1701, the marginal dates were added by an Archbishop by the name of Ussher. Official printings came in 1613, 1629, 1638, 1762, and 1769. The last is basically the bible we have today. It came under some fairly severe criticism at first, but the loudest voice against it was from one that might have been invited to participate in the translation, but was bitter because he wasn’t. All in all, the Authorized Version won out over all other English versions for three basic reasons. Firstly, it was translated by panels and committees and not by one man, which made it free from any minority viewpoints. And besides, it was a very skillful translation. Secondly, it built on much more advanced Hebrew and Greek scholarship than that available during the translation of the Bishop’s Bible. Thirdly, it avoided sectarian biases in the notes and (for the most part) in the chapter headings. Although no official proclamation ordering its use in churches and or homes can be found, it quickly became the favorite of everyone except the Puritans, who thought it smacked of the divine right of kings. But eventually, even those that came to America came to use the AV.

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