Ecclesia Militans: Where we got the Bible

A Deluge of Erroneous Versions

Following Tyndale’s example, others continued the work of issuing English-printed Bibles, and so in the reign of Henry VIII we have to face quite a deluge of them. One by one they came forth, authorized and unauthorized, printed and published by irresponsible individuals, full of errors, with no proper supervision, and having no other effect (as we shall presently see) than that of drawing down contempt and disgrace upon the Sacred Scriptures.

(1) The English Church was now separated from Rome, and the English Bishops were mere puppets and slaves at the beck and call of the Royal Tyrant, Henry. They exercised no real independent jurisdiction over either clergy or people; the governor and ruler in Church and State was the King; and consequently no ecclesiastic could undertake responsibility in regard to the publication or suppression of Bibles without the will of his Imperial Master. So long as Henry made no objection, any printer or publisher or literary hack, who thought he saw a chance of making a little money out of a new version of the Bible. George Joye, for example, took this course in regard to Tyndale’s Bible, and in consequence (1535) brought down upon himself a volley of bitter and scurrilous language when thwarted or resisted. In reply to this tirade, George Joye published an ‘Apology’, in which he showed that the printer had paid him only 4 ˝ d. for the correction of every 16 leaves, while Tyndale had netted Ł10 for his work; and besides, he exposed in fine style the departure from the truth of which Tyndale had been guilty in boasting his translation and exposition as if it were his own, whereas Joye shows it was really Luther’s all the time; that Tyndale did not know enough Greek to do it, and had only added ‘fantasies’ and glosses and notes of his own imagination to the work of others. However, we have no time to dwell on the quarrels of these amiable Bible translators, else we should never reach the end of our historical review. Let us enumerate briefly the versions that saw the light in rapid succession during the reign of Henry VIII.

(2) There was Myles Coverdale’s in 1535. Coverdale was a priest, who married abroad, and kept a school. In after years King Edward VI granted him and his wife (sic) Elizabeth a dispensation (!) to eat flesh and white meats in Lent and other fasting days. It is wonderful what power the Kings of England had in those days! In 537 appeared Matthew’s or Roger’s Bible (which was a mixture of Tyndale’s and Coverdale’s), and this has the distinction of being the first that henry authorized to be used by the people at large. Matthew or Rogers (for he assumed different names for Bible-selling purposes) was, like Coverdale, a renegade priest, and had married, and we are not surprised to find that some of his notes on the Gospel were indecent, and others consisted of abuse of the Church, her clergy, and her doctrines. Two years later (1539) a man, Taverner, produced another version of the Bible. He was a layman, but a preacher notwithstanding, who had saved his skin by recanting his opinions. And the same year appeared a version that was to hold the field for popularity for the next twenty years viz., the Great Bible, sometimes called Cranmer’s, from the Preface written by that accommodating prelate. It was Cromwell (Thomas, not Oliver, of course) who engineered it, and Coverdale who supervised its progress. The printing of it was begun in France, but when the work was half finished, the Inquisitor-General very properly stepped in and confiscated the press and types. If England was going to the dogs through anti-Papal Bibles, he saw no reason why France should do the same. However, it was completed and published in London in 1539, and, like previous versions, contained fulsome flattery of Henry VIII, concerning whom Our Lord is represented as saying, ‘I have found a man after My Own heart, who shall fulfil all My will!’ This volume was by Royal Proclamation ordered to be put up in every church in England; and Bonner, Bishop of London (‘Bloody Bonner’,) who is held up as the most determined enemy of Bible reading, set up at his own expense six beautiful copies of this Book at various convenient places in St. Paul’s Cathedral. Unfortunately, so much ill-feeling, disturbance, contention, and irreverence was the result of this unrestrained Scripture reading that he was compelled to threaten their removal. The license to read and judge, each one for himself, of the sense and meaning of the Word of God produced, as we said before, most lamentable effects, and led to the utter degradation of the Sacred Volume. Not that there was any eager desire or thirst for it, or any great or general use made of it: for the printers often complained of the large stock left, unbought, on their hands, and begged that persons should be compelled to purchase them, and besought that no fresh editions might be published; and we have seen that Acts had to be made to force people to buy them, under threat of fine and imprisonment. But yet those who did read the Bible made it only a matter of altercation and contention and argument, and brought it down to the depths of disrepute and contempt. The extent to which this evil had spread may best be judged from the public lament of Henry VIII himself in his last speech to Parliament: ‘I am extremely sorry to find how much the Word of God is abused: with how little reverence it is mentioned; how people squabble about the sense; how it is turned into wretched rhymes, sung and jangled in every alehouse and tavern; and all this in a false construction and counter-meaning to the inspired writers. I am sorry to perceive the readers of the Bible discover so little of it in their practice; for I am sure charity was never in a more languishing condition, virtue never at a lower ebb, nor God Himself less honored or worse served in Christendom.’ There is no ambiguity about these words, and when we remember that the same sentiments are expressed in the writings and speeches of many of the Reformers themselves, who complain of the licentiousness of the masses since the abolition of Popery, and remember too, how Henry VIII was constrained to seize and burn Tyndale’s and Coverdale’s and other versions of the Bible, and to forbid the reading of any version at all to large classes of his subjects – in the face of all this, who will fail to see the sinful folly of the policy of the English schismatics of that day? And who will deny that the Catholic Church showed consummate wisdom, holy prudence, and the truest reverence for God’s Word in withholding her version till a more convenient season?

(3) But are we finished with the erroneous versions yet? Far from it. Henry VIII certainly authorized no more, for the simple reason that he went to Judgment in 1547. No new edition came out in Edward the Sixth’s reign (1547-1553) but in 1557 one was published that owed its origin to William Whittingham, a layman, who had married a sister of John Calvin’s wife, and who was made Dean of Durham. Wittingham’s Bible, issued at Geneva, perpetuated the corruptions of Tyndale’s with an Epistle of Calvin added to the Epistles of St. Paul and the other Apostles. During the reign of ‘Bloody’ Mary (1553-1558), who, of course, ought to have hated the Scriptures like poison (being a bigoted Papist and wife of a Spaniard), there were, strange to say, no proclamations against Scripture reading, nor is there to be found any trace of opposition on the part either of the Queen or of her Bishops to the Bible being read or printed in the vulgar tongue; so says Mr. Blunt, the Anglican historian. With the accession of the ‘Virgin Queen Bess’, however, a new Bible saw the light in 1560 at Geneva, which was the work of Nonconformists resident here, and is known as the Genevan Bible, though Bible collectors know it more familiarly by the title ‘Breeches Bible’, from its rendering of Genesis iii, 7: ‘They sewed fig leaves together and made themselves breeches’. It was certainly the most popular that had yet appeared among the sectaries, partly because of its undeniable scholarship and accuracy, and partly because of its notes on the margin, which were fiercely Calvinistic. Take an example: Rev. ix., 3. Here the note runs: ‘Locusts are false teachers, heretics and worldly subtil prelates, with monks, friars, cardinals, patriarchs, archbishops, bishops, doctors, bachelors, masters, which forsake Christ to maintain false doctrine’. Nobody worth speaking about is missed out here.

The Puritan soldiers used to carry about with them a little book made up of quotations from the notes of this Calvinistic version. It seems also to have suited the Scottish taste of the period, for it was the first edition printed in Scotland. So little, however, did the great mass of the people in this country care for any Bible in English at all that the Privy Council passed a law compelling every householder possessed of a certain sum to purchase a copy under a penalty of Ł10. The Magistrates and Town Council of Edinburgh also did their best to force the sale of the volume; and searchers went from house to house throughout this unhappy land to see if it had been bought. But, in spite of all the pressure, we find from the Privy Council Records that many householders preferred to incur the pains and penalties to purchasing the Bible. The old dodge was then adopted in regard to the Genevan version that had done service with previous copies – the dodge, namely, of issuing the very same book, with the same errors and identical notes, but under a new title page, so as to deceive the unwary into believing it was a fresh edition. This trick had to be played, of course, by the unfortunate and impecunious printers and booksellers, who had large stocks of Bibles unsold on their shelves; and the perpetration of this fraud helped the Genevan editions considerably. But the Elizabethan Bishops soon found that this Bible, with its violent Calvinistic notes and teaching, was undermining the popularity of the Church of England; so Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, set himself the task of providing another version that would be less offensive to the High Church party and more favorable to Anglicanism. The result was the Bishops’ Bible, which appeared in 1568, and took the chief place in the public services of the Church, though it never displaced the Genevan in the favor of the people.

We are close now to the moment at which the first Catholic version (and up till today the only one ever sanctioned in English) appeared. But there was still one more Protestant version which, as it is yet the principal recognized Bible of the Protestants of the British Empire, must not be omitted. I mean, of course, King James’s version of 1611. It is the 300^th anniversary of this, commonly called the Authorized Version, that English-speaking Protestants are everywhere celebrating this year (1911).

(4) Neither the Royal Pedant himself, nor anybody else, seems to have been satisfied with any of the Bibles then floating about. Dr. Reynolds, the Puritan leader, ‘moved his Majesty there might be a new translation of the Bible, because those which were allowed in the reign of Henry VIII and Edward VI were corrupt, and not answerable to the truths of the original’. James, great scholar as he thought himself to be professed ‘that he could never yet see a Bible well translated into English, but the worst of all his Majesty thought, the Geneva’ – a judgment we cannot be surprised at, considering that that version openly allowed disobedience to a king, and blamed Asa for only deposing his mother and not killing her. (2 Chron. xv. 16). Moreover, he declared that ‘some of its notes were very partial, untrue, seditious, and savored too much of dangerous and traitorous conceits’. Hence a large band of translators was appointed and in 1611 there was finished and published what has proved to be the best Protestant version that ever appeared – one which has exercised an enormous influence not only on the minds of its readers, but also on English literature throughout the world. In 1881-1885 this version of King James was revised, but whilst acceptable to students, the Revision has gained no hold upon the people at large.

(5) How long it will be before another Protestant version appears he would be a bold man who would venture to prophecy; but that others will spring up and add to the number of the wrecks that already strew the path we may confidently predict. I have given a goodly list of corrupt and erroneous versions; but please do not imagine for a moment that my catalogue is anything like complete. I have merely mentioned those that were more commonly used an d secured a certain amount of popularity and authorization from Protestant headquarters. But there are, I am safe in saying, hundreds of other editions that flooded this unhappy realm from the time of Tyndale, some from foreign countries, like Holland and Germany, and Switzerland, and some produced at home, but all of them swarming with blunders and perversions. On glancing over a bookseller’s catalogue the other day my eye happened to light on some of those that have attained notoriety for their absurd mistakes. There is, for example, the ‘He’ Bible and the ‘She’ Bible, so called from the hopeless mixing up of these pronouns in the Book of Ruth; the ‘He’ Bible has one set of errors and the ‘She’ Bible another. There is the ‘Wicked’ Bible from the word ‘not’ being omitted from the 7^th Commandment. There is the ‘Vinegar’ Bible, from printing ‘vinegar’ instead of ‘vineyard’, and so producing ‘The Parable of the Vinegar’. This Bible was printed by a man called Baskett, and is now vainly sought for by collectors on account of its numberless errors; indeed, it was wittily called the ‘Basket-ful of Errors’. There is the ‘Murderer’s Bible’, from the words of Our Lord being thus printed: ‘But Jesus said unto her, let the children first be killed’ (instead of ‘fed’). Then we have the ‘Whig’ Bible and the ‘Unrighteous’ Bible and the ‘Bug’ Bible, and the ‘Treacle’ Bible, and no end of other kinds of Bibles, all crammed full of mistakes and corruptions. The Pearl Bible, for instance, published by Field, the Parliamentary printer, has 6,000 errors in it. A famous book was written by a man named Ward in the seventeenth century, entitled Errata of the Protestant Bible, containing a formidable list of, I should not like to say how many thousand errors in the various versions. No one has yet succeeded in refuting Ward’s Errata. It stands as a gruesome commentary on the history of heretical treatment of the inspired text. I came across a curious and rare book one day in Glasgow University Library, written in 1659, by a Protestant, one William Kilburn, entitled Dangerous Errors in Several Late Printed Bibles to the Great Scandal and Corruption of Sound and True Religion. He enumerates the errors, omissions, and specimens of nonsense that he discovered in these editions, many of them imported from Holland, and mentions that a gentleman had unearthed 6,000 mistakes in one copy alone.

(6) But time would fail to tell of all the corruptions and perversions of the original texts which are to be found in practically all the Protestant Bibles, down to the present time, and whose existence is proved by the fact that one after the other has been withdrawn, and its place taken by a fresh version, which in its turn was found to be no better than the rest.

Is this reverence for the Word of God? Which of all these corrupt partisan versions was ‘the Rule of Faith?’ The Bible, and the Bible only, we are told; but which Bible? I ask. Or had Protestants a different Rule of Faith according to the century in which they lived? According to a copy of the Bible they chanced to possess? What a mockery of Religion! What a degradation of God’s Holy Word, that it should have been knocked about like a shuttlecock, and made to serve the interests of now this sect, now of that, and loaded with notes that shrieked aloud party war-cries and bitter accusations and filthy insinuations! Is this zeal for the pure and incorrupt Gospel? Is this the grand and unspeakable blessing of the ‘open Bible’? It only remains now to show by contrast the calm, dignified, and reverent action taken by the Catholic Church, towards her own Book.

Chapter Fourteen