Bishops' Bible

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The Bishops' Bible was an English translation of the Bible produced under the authority of the established Church of England in 1568.

[edit] History

The thorough Calvinism of the Geneva Bible offended the high-church party of the Church of England, to which almost all of its bishops subscribed. They associated Calvinism with Presbyterianism, which sought to replace government of the church by bishops (Episcopalian) with government by lay elders. In an attempt to replace the objectionable translation, they circulated one of their own, which became known as the Bishops' Bible.

The leading figure in translating was Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury. It was at his instigation that the various sections translated by Parker and his fellow bishops were followed by their initials in the early editions. For instance, at the end of the book of Deuteronomy, we find the initials "W.E.," which, according to a letter Parker wrote to Sir William Cecil, stands for William Alley, Bishop of Exeter. Parker tells Cecil that this system was "to make [the translators] more diligent, as answerable for their doings" (Pollard 22-3).

The Bishops' Bible was first published in 1568 (Herbert #125). It had the authority of the royal warrant, and was the version specifically authorized to be read aloud in church services. However, it failed to displace the Geneva Bible from its popular esteem. The version was more grandiloquent than the Geneva Bible, but was harder to understand. It lacked most of the footnotes and cross-references in the Geneva Bible, which contained much controversial theology, but which were helpful to people among whom the Bible was just beginning to circulate in the vernacular. The last edition of the complete Bible was issued in 1602 (Herbert #271), but the New Testament was reissued until at least 1617 (Herbert #356–#368). William Fulke published several parallel editions up to 1633 (Herbert #480), with the New Testament of the Bishops' Bible alongside the Rheims New Testament, specifically to demonstrate the deficiencies of the latter. The Bishops' Bible or its New Testament went through over 50 editions, whereas the Geneva Bible was reprinted more than 150 times.

The translators of the King James Version were instructed to take the Bishops' Bible as their basis, although several other existing translations were taken into account. After it was published in 1611, the King James Version soon took the Bishops' Bible's place as the de facto standard of the Church of England. Later judgments of the Bishops' Bible have not been favorable; David Daniell, in his important edition of William Tyndale's New Testament, states that the Bishops' Bible "was, and is, not loved. Where it reprints Geneva it is acceptable, but most of the original work is incompetent, both in its scholarship and its verbosity" (Daniell xii).

Unlike Tyndale's translations and the Geneva Bible, the Bishops' Bible has rarely been reprinted. The most available reprinting of its New Testament portion (minus its marginal notes) can be found in the fourth column of the New Testament Octapla edited by Luther Weigle, chairman of the translation committee that produced the Revised Standard Version.

The Bishops' Bible is also known as the "Treacle Bible", due to its translation of Jeremiah 8:22 which reads "Is there not treacle at Gilead?" In the Authorized Version of 1611, "treacle" was changed to "balm".

[edit] References

Alfred W. Pollard, "Biographical Introduction," in The Holy Bible: 1611 Edition, King James Version. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2003. ISBN 1-56563-160-9.
David Daniell, "Introduction," in his edition of Tyndale's New Testament. New Haven: Yale, 1989. ISBN 0-300-04419-4.
Luther A. Weigle, ed., The New Testament Octapla: Eight English Versions of the New Testament in the Tyndale-King James Tradition. NY: Thomas Nelson, n.d. (1962). No ISBN; Library of Congress catalog number 62-10331.
A. S. Herbert, Historical Catalogue of Printed Editions of the English Bible 1525–1961, London: British and Foreign Bible Society; New York: American Bible Society, 1968. SBN 564-00130-9.