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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.
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 translators more diligent, as answerable for their doings" (Pollard 22-3).
The Bishops' Bible had the authority of the royal warrant, and was the version specifically authorised 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. As a result, while the Bishops' Bible went through 20 editions from its introduction to 1606, during the same period the Geneva Bible was reprinted more than 150 times.
In 1611, the King James Version was published, and 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".
References
- Alfred W. Pollard, "Biographical Introduction," in The Holy Bible: 1611 Edition, King James Version. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2003. ISBN 1565631609.
- David Daniell, "Introduction," in his edition of Tyndale's New Testament. New Haven: Yale, 1989. ISBN 0300044194.
- 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.
External links
- Studylight Version of the Bishops Bible Text.;From Studylight, An incomplete Version, lacking in the Apocrypha, which existed in the original, but in the original spelling.
1560s books | Bible versions and translations | Religion in the United Kingdom
"Bishops' Bible"