Pat, the Parish Secretary, has been busy in her office ‘sorting out’ and ‘tidying up’ as new brooms do, and coming across a velvet-lined wooden box containing a bible, she placed it in the deep window embrasure in the Parvise to show off its nicely carved and varnished surface. We spotted it there and admired it, but what we didn’t realise until we took a closer look is that the leather bound book inside, with wooden boards carved to match the box, is not your standard Authorised Version, but a GENEVA Bible, and the spine bears the date 1614. This is a very special Bible indeed.
Is it genuine? Oh yes. We can be sure of that by turning to Genesis 3.7 where we read that Adam and Eve ‘sewed fig leaves together and made themselves breeches’, and a marginal note helpfully explains these are ‘things to gird about them to hide their privities’. The Authorised Version has the couple in ‘aprons’, which has always seemed to me an overly domestic image; ‘loincloth’ would be my ideal translation, but that word did not appear until the 18th Century. The New International and Good News Bibles both use ‘coverings’ which is rather unimaginative.
So, the Parish has a ‘Breeches Bible’ – where did it come from? At one time it was in the possession of the Keen family who recorded family details on the reverse of the NT title page: Edmd Keen born 1691, Sara Keen born 1734, Robt Ware, and other names and dates all rather crudely written as by hands unused to holding a pen. The front fly leaf is signed ‘Henry Pritchard 1886’ in an educated hand, and he has added ‘Bound 1887 in wood panels’: the initials ‘HP’ are carved on the back panel, so certainly it was he who had this done (greatly devaluing the book of course), and had the box made to hold it. But how did it reach St Leonard’s? That we know not. Miss Laundon used it in her ‘Time to Celebrate’ display, but that was in 1999 and that is why we have all forgotten its existence. Revd Norman Woods remembers only that it was there when he arrived (than which the memory of man goes no further) and has no knowledge of its provenance.
What is its importance to history? An English translation was not new: Henry VIII had commissioned one, and placed it in every church, but he hoped to keep the genie in the bottle by forbidding labourers, servants, and women (!) – though he exempted noble women – to read the NT. Then, during Bloody Mary’s reign, Protestant exiles gathered in republican Geneva and in 1560 published a work there of which nearly one third was not God’s Word at all, but comment on it. And comment which King James was later to condemn as ‘very partial, untrue, seditious, and savouring too much of dangerous and traitorous conceits’. Indeed it threatened the finely balanced ‘Elizabethan Settlement’, that wonderful compromise which gave something to everyone: Protestant in doctrine, yet retaining Bishops, Vestments, Churches, the sign of the Cross at Baptism, and above all (from James’s point of view) the Divinity of Kingship.
The Geneva Bible was dedicated to the newly crowned Elizabeth, who accepted the honour cautiously, for typically she ‘wished to favour neither Papist nor Gospeller’. And Settlement or no, it went to the top of the charts immediately: it was so accessible. The translation was by William Whittingham (who was related by marriage to Calvin), and drew on several previous translations, but above all on the unfinished work of the martyred master of prose, Tyndale. It divided the text into verses (the first to do so), and gave simple summaries at the head of each chapter; the font was easy-to-read Roman rather that Gothic, italics were used, there were notes to explain the ‘hard places’, it had maps and pictures, ‘two right profitable and fruitful concordances….on the sense and meaning of the Scriptures’, a page of ‘certain questions and answers touching on the doctrine of Predestination’, and the quarto edition was cheap enough for a tradesman’s family to buy.
In the following years its popularity grew, and with this in the home, who needed a priest? Here was the rub of course: the Bishops especially hated the Geneva Bible because it was a threat to their authority, even their existence, and they had the support of Elizabeth’s successor, who when he acceded turned out to be no Scottish Calvinist after all. He was determined to suppress it, yet there was no stopping it: it is the Bible which Shakespeare used; it is the Bible which crossed the sea in the Mayflower, its Protestantism influences American thinking to this day; it ran through more than 160 editions. The Geneva Bible was the book King James had to beat with his Authorised Version of 1611.
He did beat it, but it was no walkover and it took many years – the Geneva Bible was still being issued as late as 1644. Why on earth did he permit the St Leonard’s copy to be ‘imprinted in London, by Robert Barker, Printer to the King’s most excellent Majestie, ‘cum privilegio’, in 1614?
Answer to follow.
Mike Umbers
Our Parish Treasure – Part 2
So, the Parish has a ‘Breeches Bible’ – see September’s Review. The title page tells us it was ‘imprinted at London in 1614 by Robert Barker, Printer to the King’s Most Excellent Majestie, cum privilegio’. These two words mean in effect ‘under licence’: Robert’s father Christopher had bought the privilege for himself and by extension for his son, and so had the monopoly of official printing, and as the Geneva Bible was so popular and therefore profitable, he quickly ensured it would be printed in England – and by himself. [Later, Robert was much less willing to take on the King James Bible, an unknown quantity which sold only slowly. Production costs amounted to £3,500, he needed partners with whom he quarrelled, and he over-reached himself, had cash-flow difficulties, and died in a Debtors’ Prison – though King’s Printer to the end! It had not helped his finances to be heavily fined for rendering Ex 20:14 as ‘Thou shalt commit adultery’.]
The first copies printed in Geneva had been imported into Britain in 1560 and were a hit from the first. It was the product of two years of intense work (by day and night, we are told), by scholars exiled from England during Queen Mary’s Catholic terror. Geneva was an independent Republic with a strong interest in spreading its political ideas – in a monarchical age the very name signalled revolt against the establishment, and the side notes and explanations to the text were revolutionary to clergy in England who saw it as undermining their authority and traditional role of interpreting God’s word to the people. Queen Elizabeth had given it a cautious welcome and it gained ground throughout her reign, especially when the defeat of Spain’s Armada proved God to be a Protestant and the Puritan extremists became more radicalised than ever. But King James, uneasy in his new capital, hated it from the first as dangerous and traitorous, that is, literally, the work of traitors. He twisted Psalm 105 and 1 Chronicles 16.22: ‘Touch not the Lord’s anointed...’ (despite the sense of the whole passage) into a justification of the Divine Right of Kings, for was not he recently anointed at his Coronation? No, said the Protestant scholars: the passage refers to the people, the rank and file, for all Christians are anointed at baptism and therefore they must not be harassed even by royal authority. Ideas like this if unchecked would overthrow the entire structure of church and state. Yet the Geneva Bible had won its place on merit: the accessible plain text, the summaries and explanations, the headings and verses – it went into edition after edition: a population of six million, and many of those illiterate, had bought half a million copies. It had to be suppressed. The only way was to produce something better – and without those seditious notes! In 1604 James set up his unpaid Committee of around 50 mainly Oxbridge scholars who working in three locations, communicating in Latin without benefit of email, and in 1611 produced the work we know and love, Apocrypha included.
For many years it remained the Bible of the establishment rather than the Bible of the people. Scholars who had not been selected to work on it were the most vociferous critics, and Puritans were quick to say aloud that Parliament should authorise a Bible, not a monarch – the lines of the forthcoming Civil War were already being marked out. James caused printing of the Geneva Bible to cease in England in 1616 – thereafter it had to be imported, but imported it still was. His son Charles I and Archbishop Laud, a high churchman, argued that English printers needed protection and banned its importation, and at last sales of King James’s Bible began slowly to grow, though there were criticisms of its misprints (Robert Barker had saved money by cutting down on proof-readers, and underpaying them), of some confusions in its translations, of its inclusion of the Apocrypha, and of its apparent hostility to Puritanism – the dominant strand in political thought up to and during the period of the Commonwealth. Then came the Restoration of Charles II, Protestantism was discredited as a system of politics and religion, and suddenly a Royal Bible was seen as holding together church and state, bishops and monarch. With its misprints corrected and growing familiarity, the literary and spiritual influence of the King James Bible from the 1700’s to the First World War has been incalculable; it has gone from strength to strength for its authority and dignity even in conservative Protestant America, whence (from Texas actually), comes this judgement: ‘If the English of the Saint James Bible was good enough for Jesus, it is good enough for me.’
Mike Umbers |