History of the English Bible
Author, Michael Andrus
The audio file included is a reader and not Mike Andrus
God has always worked in human nature, in human affairs, and in human politics to bring about His will. I don’t know any place one can see that unfold better than in the history of the English Bible. For many centuries the Bible was quite unavailable to common people. Whereas we can buy one for a few dollars, and most of us have a half a dozen or more Bibles in our homes, there was a time when a Bible cost as much as four hundred dollars, and if you were caught with one in your possession, you could easily be executed.
In the first century of the Christian era, the New Testament was completed, and both the Old and New Testaments were collected into the Canon of Scripture. The 39 books of the Old Testament and the 27 books of the New Testament were copied, distributed, and studied everywhere Christians were scattered. In approximately A.D. 400, the Latin Vulgate was translated by Saint Jerome, and it became the basis for all Roman Catholic Bibles for over 1600 years, until Vatican II in 1965. In about 735 A.D. a monk called “the Venerable Bede” translated the Gospel of John from the Latin into what might be called “proto English.”
The Norman Conquest in 1066 marks the beginning of what we know today as the English language. In the mid-1300’s John Wycliffe, a priest in England, began to translate the Bible into English. He had to do this secretly because it was not legal to put the Bible into the language of the common people. The Roman Catholic Church had a strong position against lay people reading the Bible, believing that if the average person read the Bible, it would result in all kinds of weird interpretations. Only priests were to read and interpret the Bible; they could then tell the people what it meant.
Wycliffe had to do his translation work in secret. His followers, who were called Lollards, took his work and spread it throughout England. Many of them, sadly, were burned at the stake for doing this. Wycliffe Bibles were very expensive, costing as much as a load of hay for a few pages or four hundred dollars for a complete Bible. There are only a few extant today, and they are worth multiple millions of dollars as collector’s items.
In 1456, Johann Gutenberg invented the printing press in Germany, which played an important part in the spread of Martin Luther’s reformation, starting in 1517, throughout Europe. Scholars who shared Luther’s ideas began to translate the Bible into various vernacular languages. Luther himself translated the Bible into German—not from the Vulgate, but from the original Greek and Hebrew—and began to disseminate it among the common people. He believed in the priesthood of the believer and argued cogently that a person could not be a priest before God if he didn’t know what God said.
It is not possible to effectively discuss the history of the English Bible without reference to the Catholic Church—not because the Catholic Church encouraged the translation of the Bible into English, but because it fought so hard against it. My comments here are not meant to disparage the Catholic Church; they really don’t relate to the Catholic Church today. But they have a lot to say about the medieval Catholic Church, which was a corrupt and very ungodly institution. Even Catholic scholars today would agree about that.
In 1198 the Pope was a man who took the name, Innocent III. Scholars refer to his time as the “peak of papal power.” He was probably the most powerful man in the world. During his life, he not only controlled the church but also the major governments of the time—the Holy Roman Empire and France and Italy. However, shortly after his time the papacy began to decline. In fact, a hundred years later, the papacy had declined so much in power that Pope Boniface VIII was deposed by Philip the Fair of France, and then French cardinals moved the papacy to the city of Avignon in France. That began what is known as “the Babylonian Captivity of the Church”—from the period of 1309 to 1378. It’s called the Babylonian captivity because it lasted about seventy years, which is the same timeframe as the Babylonian captivity of Israel.
During this period, all the popes were French, and the church was virtually a French department of state. A great schism occurred in 1378 as the papacy returned to Rome, and an Italian pope was elected. However, the French cardinals refused to accept the Italian pope, so now there was a pope in Avignon and a pope in Rome. Each excommunicated the other from the church. It was during this time of uncertainty in the Roman Catholic church that John Wycliffe began to do his translation work in England. If the church wasn’t struggling with its leadership problem, they would have probably executed Wycliffe and done away with his efforts, but they were preoccupied with their political problems.
In 1409 at the Council of Pisa, both the French and Italian popes were excommunicated, and a Greek prelate named Alexander V was elected pope. But neither the French nor the Italian popes would quit. So now there were three popes, all claiming to be the vicar of Christ. The Council of Constance met in 1414 to 1418 to settle this problem, and they finally did. They elected Martin V as Pope and persuaded the others to quit.
This Council of Constance not only settled who was pope, but it also made a very important decision about John Wycliffe, who had died some time earlier. They decided to dig up his bones, burn them, and scatter his ashes on the River Thames to show what they thought of his Bible translating work. I’m sure it didn’t bother Wycliffe, but it was a major statement by the Catholic Church as to their view of having the Bible distributed in English.
The period from 1350 to 1550 is generally referred to as “the Renaissance Papacy.” It was a time when the popes were not really very religious but rather were leading humanists of the Renaissance. Nicholas V, for example, was pope from 1447 to 1455. He was the founder of the Vatican Library and a major builder of the city of Rome. He was followed a few years later by Sixtus IV. an absolute secularist and a patron of the arts. The Sistine Chapel is named after him. He was an avowed nepotist, putting all his nephews and relatives into bishoprics.
Alexander the Sixth became the Pope in 1492, a date most of us can remember. He had many children before and after becoming pope, issuing papal bulls to make them legitimate and giving them high church offices. He was followed by Julius II, who began rebuilding Saint Peter’s Cathedral and hired Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel. Finally, Leo X, the son of Lorenzo de Medici, became the Pope. He is known for his statement, “God gave us the papacy. Let us enjoy it.”
During this entire time the Roman Catholic Church was in awful shape spiritually. Most of the Popes were essentially immoral humanists. It was during the papacy of Leo X that Luther nailed his ninety-five theses on the door of the of the Wittenberg church. The Reformation, of course, followed. One can see historically how the Reformation was a product of its times.
Out of the Reformation came several very important doctrinal positions. One was sola scriptura, the view that the Scripture is our sole authority for faith and practice. A second was sola fide, or the view that that salvation is by faith alone and not through the church. Third was the priesthood of the believer, namely that every believer is responsible before God for his spiritual life, including the confession of his sins and his understanding of God’s Word. Since one can’t have the priesthood of the believer unless the believer can have God’s Word, the most important thing about the Reformation became getting the Bible into the hands of the people.
The Roman Catholic Church didn’t take the Reformation sitting down. Instead of agreeing to the reforms Luther asked for, they reacted with the Counter-Reformation, highlighted by the Council of Trent from 1545 to 1560. At this Council most of Luther’s ideas were officially condemned, the Apocrypha was declared fully scriptural, and the Latin Vulgate was amazingly declared to be superior even to the Greek and Hebrew from which it was translated. This was a reaction to the fact that Luther had translated the Bible into the German language. He had not only translated it, but he ignored the Vulgate and translated directly from Greek and Hebrew. The notion that a translation can be superior to the original is an utterly absurd notion, but that was the official position of the Catholic Church for 400 years—until Vatican II in 1965.
The translation and distribution of the Bible in English are intimately tied in with the English monarchy and the English Reformation. To understand this let’s begin with a date we all know—1492. The king and queen of Spain were Ferdinand and Isabella. Alexander VI, the worst of all the popes, was in Rome. Machiavelli was the political leader of Italy. Charles V was the Holy Roman Emperor.
Henry VII was King of England from 1485 to 1509. He was the first monarch of the House of Tudor, and he had two sons, Arthur and Henry VIII. Arthur was the oldest and the heir apparent, so his father pursued a marriage alliance for Arthur. He got Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain to give their daughter Catherine to Arthur as his wife. Arthur was only fourteen years of age, but they got married and a huge dowry was given by Ferdinand and Isabella to Henry VII.
Unfortunately, Arthur died later that year. His bride, Catherine of Aragon, became a real financial and political problem for Henry VII, as he didn’t want to lose the political alliance or the dowry he had received. So, he arranged to have Catherine married to his second son, Henry VIII. But to bring this about, he had to get a special papal dispensation, because the Church had a law against a man marrying his brother’s widow. That’s interesting, because the the Old Testament actually commands a man to marry his brother’s widow (Deut. 25:5-10). But the Catholic Church’s laws didn’t always line up with Scripture.
Henry VII finally got permission from the Church, and when his son Henry was eighteen, he also married Catherine of Aragon. They seemed to have a fairly happy marriage, except that Catherine bore him no sons. She did have one daughter, Mary, but Henry VIII wanted a son and began to wonder if some divine displeasure rested upon him because he had married his brother’s widow. In addition, he had met another woman named Anne Boleyn, who helped raise doubts in his mind. So, he began to seek an annulment of his marriage to Catherine. The only way to get it was to obtain a special dispensation from Rome. But the Pope could hardly afford to offer that because Charles V, the Holy Roman Empire emperor, was now controlling Italy, and Catherine was his niece! How could the Pope offer Henry a divorce from the niece of the ruler, Charles V, who could come down and kick the Pope out of Rome?
Since Henry VIII couldn’t get permission from the pope, he decided to declare his independence from Rome and start his own church, the Church of England, which led to his own excommunication. Henry appointed a new Archbishop of Canterbury, who promptly gave him the annulment he was seeking. A lot of people lost their heads during this time, including Sir Thomas More, who was a Catholic and refused to bow to Henry’s desires. Though he was a very good friend of Henry, Henry had him executed. The story is told in the one of the finest movies that Hollywood has ever produced called “A Man for All Seasons.”
Henry then divorced Catherine and married Anne Boleyn, who was already pregnant with his daughter, Elizabeth, and the break with the Catholic Church was made official in 1534. Many protested Henry’s usurpation of church authority, but he usually took care of that by simply beheading them. Unfortunately, he soon grew tired of Anne Boleyn, who didn’t produce a son for him, and married Jane Seymour, who finally bore him a son, named Edward, who became king when Henry died. Edward was just nine years old when he ascended the throne and died at age fifteen.
Henry VIII, of course, had other wives, but our concern is in how Henry’s marriages and his break from Rome allowed an open door for the English Bible. Had it not been for Henry’s marriage troubles and his subsequent split from Rome, there would never have been a proper climate for the translation and dissemination of the Bible in England. But when Henry declared his independence from Rome, that provided the opportunity, and some brave souls began to test the waters. The bravest of them was William Tyndale.
Tyndale was a brilliant and godly Englishman who had already begun to translate the Bible while the Catholic Church was still in power in England. Once the Catholic church was deposed, he continued his translating work with increased vigor. A scholar from Oxford and Cambridge, he believed strongly that the people needed to have the Bible in their own language, and not just a revision of the Vulgate, but translation from the Greek and Hebrew. When church leaders began to oppose his work, he told them, “If God spare my life, I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the scripture than you know.”
When it became impossible for him to continue his translation work in England, he went to the continent. He did such an excellent job that virtually every English Bible we have today is indebted to his translation. Probably two thirds of the expressions we have in our English Bibles today are original with William Tyndale. He had the Bible printed on a Gutenberg press and smuggled back into England in flour sacks. Henry VII’s henchmen tried to seize those Bibles, and as they did, they would burn them in the city square. But Tyndale wasn’t deterred. In fact, because they had to pay more to get those Bibles than the Bibles cost to produce, he just produced that many more and sent them back to England. Fifty thousand Bibles were smuggled into England by William Tyndale.
Eventually someone betrayed Tyndale, and on October 6, 1536, Henry VIII gave permission for him to be executed. He was burned at the stake and his last words were, “Lord, open thou the King of England’s eyes.” Amazingly, in 1538, less than two years later, Henry VIII himself commanded that an English Bible be placed in every church in England, one Bible per church. Mind you, that was all. It had to be chained in the foyer so people wouldn’t walk away with it. And they even had to pass a law later that year that the Bible could not be read during the service, because people were gathering out in the foyer while someone read the Bible to them. They were making so much commotion in the foyer that the priest could not be heard as he was chanting his Latin mass in the worship service. The people were hungry for God’s Word in their own language.
When one looks back at Tyndale’s prayer, one sees that God answered it in a unique way. I don’t think Henry VIII’s spiritual eyes were ever opened. But despite his own spiritual coldness, he ordered the Bible to be disseminated throughout England.
Edward became king in 1547, and though he only reigned for seven years, this was a period of great advancement for Protestant causes. The people that were the power behind the throne let Protestantism flourish and many Bibles were produced. Scholars from the continent came to England and started doing biblical research. But when Edward died at age 15, Mary, Henry VIII’s daughter, became queen. Catherine, you will recall, was the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, and she was a strong Catholic, as was her daughter. Mary began to persecute the Protestants. She drove them out of England and murdered many Protestant leaders. The book, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, was written during this time. It tells the story of many of these people who lost their lives during Bloody Mary’s reign. The damage would have been far worse had she reigned very long, but she too died after just six years.
In 1558 Elizabeth, who was Henry VIII’s second daughter and last surviving child, became queen, and she reigned for nearly forty years. Elizabeth was not a very religious person. She wasn’t Protestant and she wasn’t Catholic—she just wanted peace in the land. One very important thing she did was to order that a new Bible be published. During Bloody Mary’s reign many Protestant scholar escaped England and went to Geneva, Switzerland, where they began to translate a new Bible, largely a revision of Tyndale. It’s called the Geneva Bible, and it was a very anti-Catholic Bible. They inserted notes identifying the Great Whore of Babylon as the pope in Rome. This Bible was imported into England in great quantities because it was small, the first Bible that would fit in one’s hand. All the previous ones had been very large and very expensive.
The Geneva Bible began to create real tension between Protestants and Catholics. The Catholic Church finally decided to respond with an English translation of their own—the Rheims Douay version. The New Testament was finished in 1582 and the Old Testament in 1610. It was a translation from the Vulgate for Catholic people. The Great Whore of Babylon is now identified as Martin Luther, and the notes are all virulently Anti-protestant. So, there are two English Bibles, the Geneva Bible and the Rheims Douay, fighting one another with their notes. Elizabeth didn’t want this, so she ordered a new Bible to be published called the Bishops Bible, which was not to have any notes in it—no Catholic notes and no Protestant notes. It became the first authorized version in English.
The House of Tudor started with Henry VII and ended with Elizabeth. King James I, the King of Scotland, was then inaugurated as the King of England. He ordered that a new Bible be translated, called the King James Version. It was published for the first time in 1611, a Bible that was to appeal to the whole church without partisan notes, produced by the best scholars in England. They did their work well, for that Bible was the Bible of the English language for over three hundred and fifty years. Only during our lifetimes has it begun to be supplanted by other translations! It was a remarkable translation but finally lost some of its appeal because of changes in the English language.
Protestants are sometimes chagrined to learn that all English Bibles up to 1640 included the Apocrypha as well as the Old and New Testaments. The Apocrypha were separated between the Testaments as a separate portion. Finally in 1640 a King James Version was published without the Apocrypha. In 1701 Archbishop Usher published a King James Version that included the date of creation—4004 BC at three thirty in the afternoon!
One of the important lessons we ought to draw from the history of the English Bible is that God is the sovereign Lord of history, and he uses the strangest things, political and marital, to bring about His will. When we look at the Bibles that we carry today and realize how many thousands of people lost their lives to give us God’s Word, and how God used such strange circumstances to provide an atmosphere where this could be produced, I think it ought to give us a great deal of gratitude in our hearts for our spiritual forefathers that went before us.