An Introduction to the Geneva Bible
Steve
The Geneva Bible
An Introduction to the Geneva Bible
For the last three centuries
Protestants have fancied themselves the heirs of the Reformation, the Puritans,
the Calvinists, and the Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth Rock. This assumption is
one of history's greatest ironies. Today's Protestants laboring under that
assumption use the King James Bible. Most of the newer Bibles such as the
Revised Standard Version are simply updates of the King James.
The irony
is that none of the groups named in the preceding paragraph used a King James
Bible nor would they have used it if it had been given to them free. The Bible
in use by those groups until it went out of print in 1644, was the Geneva Bible.
The first Geneva Bible, both Old and New Testaments, was first published in
English in 1560 in what is now Geneva, Switzerland,* William Shakespeare, John
Bunyan, John Milton, the Pilgrims who landed on Plymouth Rock in 1620, and other
luminaries of that era used the Geneva Bible exclusively.
Until he had
his own version named after him, so did King James I of England. James I later
tried to disclaim any knowledge of the Geneva Bible, though he quotes the Geneva
Bible in his own writing, As a Professor Eadie reported it:
". . . his virtual disclaimer of all knowledge up to a late period of the Genevan notes and version was simply a bold, unblushing falsehood, a clumsy attempt to sever himself and his earlier Scottish beliefs and usages that he might win favor with his English churchmen." 1
The irony goes further. King James
did not encourage a translation of the Bible in order to enlighten the common
people. His sole intent was to deny them the marginal notes of the Geneva Bible.
The marginal notes of the Geneva version were what made it so popular with the
common people.
The King James Bible was, and is for all practical
purposes, a government publication. There were several reasons for the King
James Bible being a government publication.
First,
King James I of England was a devout believer in the "divine right of kings," a
philosophy ingrained in him by his mother, Mary Stuart. 2 Mary Stuart may
have been having an affair with her Italian secretary, David Rizzio, at the time
she conceived James. There is a better than even chance that James was the
product of adultery* (G.P.V. Alerigg Jacobean Pageant p.6.). Apparently, enough
evidence of such conduct on the part of Mary Stuart and David Rizzio existed to
cause various Scot nobles, including Mary's own husband, King Henry, to drag
David Rizzio from Mary's supper table and execute him. The Scot nobles hacked
and slashed at the screaming Rizzio with knives and swords, and then threw him
off a balcony to the courtyard below where he landed with a sickening smack. In
the phrase of that day, he had been scotched. 3
Mary did have affairs with other men, such as the Earl of
Bothwell. She later tried to execute her husband in a gunpowder explosion that
shook all of Edinburg. King Henry survived the explosion, only to be suffocated
later that same night. The murderers were never discovered. Mary was eventually
beheaded at the order of her cousin, Elizabeth I of England. 4
To such
individuals as James and his mother, Mary, the "divine right of kings" meant
that since a king's power came from God, the king then had to answer to no one
but God. This lack of responsibility extended to evil kings. The reasoning was
that if a king was evil, that was a punishment sent from God. The citizens
should then suffer in silence. If a king was good, that was a blessing sent from
God.
This is why the Geneva Bible annoyed King James I. The Geneva Bible
had marginal notes that simply didn't conform to that point of view. Those
marginal notes had been, to a great extent placed in the Geneva Bible by the
leaders of the Reformation including John Knox and John Calvin. Knox and Calvin
could not and cannot be dismissed lightly or their opinions passed off to the
public as the mere dithering of dissidents.
First, notes such as, "When
tyrants cannot prevail by craft, they burst forth into open rage," (Note i,
Exodus 1:22) really bothered King James
Second, religion in James' time
was not what it is today. In that era, religion was controlled by the
government. If someone lived in Spain at the time, he had three religious
"choices":
1. Roman Catholicism
2.
Silence.
3. The Inquisition.
The third
"option" was reserved for "heretics," or people who didn't think the way the
government wanted them to. To governments of that era heresy and treason were
synonymous.
England wasn't much different. From the time of Henry VIII
on, an Englishman had three choices:
1. The Anglican Church.
2. Silence.
3. The rack,
burning at the stake, being drawn and quartered, or some other form of
persuasion.
The hapless individuals who fell into the hands of the
government for holding religious opinions of their own were simply punished
according to the royal whim.
Henry VIII, once he had appointed himself
head of all the English churches, kept the Roman Catholic system of bishops,
deacons and the like for a very good reason. That system allowed him a "chain of
command" necessary for any bureaucracy to function. This system passed intact to
his heirs.
This system became a little confusing for English citizens
when Bloody Mary * ascended to the throne. Mary wanted everyone to switch back
to Roman Catholicism. Those who proved intransigent and wanted to remain
Protestant she burned at the stake - about 300 people in all. She intended to
bum a lot more, but the rest of her intended victims escaped by leaving the
country.
A tremendous number of those intended victims settled in Geneva.
Religious refugees from other countries in Western Europe, including the French
theologian Jean Chauvin, better known as John Calvin, also settled
there.
Mary died and was succeeded to the throne by her Protestant
cousin, Elizabeth. The Anglican bureaucracy returned, less a few notables such
as Archbishop Cranmer and Hugh Latimer (both having been burned at the stake by
Bloody Mary). In Scotland, John Knox led the Reformation.
The Reformation
prospered in Geneva. Many of those who had fled Bloody Mary started a
congregation there. Their greatest effort and contribution to the Reformation
was the first Geneva Bible.
More marginal notes were added to later
editions.
* Daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. She became queen in 1553 after her brother, Edward VI, died.
By the end of the 16th Century, the
Geneva Bible had about all the marginal notes there was space available to put
them in.
Geneva was an anomaly in 16th Century Europe. In the days of
absolute despotism and constant warfare, Geneva achieved her independence
primarily by constant negotiation, playing off one stronger power against
another. While other governments allowed lawyers to drag out cases and took
months and years to get rid of corrupt officials, the City of Geneva dispatched
most civil and criminal cases within a month and threw corrupt officials into
jail the day after they were found out. The academy that John Calvin founded
there in 1559 later became the University of Geneva.
Religious wars
wracked Europe. The Spanish fought to restore Roman Catholicism to Western
Europe. The Dutch fought for the Reformation and religious freedom. England, a
small country with only 4 ½ million people, managed to stay aloof because of the
natural advantage of the English Channel.
The Dutch declared religious
freedom for everybody. Amsterdam became an open city*. English Puritans arrived
by the boatload. The 1599 Edition of the Geneva Bible was printed in Amsterdam
and London in large quantities until well into the 17th Century.
*At the time Geneva, was a city-state. Geneva did not become part of Switzerland until 1815.
King James, before he became James I
of England, made it plain that he had no use for the "Dutch" rebel who had
rebelled against their Spanish King.
Another of the ironies left us from
the 16th Century is that freedom of religion and freedom of the press did not
originate in England, as many people commonly assume today. Those freedoms were
first given to Protestants by the Dutch, as the records of that era plainly
show. England today does not have freedom of the press the way we understand it
(There are things in England such as the Official Secrets Act that often land
journalists in jail.)
England was relatively peaceful in the time of
Elizabeth I. There was the problem of the Spanish Armada, but that was brief
Elizabeth later became known as "Good Queen Bess," not because she was so good,
but because her successor was so bad.
Elizabeth died in 1603 and her
cousin, James Stuart, son of Mary Stuart, who up until that time had been King
James VI of Scotland, ascended the throne and became known as King James I of
England.
James ascended the throne of England with the "divine right of
kings" firmly embedded in his mind. Unfortunately, that wasn't his only mental
problem.
* In those days an "open city' was one in which the inhabitants were allowed to believe in or print what they preferred
King James I, among his many other
faults, preferred young boys to adult women. He was a flaming homosexual. His
activities in that regard have been recorded in numerous books and public
records; so much so, that there is no room for debate on the subject.
The King was queer. The very people who use the King James Bible today
would be the first ones to throw such a deviant out of their
congregations.
The depravity of King James I didn't end with sodomy.
James enjoyed killing animals. He called it "hunting." Once he killed an animal,
he would literally roll about in its blood. Some believe that he practiced
bestiality while the animal lay dying.
James was a sadist as well as a
sodomite: he enjoyed torturing people. While King of Scotland in 1591, he
personally supervised the torture of poor wretches caught up in the witchcraft
trials of Scotland. James would even suggest new tortures to the
examiners.
One "witch" Barbara Napier, was acquitted. That event so
angered James that he wrote personally to the court on May 10, 1591, ordering a
sentence of death, and had the jury called into custody. To make sure they
understood their particular offense, the King himself presided at a new hearing
(which could hardly be called a trial) and was gracious enough to release them
without punishment when they reversed their verdict.
History has it that James was also a great coward. On January
7, 1591, the King was in Edinburgh and emerged from the toll booth. A retinue
followed that included the Duke of Lennox and Lord Hume. They fell into an
argument with the laird of Logie and pulled their swords. James looked behind,
saw the steel flashing, and fled into the nearest refuge which turned out to be
a skinner's booth. There, to his shame, he "fouled his breeches in fear." 5
In short, King James I was the kind of despicable creature honorable
men loathed, Christians would not associate with, and the Bible itself orders to
be put to death. 6
Knowing what
King James was we can easily discern his motives.
James ascended the
English throne in 1603. He wasted no time in ordering a new edition of the Bible
in order to deny the common people the marginal notes they so valued in the
Geneva Bible. That James I wasn't going to have any marginal notes to annoy him
and lead English citizens away from what he wanted them to think is a matter of
public record. In an account corrected with his own hand dated February 10,
1604, he ordained:
That a translation be made of the whole Bible, as consonant as can be to the original Hebrew and Greek; and this to be set out and printed without any marginal notes, and only to be used in all churches of England in time of divine service.
James then set up rules that made it impossible for anyone involved in the project to make an honest translation, some of which follow:
1. The ordinary Bible read in the church, commonly called the Bishop's Bible to be followed and as little altered as the truth of the original will permit.
Or, since the common people preferred the Geneva Bible to the existing government publication, let's see if we can slip a superseding government publication onto their bookshelves, altered as little as possible.
2. The old Ecclesiastical words to be kept, viz. the word "church" not to be translated "congregation," etc.
That is, if a word should be translated a certain way, let's deliberately mistranslate it to make the people think God still belongs to the Anglican Church - exclusively.
3. No marginal notes at all to be affixed, but only for the explanation of the Hebrew or Greek words, which cannot without some circumlocution, so briefly and fitly be expressed in the text.
James didn't want those pesky
marginal notes cropping up, not even once. That was fine for the common herd,
but not for James' own bishops. Many of their writings and sermons alluded to
the Geneva Bible and its marginal notes decades after the King James Bible was
published.
The bishops had good reason to be confused. They needed those
marginal notes. James had just obliterated a procedure that kings and
governments had used for thousands of years. Because words and phrases quite
often had several meanings all important state or royal decrees, treaties, and
agreements contained marginal explanations or commentaries in order to remove
all doubt from the mind of the reader. In the 16th century those marginal notes
were called "glosses." Today the members of the legal profession use almost the
same system in the form of footnotes and case cites.
The King James Bible
was finally printed in 1611. It was not technically a translation. What the
flunkies employed by King James did was revise and compare other translations of
which they simply plagiarized about 20% of the Geneva Bible. *
* Translations from one language to another almost never come out word-for word identically.
In their New Testament translation,
the King James "translators" didn't even revise and compare. What they did was
simply copy – almost word for word - William Tyndales' 1525 New Testament. At
the time of his translation Tyndales' New Testament had been labeled as
"seditious material" by Henry VIII and copies discovered on ships reaching
English ports were confiscated and destroyed. William Warham, archbishop of
Canterbury, even went so far as to buy all the copies he could get in Europe in
order to destroy them.
Tyndale was hounded from London to Cologne to
Worms. He settled in Marburg under the protection of Philip, landgrave of Hesse.
Nobody messed with Big Phil.
Philip didn't care what anyone thought. If
he felt like telling the emperor to "stuff it," he did. If neighboring royalty
wanted to rumble, Philip showed up with troops. If Philip decided one wife
wasn't enough for him, he just took another one. In March of 1540, after Martin
Luther and other prominent Protestant theologians had expressly approved
polygamy according to the Scriptures, Philip became Europe's best- known
bigamist.
Unfortunately, even Philip couldn't cope with treachery.
Tyndale was betrayed by his personal Judas, Henry Phillips. He was tried for
heresy, condemned, strangled at the stake, and his body afterwards
burnt.
It is interesting to note that the Geneva Reformers- men such as
John Calvin - expressed opinions in the marginal notes that would be simply
unacceptable to the "scholars" of today. For example, the passage in Genesis
12:2-3, that reads:
"And I will make of thee a great nation, and will bless thee, and make thy name great, and thou shalt be a blessing.I will also bless them that bless thee, and curse them that curse thee, and in thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed."
Our ministers today tell us this refers to Jews. That isn't the way the Geneva translators understood it:
The world shall recover by thy seed, which is Christ, the blessings that were lost in Adam. 7
Twentieth century scholarly works, such as the Scofield Reference Bible, published by Oxford University Press, hold that the 38th Chapter of Ezekiel refers to an invasion of Jerusalem by Russian armies leading the Northern European powers. John Calvin and his cohorts, who annotated the Geneva Bible, understood it a little differently:
Signifying
all the people of the world should assemble themselves against the Church and Christ their head. 8
The Reverend Scofield and his fellow
"scholars" hold up Satan as some sort of boogey-man. The Geneva translators, as
in Psalm 109:6, simply translated the word, "adversary." In Mark 8:33, Christ
said to Peter, "Get thee behind me, Satan." The Geneva translators understood
exactly what the word meant and apparently didn't figure anyone else would be
dumb enough to equate Peter with the Evil One. On that, the Geneva and King
James translate the word the same.
James did not stop at censoring the
Bible. He carried his "divine right of kings" to the point that he dissolved
Parliament. That institution was to James simply a convenience he needed to
raise money for his endless pursuit of pleasure and depravity. When Parliament
balked at his requests for money James dissolved it Magna Carta and the
liberties of Englishmen were mere frivolities in the mind of James. As an
illustration of the loathing and contempt Christians of that era held for the
government of James I, it is interesting to note that after the first bitter
weather in New England, when half their number were dead, not one of the Pilgrim
survivors wanted to be taken back to the England of James I aboard the
Mayflower.
James' oldest son died and his second son, Charles, ascended
to the throne after the death of James I, Charles also believed in the "divine
right of kings." By 1642, English patience was at an end and civil war erupted.
By 1649, the English Parliament had had enough of Charles, who apparently
believed that one of his "divine rights" was to sign agreements and then break
them any time he felt the urge. Charles was beheaded. Oliver Cromwell took over
the government.
Oliver Cromwell, of Celtic and Welsh ancestry, made the
same basic mistake that James I and his son, Charles, made. Cromwell believed,
as James had professed to, that governments were for the common wealth (good)
and not the common will. He tried to legislate moral codes that very few could
handle. The prisons overflowed with his critics. During his invasion of Ireland,
he slaughtered enough women and children to fill entire graveyard& Cromwell
died in 1658. The English had had quite enough of his form of government and
acquired another king, Charles II.
The last run of Geneva Bibles was
printed in 1644. That was the year John Milton was invited to instruct the
English Parliament on the actual teachings of the Bible regarding divorce (it
was allowed). What Milton understood that none of our modern "experts" seem to
was that "He who divorces his wife and marries another," was not a prohibition
of divorce, it was a prohibition against throw-away people. As John Milton in
his On Christian Doctrine and Martin Luther in his essay on Deuteronomy 21:15
pointed out, having more than one wife was Scriptural. You just weren't supposed
to throw them away when you got bored with them.
Four years after the
last Geneva Bible was printed, the Thirty Years War (the last of the great
religious wars of Europe) ground to a halt. Millions had died. Germany was so
depopulated it took her two centuries to recover. The Reformation had survived.
It didn't survive for long.
After several generations of English speakers
grew up without the stabilizing influence of the Geneva marginal notes, the
"interpret it any way you want" school of thought came into fashion. The
"charismatic" movement was in full swing by 1730.
A few men here and
there tried to show people what the religion of their ancestors actually was. A
man named Ferrar Fenton published his own translation of the Bible in 1906,
complete with a history lesson at the beginning of each set of books in the
Bible. Another man named George Lamsa wrote "Idioms of the Bible Explained," and
tried to show the errors of the modem scholars. They were drowned by the works
of others.
Of course, there were those that went the other way. A
backwoods preacher, Noah Fredericks, wrote a book titled, Pilgrim Ships, in
which he claimed the people of the Old Testament came from outer space, Moses's
rod was an electronic control used to open a fortress (mistranslated, "rock"),
Elijah introduced a path for current to flow from the ionosphere to the ground
in order to fry two platoons of Ahab's infantry, and other theological positions
that will probably never be taken seriously by anybody
(unfortunately).
During the 16th Century and the one preceding it, the
Spanish Empire, a colossus larger than the Roman Empire, had been unable to
stamp out the Reformation with the world's finest and most well equipped armies.
The Spaniards needn't have bothered. What the armies of Catholic Spain were
unable to make a dent in, one sadistic sodomite, James I, did with a pair of
censoring scissors.
The Reformation, and the blood of millions who fought
for it, apparently went for nothing. Protestant churches of today hardly
resemble the churches of the Reformation.
Today's preachers study the
Scofield Reference Edition of the King James, a volume that contains marginal
notes that would seem no more accurate to John Calvin and John Knox than Mother
Goose. The blind are once more leading the blind. This reprinted edition of the
1599.
Geneva Bible is probably the last sputtering flame of the
Reformation. The works of John Milton, John Calvin, John Knox, George Buchanan,
William Tyndale, and the rest can still be found on the shelves in the public
libraries. Such works are checked out by uninterested college students on an
average of about one volume every ten years, no one in today's churches reads
them.
Michael H. Brown - 1988
Footnotes:
1 Luther A, Weigle, The English New
Testament, P.24. [back]
2 Otto J. Scott, James I, Passim [back]
3 lbid [back]
4 Ibid, p. 212 [back]
5 Ibid, p. 211 [back]
6 Leviticus, 20:13 [back]
7 Genesis 12:2 note c 1599 Geneva
Bible [back]
8 Ezekiel 38:7. note e 1599 Geneva
Bible [back]
Copyright © 1999-2003, The Reformed Reader, All Rights Reserved
1 Corinthians 14:8
And also if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to battle?
"Let not Geneva be forgotten or despised. Religious liberty owes it most respect." John Adams, the second president of the United States
Before, and many years after the KJV was printed, the GENEVA BIBLE was the People's Choice, but an ungodly King made it illegal to publish it any longer: http://www.reformedreader.org/gbn/igb.htm
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