Geneva Bible

If you read their

journals and even go over their Bibles, their Geneva Bibles that they were using, you will see that they were very much followers of Jesus.

Most of them, there were some deists, but most were actually card-carrying members of the body of Christ.

Many of them were deacons.

So I invite you to join me in a prayer of confession as we anticipate, as we listen for the words of hope and forgiveness, words of assurance that we are forgiven and we can go in peace.

So I invite you to join me as we pray the prayer of confession in our bulletin, the Geneva Bible.

He didn't like it because it was translated from Hebrew and Greek.

by John Calvin and also by John Knox.

And he didn't like them and said you can't use the Geneva Bible.

So King James came up and had his own Bible authorized.

We know it as the King James Bible or the authorized version.

So we drink a little, we take the bottoms out, and we got our Bibles.

six sundry men of letters besides matthew arnold have pleaded for a literary study of the bible and specially of our english version that we may thereby enhance our enjoyment of the work itself and through this enjoyment and understanding of the rest of english literature from sixteen eleven down specially among these pleaders let me mention mr f b moneycoutts now lord latimer and a cambridge man dr r g moulton now professor of literary theory and interpretation in the university of chicago of both these writers i shall have something to say but first and generally if you ask me why all their pleas have not yet prevailed i will give you my own answer the fault as usual lies in ourselves in our own tameness and incuriosity there is no real trouble with the taboo set up by professionals and puritans if we have the courage to walk past it as christian walked between the lions no real tyranny we could not overthrow if it were worth while with a push no need at all for us to wreathe our sword in myrtle boughs what tyranny exists has grown up through the quite well-meaning labours of quite well-meaning men and as i started this lecture by saying i have never heard any serious reason given why we should not include portions of the english bible in our english trippos if we choose nos te nos then why don't we choose to answer this we must i suggest seek somewhat further back the bible that is to say the body of the old hebrew literature clothed for us in english comes to us in our childhood but how does it come let me amplifying a hint from dr moulton ask you to imagine a volume including the great books of our own literature all bound together in some such order as this paradise lost darwin's descent of man the angle saxon chronicle walter mapp mill on liberty hooker's ecclesiastical polity the annual register frossard adam smith's wealth of nations domesday book l'amour d'arthur campbell's lives of the lord chancellors boswell's johnson barber's the bruce hacklett's voyages clarendon mackledy the plays of shakespeare shelley's prometheus unbound the fairy queen palgrave's golden treasury bacon's essays swinburke's poems and ballads fitzgerald's omar khayyam wordsworth browning sartor ressartus burton's anatomy of melancholy burke's letters on a regicide peace ossian piers plowman burke's thoughts on the present discontents quarrell's newman's apologia dunn's sermons ruskin blake the deserted village manfred blair's grave the complaint of dorr bailey's festus thompson's hound of heaven will you next imagine that in this volume most of the authors names are lost that of the few that survive a number have found their way into wrong places that ruskin for example is credited with sartor that laus veneris and dolores are ascribed to queen elizabeth the anatomy of melancholy to charles the second and that as for the titles these were never invented by the authors but by a committee will you still go on to imagine that all the poetry is printed as prose while all the long paragraphs of prose are broken up into short verses so that they resemble the little passages set out for parsing or analysis in an examination paper.

This device, as you know, was first invented by the exiled translators who published the Geneva Bible, as it is called, in 1557.

And for pulpit use, for handiness of reference, for whaling a portion as it has its obvious advantages but it is after all and at the best a very primitive device and for my part i consider it the deadliest invention of all for robbing the book of outward resemblance to literature and converting it to the aspect of a gazetteer a biblion a biblion as charles lamb puts it have we done by no means having effected all this let us pepper the result over with italics and numerals printed in double columns with a marginal gutter on either side each gutter pouring down an inky flow of references and cross references then and not till then is the outward disguise complete so far as you are concerned it remains only then to appoint it to be read in churches and oblige the child to get selected portions of it by heart on sundays but you are yet to imagine that the authors themselves have taken a hand in the game that the later ones suppose all the earlier ones to have been predicting all the time in a nebulous fashion what they themselves have to tell and indeed to have written mainly with that object so that macaulay and adam smith for example constantly interrupt the thread of their discourse to affirm that what they tell us must be right because walter mapp or the author of piers plowman foretold it ages before now a grown man that is to say a comparatively unimpressionable man that is again to say a man past the age when to enjoy the bible is priceless has probably found out somehow that the word prophet does not in spite of vulgar usage mean a man who predicts he has experienced too many prophets of that kind especially since nineteen fourteen and he respects isaiah too much to rank isaiah among them he has been in love belike he has read the song of solomon he very much doubts if on the evidence solomon was the kind of lover to have written that song and he is quite certain that when the lover sings to his beloved thy two breasts are like two young rose that are twins thy neck is as a tower of ivory thine eyes like the fish-pools in hejban by the gate of bath he knows i say that this is not a description of the church and her graces as the chapter heading audaciously asserts but he is lazy too lazy even to commend the revised version for striking solomon out of the bible calling the poem the song of songs omitting the absurd chapter headings and printing the poetry as poetry ought to be printed the old-fashioned arrangement was good enough for him or he goes to church on christmas day and listens to a first lesson of which the old translators made nonsense and in two passages at least stark nonsense but again the old nonsense is good enough for him soothing in fact he is not even quite sure that the bible looking like any other book ought to be put in the hands of the young in all this i think he is wrong i am sure he is wrong if our contention be right that the english bible should be studied by us all for its poetry and its wonderful language as well as for its religion the religion and the poetry being in fact inseparable for then in euripides phrase we should clothe the bible in a dress through which its beauty might best shine seven if you ask me how i answer first begging you to bear in mind that we are planning the form of the book for our purpose and that other forms will be used for other purposes that we should start with the simplest alteration such as these one the books should be rearranged in their right order so far as this can be ascertained and much of it has been ascertained i am told and i can well believe that this would at a stroke clear away a mass of confusion in strictly biblical criticism but that is not my business i know that it would immensely help our literary study two i should print the prose continuously as prose is ordinarily and properly printed and the poetry in verse lines as poetry is ordinarily and properly printed and i should print each on a page of one column with none but the necessary notes and references and these so arranged that they did not tease and distract the eye three this arrangement should be kept whether for the trippos we prescribe a book in the authorized text or in the revised as a rule perhaps or as a rule for some years to come we shall probably rely on the authorized version but for some books and i instance job we should undoubtedly prefer the revised with the verse we should i hold go farther even than the revisers as you know much of the poetry in the bible especially of such as was meant for music is composed in stanzaic form or in strophe and antistrophe with prelude and conclusion sometimes with a choral refrain we should print these i contend in their proper form just as we should print an english poem in its proper form I shall conclude today with a striking instance of this, with four strophes from the 107th Psalm, taking leave to use at will the Authorized, the Revised, and the Coverdale versions.

Each strophe, you will note, has a double refrain.

The book list mentions two Bibles, one in quarto and one Great Bible, um, and various other things.

Um, Southwell clearly knew, uh, probably the Geneva Bible, which is what she would have been brought up with in a Puritan-inclined household in the fifteen seventies.

Um, but she does sometimes use the King James Bible as well.

As...

Because a lot of people, including Augustine in North Africa, are wedded to the translations they've been using.

And that was the same with the Geneva Bible in England.

People didn't want to give up the Geneva Bible for the King Jude.

In the end, it had to be almost forced on them.

And so this is the same with Jerome.

We're running short on time, but before we finish, perhaps you could take that story on then.

You've already... referred to, hinted at, well, more than hinted at, but you talked about the debt that we owe in terms of subsequent English Bible translations.

Can you just talk about how Tyndale feeds into, particularly the next century of translations in England, the Coverdale, the Geneva Bible, and so on, and to the AV, the Authorized Version, or the King James Version?

And, uh, and when Bloody Mary came up and started killing people in, in Scotland, and Knox and Calvin went down to Geneva in order to escape getting their, getting chopped up.

And they're hanging around a Starbucks figuring, "What can we do?" And they decided to write the Geneva Bible.

And from the Geneva Bible, it has the principles that we, uh, uh, support today, which is that we are accountable directly to God.

We don't have to pay this person here or there.

We go directly to Him.

And in fact, Knox said, said, "I think we ought to number the verses." So prior to the Geneva Bible, there was no John 3:16.

And so as ...

Uh, you can see where that Bible went, and there's an explosion in, in invention and creation, and Beethoven and Shakespeare and Bach and beauty and, and all these things.

So it is quite transformational.

It also bizarrely, as commentators keep pointing out who are in that world who do that much more rigorously than I do, instead of um dialing down your energy and presence for your work life paradoxically it actually seems to kind of give you more energy and more focus more creativity for your work life and certainly stronger relationships with with your family and loved ones so shabbat's for everyone it's not just a jewish thing You know, if you believe in the Holy Bible, you know, it's right there on the seventh day.

God rested from his work in creating the world.

And he repeatedly describes the importance to him of a day of rest on the seventh day.

I don't know if it's like a duplicate soul or just more kind of connection between where we are a Venn diagram with the divine, but that is worth looking into for sure.

It is magical.

Like I'm reading the history of the Jews right now by Paul Johnson, a really good book in trying to understand how this people that everyone hates over and over in the country after country survives for, you know, millennia, including with observances, as we are seeing with my Geneva Bible readings, largely intact, right, from 3,700 years ago.

And I think that Shabbat is one secret to their survival because for one day, this has been explained in many kind of memoirs from the old country before the Holocaust where, you know, Jews were living in horrible conditions in shtetls and victims of pogroms and so on.