Three other pioneer Bible translators followed William Tyndale during the reign of Henry VIII, and of these three, two preached for a time in surviving London churches. Miles Coverdale was the rector of St Magnus, Martyr, from 1563 to 1566. When he died in 1568 he was interred in this church and later, in 1837, a memorial extolling his translation work was placed by the parishioners against the east wall. It says in part, ‘... he spent many years of his life in preparing a translation of the Scriptures. On the 4th of October, 1535, the first complete printed English version of the Bible was published under his direction’. Like Tyndale, Coverdale started his translation work in secret and went to the Continent where the danger attached to such a project was less. But unlike Tyndale, he had a friend at the royal court, Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s principal advisor. Coverdale actually served his apprenticeship assisting Tyndale in the work on the first five books of the Bible. He then completed the Old Testament using German and Latin texts. In 1535 he published the whole Bible combining his and Tyndale’s work. Because of Coverdale’s connection with Cromwell and the fact that Henry VIII was favourable to an English Bible that he could approve of, Coverdale’s Bible circulated freely in England and was reprinted on home soil with the royal licence in 1537. Tyndale’s prayer had been answered before he uttered it!
Yet another English Bible appeared in 1537 bearing the royal licence of Henry VIII. This was the so-called Matthew Bible done by a priest named John Rogers who had become a Protestant through Tyndale’s influence and who used the Bibles of Tyndale and Coverdale for his sources. The licence had been obtained by Archbishop Cranmer, and the king ordered that a copy should be placed in every parish church, to be read by the people. With Cromwell’s encouragement, Coverdale revised the Matthew Bible, and this was then officially published in 1539 in a large size known as the ‘Great Bible’.
Rogers was pastor to an English congregation at Antwerp during his translation work, but returned to London after its publication. He became rector of St Margaret Moses, vicar of St Sepulchre’s and a lecturer at St Paul’s. He became the first martyr of Mary Tudor’s reign. The same year that the Great Bible appeared, a Greek scholar named Richard Taverner came out with his own revision of the Matthew Bible, which we now call the ‘Taverner Version’. The notes in this Bible tone down those of John Rogers, which tend to be violently Protestant in places, and the New Testament shows Taverner’s skill in Greek. While at Oxford Taverner had undergone persecution for his circulation of Tyndale’s New Testament in 1528, but as a friend of Thomas Cromwell he was by 1539 Clerk of the Signet.
The Taverner Bible was printed first in folio and quarto versions, and reprinted once before being superseded by the Great Bible. Three more English translations of the Bible were published during the reign of Elizabeth I. The first to appear was the Geneva Version, which for a century was the Bible of the Reformed Church, of the Puritans and of the Pilgrim Fathers. Geneva was the birthplace of the Reformed Church under the leadership of John Calvin and the Greek scholar Theodore Beza. It was natural that the English exiles who fled to that city would want a Bible with notes reflecting the Reformed doctrines. The Geneva Bible was the result. The New Testament came first, in 1557, a revision of Tyndale’s version by William Wittingham.
The whole Bible was published in 1560. It was smaller in size than its predecessors and was the first to use Roman type, verse divisions and italics. It was first printed in London in 1575. The Bishops Bible was so called because it was a version entrusted to Elizabeth’s bishops under the leadership of Archbishop Matthew Parker. The queen was intimidated by the growing Puritan influence in England, and she intended the Bishops Bible to be an answer to the Geneva Version and to replace the Great Bible. It was published in 1568, but proved too stiff and formal to gain wide usage.
The Douai-Rheims Bible, like the Bishops Bible, was a reaction to the popularity of the Geneva version, but by Roman Catholics. It was also similar to the Geneva Bible in that it was the work of English exiles on the Continent. The project was begun at Douai in France where there was a Roman Catholic training college for English-speaking priests. The main translator was Gregory Martin, an Oxford scholar in Greek and Hebrew. The New Testament was published in Rheims, where the college had moved, in 1582. The college later moved back to Douai, and here the Old Testament was published in 1609–10. This version was actually a translation of a translation, that is, from Hebrew and Greek into Latin by Jerome and from Latin into English by Martin and others. While possessing the long-standing credibility of Jerome’s Latin Vulgate version, it lacked the readability in English achieved by Tyndale and those who followed him.