Bibles in the South African Bible Exhibition Collection (Bishops' Bible 1568)
The story of how the English bible came to us is miraculous, a slow outworking of many smaller miracles which finally came to fruition in the King James Bible of 1611. In the South African Bible Exhibition Collection, the first ancient Bible under discussion is the Bishops’ Bible printed in 1568, under the authority of the church of England. It was revised in 1572 with the 1602 edition recommended as the base text of the 1611 King James Bible.
This particular edition is Coptic bound with 1/3 of the cross struts still intact. Unfortunately, the first 30 pages are missing, including the preface, prologue and order of the Psalms. A full version is on-line here:
https://archive.org/details/holiebiblecontey00lond
There is a list of previous owners of the bible on the fore page, (see image above, left) but due to some (bad) restoration, instead of introducing more binders paper, the older pages were just glued down. This of course places strain on the binding and the first few pages which then come loose from the spine.
The above description was written by J F Hollingworth Esq F.R.A.S. F.R.G.S. signed J P Moore.
History of the bible:
When Queen Elizabeth ascended the throne in England in 1558, reform came to the church. Under Bloody Mary only a handful of bishops had survived her vicious and absolute reign of terror. The Bible was forbidden but once Elizabeth took charge, men and women everywhere could once more have access to the Word of God. Archbishop Matthew Parker organized the new translation. At first he had been supportive of the Geneva Bible (to be discussed), but this changed and he became increasingly hostile towards the translation due to its attack on the authority of bishops.
Archbishop Matthew Parker, the dean of Lincoln and who was chaplain to Queen Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth's mother was the ideal candidate to organize and execute a new translation. He had at first supported and endorsed the reading and teaching of the Geneva Bible but became increasingly hostile toward the translation due to it's attack on the authority of bishops. The Geneva Bible also showed up a number of weaknesses in the Great Bible (the official Bible of England), so it was deemed time to produce another version. A number of scholars, most of them bishops worked independently on different parts of scripture.
“The revisers were instructed to "use the Great Bible as the basis and depart from it only where it did not accurately represent the original." So as a rule, unless the Hebrew or Greek original required a change, the reading of the Great Bible was retained. And those Marginal Notes from the Geneva Bible??? Well, those that were not offensive to the Church of England were included; the others were discarded”.
Information taken from the following sites where you can read further if you are interested. The remarkable thing is not really the Bible though, it's the contents, isn't it?
https://manifoldgreatness.wordpress.com/tag/bishops-bible/
Comments
Post a Comment