English Bibles Before 1611

The first widely circulated English version of the Bible was a fourteenth-century translation of St. Jerome’s Latin by followers of John Wycliffe (d. 1384). This text was outlawed in 1408 by the Church for fear of the “heresy and error” that any departure from the Latin text might promote. It was followed by the translation of William Tyndale (d. 1536), the first English version translated from the original Hebrew and Greek. Tyndale’s translation likewise was banned by the church, but its influence on subsequent translators was immense, beginning with Miles Coverdale’s translation of 1535, the first complete English Bible to appear in print. That Bible received limited support from King Henry VIII, who pronounced to his censors, “if there be no heresies, then in God’s name let it go abroad among our people.”

Henry VIII broke with the Church of Rome in 1538, but when his daughter Mary Tudor reinstated Catholicism throughout England in 1553, English Puritans exiled in Geneva produced a truly Protestant Bible translation in 1560. Queen Elizabeth I re-established the Protestant faith in England in 1558 and ordered her bishops to compile a new Bible in 1568. At the time of her death in 1603 and the coronation of King James I, England essentially had three Bible versions: the outdated Bishops’ Bible found on church lecterns, the popular Geneva Bible used in Protestant homes, and the Douai-Rheims version, recently translated from the Latin for use by Catholics.