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Geneva Bible

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Stephensonia

This is most likely the version of the Bible endorsed by Barkers like the Bolstroods and Waterhouses.

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Community entry: Geneva Bible

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The Geneva Bible was a Protestant translation of the Holy Bible into English. During the time when England was ruled by Queen Mary, who persecuted Protestants, a number of Protestant scholars fled to Geneva in Switzerland, which was then ruled as a republic by John Calvin and Theodore Beza. Among these scholars was William Whittingham, who supervised the translation project. The first edition of this Bible appeared in 1560. It was revised substantially in 1576 and again in 1599. Like most English translations of the time, it was translated out of the original Greek and Hebrew, and was substantially based on the earlier English translations by William Tyndale and Myles Coverdale. The Geneva Bible was extensively annotated by Laurence Tomson, who based his notes on Beza's 1574 Latin translation of the Bible. As such, it was the first annotated study Bible to appear in English, and the annotations made it more useful for private Bible reading than for public worship. This was the Bible read by William Shakespeare, by John Donne, and by John Bunyan, author of Pilgrim's Progress. Because the language of the Geneva Bible was more forceful and vigorous, most readers preferred this version strongly over the Bishops' Bible, the translation authorised by the Church of England under Elizabeth I, often considered a political compromise of the type that Elizabeth often had to make to keep her throne. The annotations were strongly Protestant in character, and as such were disliked by King James I, who commissioned the Authorised Version or King James Bible to replace it. The Geneva Bible remained popular among Puritans and remained in widespread use until after the English Civil War. Perhaps fearing that the anti-authority bias of the Geneva text and annotations had led to civil disruption, and perhaps also the loss of royal authority, the King James version slowly became more popular with all in authority. Today, the Geneva Bible is rarely used except as a source for translation of new versions in modern English. Perhaps because these versions lack the dedicated scholarship and poetic vision of the King James translators, however, none of them have ever actually managed to supplant the King James as the standard English Bible. See the article on the King James Version for more detail on this and its role in civil society.