The First Bible in English Goes To Print

King Henry VIII's court painter Hans Holbein the Younger illustrated this cover page for the folio edition of the Coverdale Bible printed in England in 1639.

On this day in 1535 the first complete printed translation of the Bible into English was published.  Because its translator Miles Coverdale had been on the lam in Europe for some years due to religious turmoil at home, the book was printed on the continent.  For many years the exact printer and his location were in dispute, but has fairly recently been established to be Merten de Keyser in Antwerp.  The book was evidently financed by leading Low Countries Reformers.

Coverdale himself was born in Yorkshire around 1488.  He was ordained a priest in Norwich, a hotbed of religious fervor.  In 1514 he joined the scholarly convent of Austin friars at Cambridge where he was also allowed to pursue his studies at the University.  He was a supporter of Prior Robert Barnes who was sympathetic to the Reformation on the Continent.  Barnes was tried for heresy in 1526 and Coverdale was active in his defense.

He left the convent to resume preaching shortly thereafter, but was forced to flee the country in as pressure mounted against dissenter in the English Church.  Whether he had already begun his work on a Bible translation is unknown.  But once in Europe, where making the Word of God available in the languages of the people was considered essential to Reform, he was undoubtedly encouraged and financed in his efforts.  

The trouble for Coverdale was that although scholarly by bent, he was far from well equipped to undertake such a massive translation.  Although proficient in Latin, he was barely competent in Greek and knew only rudimentary Hebrew.  That meant that he had to rely on either Latin texts or other translations into modern language instead of working from near original material.  He claimed to have consulted “five soundry interpreters” in Latin, English and German as source texts. 

His main sources were German texts including Luther’s Bible and the Swiss-German version Zürich Bible of Zwingli.  That meant he was working from sources several times removed from original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek texts.

In fact Coverdale also drew heavily on both the Latin Vulgate, a more recent translation from the Greek made possible by the research of Erasmus and the early Humanists, and on the translation of the New Testament and a handful of Old Testament books into English by William Tyndale which had been printed in 1525.  

He did not claim to have used the infamous Wycliffe's Bible, translated into Middle English way back around 1390.  That had circulated only hand to hand in manuscript and had resulted in the execution several churchmen over a number of decades who possessed or passed it along.

But Coverdale helped himself to big chunks, barely disguised from Tyndale.  Tyndale himself ran afoul of the Counter Reformation and was executed by strangulation as heretic in 1536, the year after Coverdale’s version first appeared.

Obviously things were getting dangerous in Europe for Bible translators.  On the other hand, things were becoming more congenial back home in England.

Coverdale had managed to dash back to Cambridge in 1531 to finish his bachelor’s degree at the University and had managed to make it back to Antwerp with his head still attached to his body.  Then in 1534 Henry VIII, the former Defender of the Faith—Catholicism—broke with the Roman Church over certain domestic matters and established a new national Church with himself at its head.

Originally it was expected that the new Church would simply continue Catholic practice and usage intact.  But almost from the beginning Reformers sought to make the church over in the manner of the Lutherans and other Protestants.  When Henry decided to break up the Monasteries and appropriate their lands and wealth for the Crown, he found more reason than ever to be sympathetic of that trend.

Coverdale arrived back in England to find himself a favorite of the King in 1539.  His Bible was printed for the first time in the country in folio and quarter-folio editions, carried the royal license and was therefore the first officially approved Bible translation in English.  

He was already at that time editing on yet another new version of the Bible known as the Great Book. This version drew even more strongly on Tyndale than his first effort under the sponsorship of Thomas Cromwell, the king’s first minister. Henry was so enthusiastic in fact that he ordered every parish in England to procure a copy and keep chained but publicly available in every chapel so the any literate person would have direct access to the Scripture in the vernacular.

Despite the success of the newer version, Coverdale’s first version continued to be printed in new editions through 1553.

But favor of the mercurial monarch was a hard thing to hold.  In 1440 Coverdale’s friend and main sponsor at court, Thomas Cromwell, the king’s former first minister who lost his head that year. Cromwell was also the leading voice for remaking the Church of England along protestant lines.  With the balance of power swinging back to the Anglo-Catholic party, Coverdale had to return to Europe for this own safety.

He lived in impoverished exile in the German states.  From 1543 to 1547 he was a pastor and schoolmaster at Bergzabern in the Palatinate Electorate. 

Winds of change blew fortunate for Coverdale when Henry’s son Edward VI assumed the throne.  He was made personal chaplain to the boy king and then appointed Bishop of Exeter in 1653.

When Henry’s daughter Mary, who had remained a good Catholic, assumed the throne in 1657, Coverdale was ousted from his See and once again went into exile.  For the next several years he bounced around Europe.

It was safe to return again 1654 but unable to reclaim his Bishopric.  He served a modest parish as Rector of St. Magnus’s, near London Bridge increasingly drawn to Puritanism.  He died, however, still in the good graces of the Church of England.

The Church still has a soft spot in its heart for the old maker of Bibles.  It still uses his translation of the Psalter in the Book of Common Prayer.

Want to know what Coverdale’s work sounded like?  First hear is the familiar VIII Psalm as he rendered it in The Coverdale Bible:

The Lord is my shepherde, I can wante nothinge. He fedeth me in a grene pasture, ād ledeth me to a fresh water. He quickeneth my soule, & bringeth me forth in the waye of rightuousnes for his names sake. Though I shulde walke now in the valley of the shadowe of death, yet I feare no euell, for thou art with me: thy staffe & thy shepehoke cōforte me. Thou preparest a table before me agaynst mine enemies: thou anoyntest my heade with oyle, & fyllest my cuppe full. Oh let thy louynge kyndnes & mercy folowe me all the dayes off my life, that I maye dwell in the house off the LORD for euer.

And here it is in the Book of Common Prayer Psalter:

The Lord is my shepherd therefore can I lack nothing. He shall feed me in a green pasture and lead me forth beside the waters of comfort. He shall convert my soul and bring me forth in the paths of righteousness, for his Name's sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff comfort me. Thou shalt prepare a table before me against them that trouble me thou hast anointed my head with oil, and my cup shall be full. But thy loving-kindness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

Not yet the majestic cadences of the King James Version but getting there.

The Day an Anglican Parish Became the First Unitarian Congregation

King's Chapel, Boston shortly before the turn of the 20th Century.

In most of the brand spanking new United States, the stone church in Boston would be the most respectable place of worship in town.  In fact, in most of the Middle and Southern states, Pennsylvania excepted, it would have been the officially established church.  But in Boston, hot bed of Puritanism and cradle of the Revolution, King’s Chapel was seen by many as an alien force.  It was the lone outpost of Anglicanism in the city, a member of the recently formed Episcopal Church, now officially free of its connections to the British Crown.

Boston was a well-churched town, dominated by independent Congregational parishes and their increasingly theologically liberal ministers.  Most of those ministers had rejected the hell-fire-and-damnation rigid Calvinism their ancestors and had embraced a theology based on rationality and influenced by the Enlightenment.  Theologically, they embraced elements of Arminism which rejected Pre-destination, salvation by faith alone, and unimpaired freedom of the will.  They were also influenced by Arianism, an even older theological position declared heretical by early Church Councils, which asserted that Jesus, the Son of God, was not eternal and coequal to God—a denial of the Trinity as taught by most Christian churches since the 4th Century.  Within the next forty years these churches and ministers would break from orthodox Congregationalism to become openly Unitarian.

So it comes as a surprise to many that it was the Anglican congregation that by a vote of the Proprietors of the church revised the Book of Common Prayer to omit all references to the Trinity.  They thus beat the liberal ministers by adopting the first avowedly unitarian theology and liturgy on June 19, 1785.

This is how it came to be.

The Anglican congregation was organized at a meeting held in Boston’s Town Hall on June 15, 1686, 56 years after the city had been founded by the Puritans.  The founders were mostly recent immigrants from England—traders, master craftsmen, government officials, and those who wished to rise in the Empire.  The Boston clergy, still at that point piously Puritan, were mightily upset and did everything in their power to prevent the establishment of the church.  It was a sign of the waning authority of their once near absolute dominance of local government that they failed to do so.

The congregation built a small wooden church at the corner of Tremont and School Streets.  It worshiped there for 60 years as the building fell into disrepair.  Meanwhile the Congregational churches were building magnificent brick churches with soaring spires.  When the Anglicans attempted to purchase more land adjacent to their tiny lot to build a new Church, once again the majority clergy fought them.  After difficult negotiations, the land was purchased and a corner stone for the new building was laid in 1749.

Heavy blocks of gray granite from quarries in Quincy, encased the original wooden chapel.  When the new walls were completed, the old church was taken apart board by board and disposed of through the windows of the new building.  The wooden church’s beams and rafters were shipped to Lunenburg, Nova Scotia to build a new Anglican church there which stood until burning down in 2001.

The new church building with a squat tower over the main entrance, intended as the base of a steeple that was never built, was completed in 1754.  It became one of the first churches in New England with an organ—the Puritanical Congregationalists rejected most liturgical music except for Psalms.  In 1772 a large bell, cast in England was hung in the squat tower.  That bell cracked in 1814 and was personally re-cast by Paul Revere.  It still calls worshipers to Sunday services today.

As tensions between the Crown and it restive colonists worsened, King’s Chapel became more and more identified with loyalists.  When troops were quartered on the city, many officers attended services at the church.  With the outbreak of hostilities in 1775, the church was identified with the occupying authorities.  When the British evacuated the city many of the Loyalist parishioners and the Rector, the Rev. Henry Caner set sail for exile in Nova Scotia. 

The church was closed.  In May of 1776 the church was re-opened for the funeral of Patriot hero Dr. Joseph Warren, who had been killed in the attack on Breeds Hill the previous June—the battle we know as Bunker Hill.  Warren’s body had been stripped, mutilated, and dumped in a shallow grave with another soldier by the British.  His brother’s found him and Paul Revere identified the corpse by an artificial tooth he had implanted in the Doctor.  

After the elaborate funeral and internment in the adjacent Burial Grounds, the church building was opened sporadically for worship by Patriot members of the congregation and Congregationalists from Old South Meeting House.

Without a Priest, it was difficult to sustain an Anglican congregation.  Even after the war remaining tensions made it difficult for British priests to be assigned or American ones trained and ordained.  In 1782 remaining members re-organized and hired Harvard educated James Freeman to lead the church as a Lay reader and teacher.  Freeman was, unlike the Arian ministers of the Standing Order (Congregationalists) influenced by the Socinian theology of James Priestly and English Unitarianism.  He requested that the congregation not require him to read the Athanasian Creed which affirmed the traditional Trinity.  

Despite this un-orthodoxy, Freeman was popular with the congregation and was asked to become its minister after only 6 months.  Meanwhile he continued to study Priestly and another prominent English Unitarian, Thesophilus Lindsey and became more firmly Unitarian in his theology.  He began preaching a series of sermons on the subject in 1784.  To his own surprise, the congregation was largely amenable to his emerging thought.  The following year he submitted his own revision of the Book of Common Prayer eliminating all references to the Trinity.  That book, revised and updated, remain in use at worship in King’s Chapel to this day, making it unique among all member congregations of what is now the Unitarian Universalist Association.

But I am getting ahead of myself.  Back then, despite the break with orthodoxy, the congregation hoped to remain Anglican and to obtain ordination for Freeman.  Bishop Samuel Seabury, and even the much more liberal Dr. Samuel Provoost, bishop-elect of New York rejected the application.

The congregation decided in 1787 to go ahead on its own with a lay ordination of Freeman as the “Rector, Minister, Priest, Pastor, and Ruling Elder” of Stone Chapel, as the church was known in those post-Revolutionary days.  Freeman was effectively excommunicated from the Episcopal Church and the congregation expelled from the Communion.

Freeman continued to serve the church nearly until his death in 1826.  

By that time the local Congregational ministers, led by William Ellery Channing had openly embraced Unitarianism, albeit a version different in details than the Socinism espoused by Freeman, and a de-facto new denominations was being born.   King’s Chapel became part of that and future ministers would be trained and ordained under Unitarian authority. 

But the Church as always remained unique, cleaving to that revised Book of Common Prayer.  It has been an outpost of Christianity in denomination eventually dominated by Humanism and now embracing’s multiple Sources and theological diversity.  It resisted for a long time such Unitarian Universalist innovations as chalice lighting and Flower Communion.  

Ministers today still preside from the high pulpit stand overlooking the rows of high-backed pew boxes.  Light filters through beautiful Louis Comfort Tiffany stained glass windows installed in the early 20th Century.  It is a vital and thriving congregation with an active social justice agenda, a renowned music program and large ministerial staff.  That recently included a Rabbi.

But if you go to worship on Sunday morning and open those Prayer Books in the pews, you will be transported to the days when Episcopalians became Unitarian.