The Bible, Elizabeth I, and a virtual revolution

Pondering the fact that all the translators were men, I wondered about women’s influence on those men. Thought turned to Elizabeth I (1533-1603). Did she read the Bible? After all, her father Henry VIII (1491-1547) and her first cousin, twice-removed, James I (1566-1625) had a big influence on bringing the Bible to the masses.

In my search, up came a Christian Science Monitor article by co-author or our book, The Reforming Power of the Scriptures, Mary Trammell. The article's title is The Struggle overthe English Bible: A scholar’s view. Elizabeth I gets only a passing mention – she objected to the Geneva Bible:

"There [Geneva] they completed an ambitious retranslation of the whole Bible - called the Geneva Bible - from the original Greek and Hebrew in 1560. Surprisingly, the new sovereign, Protestant Queen Elizabeth I, refused to allow it to be sold in England, fearing its strongly antimonarchical notes."

An article from the Washington Post provides further insights: 

"Queen Elizabeth 1, who was queen from 1558 to her death in 1603, had a most extraordinary education. An especially precocious child, she studied for years with tutors and learned to speak six languages fluently as well as grammar, theology, history, rhetoric, logic, philosophy, math, logic, literature and geometry."

And her tutor taught her public speaking. She was very much involved in religion. It seems she mixed some of the Roman Catholic teaching in with her Protestantism.  

I sense that Mary Trammell’s Monitor article is a sort of precis of our present study.

Joyce Voysey

Ed. I like Mary Trammell's description of the English translation as "a virtual revolution":

"TODAY, English-speaking Christians may take the King James Bible and modern English translations for granted. But they shouldn't. The translation of the Bible into English out of Greek, Hebrew, and Latin was a virtual revolution."

And readers will find this of interest, again from Trammell's Monitor article:

"When James VI of Scotland became king of England in 1603, he faced a deeply divided nation committed to two extremist Bibles, the Geneva and the Rheims - and dead set against the one legal Bible, the Bishops' text. His way out of this Bible deadlock was to commission an entirely new translation of the Bible, to be carried out by 50 of England's best scholars. The genius of the project, which was completed in 1611, was its ecumenicism. James stacked each of the six translation committees with scholars of every theological stripe and told them to come up with a text they could all agree on. This was consistent with the king's lifelong dream to reconcile the Protestant and Catholic divisions of Western Christendom in one grand church - united under the banner of the Bible. As a king, James was a failure. He was vain, extravagant, and foolish. But his achievement in forging a gloriously beautiful English Bible, reflecting all the exuberance of the Golden Age of English literature, was enormous."