It was Henry the VIII who was then King of England, and who assisted the bishops to buy up Tyndale’s edition and burn the books in a heap before St. Paul’s in London.
I saw a fragment of one of the books, mostly burned, rescued from the flames, and now in the British Museum. This is Jehoiachim No. 4.
It is said that a young man named Coverdale had been greatly interested in Tyndale’s edition; that he was a fine scholar, and that he, with several others, finding that the edition would be destroyed, succeeded in selling many copies for the flames, thus erecting a fund with which they proposed another edition. The prayer of Tyndale in less than two years was answered. Henry the VIII, with increasing disgust at the ignorance and corruption of the religious teachers in every community, determined that, after all, the Bible should be printed and extensively circulated. So Coverdale, with strong patronage, was employed to issue it, which he did, under the care of Archbishop Cramer, in 1527, in Zurich. Two thousand five hundred copies of Coverdale’s edition were seized and burned by the Inquisition in France. This is Jehoiachim No. 5.
Following Henry VIII, Edward VI ordered that every parish priest should own a copy and read therefrom a chapter at each service.
In 1558 John Calvin, with able associates, published an edition called the Genevan edition.
In 1614 King James commissioned forty-seven scholars to make a careful and complete edition, which was authorized as standard. This is our own edition or translation in common use since. As Tyndale commenced his work in 1511, you will see that it took just a century and more than fifty years after the time of printing to produce a complete and authorized version of God’s word. The race of Jehoiachims in many parts have attempted to destroy it, especially in Spain, for the last few years.
During the time of the preparation of King James’s version, our Catholic friends completed an edition more to their liking, which was published in 1609 in Douay, France, and which they have in whatever common use it is proper to say, called the Douay version.
In 1604, the same year that King James moved for his version, John Eliot was born. In 1631 he joined the church in Boston, and became a learned and pious missionary among our American Indians. In 1661 he published his translation, and lived to see over twenty Indians educated and using his edition in their own tongue, in the pulpit. Eliot died when he was eighty-six years old. There are now about thirty copies of his translation remaining, about equally divided between England and America. There is a copy in the Astor Library in New York, and one in Yale College library. A copy was sold at auction in New York a few years since for $1,130, the highest known price ever paid for one book. There is no man now living who can read Eliot’s Bible.
In 1870 a movement was started, appropriately by the Church of England, for a thorough revision of our Scriptures. The New Testament has been in our hands for some time, and we now eagerly look forward to the appearance of the Old Testament in the new version.
“Within this simple volume lies