Pen, Print, & Pixels: Peter Gurry: Textual Notes in Early English Bibles

Daniel Buck reports on another session of the Pen, Print, & PIxels Conference:

Peter Gurry

          Peter Gurry gave a brief history of printed English Bibles up to the King James, focusing on their text-critical marginal notes.  The first of these editions was Tyndale’s of 1525, printed in Cologne as far as the 22nd chapter of Matthew before the printing was stopped by the local authorities.  This edition had extensive printed notes in the margins.

          Tyndale’s second edition, the first complete NT, was printed in Worms in 1526, a press run of six thousand of which only three copies remain, none of them quite complete:  the British Museum’s copy is missing the title page.  In that copy, the first owner not only colorized the illustrations but added his own marginal notes [in Latin]!  This edition was reprinted by a Bible printing firm in Antwerp several times before 1534, when George Joye undertook to anonymously edit the text for them, putting some of his own theology into the revision.  This provoked Tyndale enough to issue his own revision in which he criticized Joye by name in the introduction.

          This 1534 edition, Tyndale’s third, contained substantial marginal notes (but none of a textual nature), very interpretative and marked with stars.  For example, the word “sandals” which had been introduced to the English Bible by Wycliffe, was retained, but with a note at Mark 6:9 explaining what they were.  Like the second edition, this 1534 NT has chapters subdivided into paragraphs, and lacks the line in John 8 about the adulterous woman’s detractors being accused of their own conscience.

          We now move on to the Whittingham NT of 1557, printed in Geneva.  It was the first English NT to be printed in Roman type, the first to be subdivided into verses, and the first to use italics for implied words.  Conrad Badius printed it, brother in law of Stephanus. There was a real brain trust then in Geneva.  According to the introductory pages, this translation was “Compared with the Greke, and best approued translations.”  It was based on Erasmus, Stephanus, and Beza’s Latin-only 1556 NT.    Whittingham mentions “divergent readings in diverse Greek copies,” using a “ symbol for a word-length variant and || for a sentence-length variant. (Peter Gurry had searched in vain for any examples of these in the margins, finally finding a series of the latter in Acts!) All but one of the nine are a full verse long. 

A conjectural emendation offered in the 
margin of the 1611 KJV.

         Textual margin notes are always italic and in a bigger font. Of Beza’s 350 textual variants noted in Acts, only 9 were included, kind of clustered on a few pages. In the Geneva NT, which came out three years later, variants were marked by double bars. There are only 21 such in NT, all 9 carried over from Whittingham in Acts, and the rest mostly in the Gospels from Beza’s text.

          Finally: the KJV.  Up until now, title pages of English Bibles have been keen to point out the inclusion of notes to help the reader, but not so the King James, even though it contained 6000 marginal notes in the OT and 300 in the NT.  Instead, the editors actually felt a need to apologize in the preface for providing the notes. In doing so, they took a slight swipe at Sixtus VI, who disallowed any variety of readings in the margin of his Vulgate. 

          The variant notes read much as do those in modern editions:  “As some read” or “many copies wanting.”  Most variant notes are indistinguishable from translation notes, usually starting with “Or.”  About three-fourths of the NT notes are just alternate renderings.  Acts 13:18 has a conjecture, proposing ἐτροφοφόρησεν for ἐτροποφόρησεν.  [This is, as far as Peter could see in a quick run through the margins, the only note in the entire KJV with Greek in it – but Daniel Buck has observed that there’s another one on the same page: τα οσια at verse 34].

          I John 2:23 is the only place the KJV uses typefont to indicate a textual variant, instead of a marginal note. That variant was found either in the text or margin in their Greek sources. The KJV editors included many more variants than the Geneva, but not as many as were in Beza’s GNT, making their own judgment on which of Beza’s to include.

          And now some conclusions. 

          ● It is striking how many editions made their notes a selling point, for which Geneva is so famous.  But they go along with other features now common:  book summaries, chapter summaries, cross references, readers’ introductions.

          ● Those who produced these English Bibles knew that many of their readers would be reading the Word of God in their own language for the first time. So they also included extensive book prefaces. Tyndale’s preface to Romans is the longest in the whole NT, longer than Romans itself – and almost entirely directly translated from Luther.  

          ● Early English Bible translators made only a vague distinction between translation differences and textual differences. They didn’t see them as distinctly as we do.

          ● Finally, I’m not sure we’ve improved much on the KJV notes.