This episode describes the confrontation between Puritans and King James just prior to the new monarch's ascension to power in 1603. A Puritan delegation headed by John Reynolds petitioned the king to share ecclesiastical power with lay elders and install presbyterian church government throughout England. This radical change in church polity would undermine the authority of bishops, and James adamantly responded, "No bishop, no king!" James reaction underscores the church-state fusion that predominated in Europe in which bishops were, in effect, delegates of the king. Presbyterian church government threatened to undermine royal authority. The confrontation nevertheless bore positive fruit when King James agreed to Reynold's suggestion that a new English translation of the Bible be sanctioned by the king.
“Power Corrupts”: the Legacy of the Geneva Bible
This episode expands on the legacy of the Geneva Bible, which is not shaped by the translation itself but by commentary in the margins. The editors of the Geneva Bible had fled the reign of "bloody" Mary, the Catholic queen who zealously martyred many Protestants. The margin study notes reflect a consistent preoccupation with the concentration of secular power in the monarch and ecclesiastical power in the bishop, where tyranny is a likely result. Of course, with the fusion of church and state, in which the monarch also presides over the church, abuse is more likely. The "republican" tradition, captured by the maxim, "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely" is largely derived from Calvinist emphasis on total depravity. Puritans, who relied on the Geneva Bible for the next century, often pushed back against the monarch and the bishop when abuses were evident. In the case of the latter, Puritans advocated a "presbyterian" form of church government, where power is shared among elders of the church. The English monarch who presided over both church and state was seen by many Puritans as the corrupt Protestant version of the pope, who had significant power in both arenas as well. The legacy of the Geneva Bible, via notes in commentaries, is a distrust of concentrations of power in both church and state, and this sentiment would later undergird "republican" ideology on the eve of the American Revolution.
Henry VIII: When the Wicked Falls into his Own Trap
This episode follows the history of Bible translation amidst the stormy political swings of 16th century England. William Tyndale translated the New Testament into English in 1526, and his continued work on translating the Old Testament led to his execution in 1536 as a heretic by Henry VIII. Tyndale's protege Miles Cloverdale nevertheless managed to convince the king to authorize "The Great Bible" in 1539, the first officially sanctioned English Bible of the Anglican church. Why the sudden reversal? In his dispute with the papacy over separation of the Church of England from the Roman church, Henry VIII found an English translation to be a politically expedient tool to uphold his power. The English Bible, as opposed to the Latin Vulgate, was much more amenable to the nationalism that he was promoting, particularly one in which he was actually head of both the church and the state. The irony here is that the Great Bible, unbeknownst to Henry, depended on Tyndale's NT! The episode traces the close church-state relationship as it developed, highlighting England's return to Catholicism under "bloody Mary" (1553-58) and the subsequent compromise reached under Elizabeth in the "Elizabethan Settlement" of 1577.