The notes, after four centuries

The exiles who wrote it

When the Catholic Mary I took the English throne in 1553, hundreds of Protestants fled the country. A group of them settled in Geneva, the city of John Calvin and, for a time, the Scottish reformer John Knox.^[1] There, between roughly 1557 and 1560, a small team of scholars set out to make an English Bible for ordinary readers. The chief translator was William Whittingham, Knox's successor in the English congregation at Geneva; he worked with Anthony Gilby and Thomas Sampson, among others.^[1]

They had time, quiet, and access to the best biblical scholarship in Europe — Calvin's Geneva was its hub. The New Testament appeared first in 1557; the complete Bible followed in 1560, printed in Geneva by Rowland Hall and dedicated to the newly crowned Protestant queen, Elizabeth I.^[2]

Why it was revolutionary

Several firsts came together in one affordable book:

• The first English study Bible. It surrounded the text with introductions, chapter “arguments,” explanatory notes, cross-references and maps — a whole apparatus for reading, not just the bare text.^[1]
• The first English Bible with numbered verses. Every verse got its own number, so a reader could find and cite an exact place — the same idea as this site's addresses, four centuries early.^[1]
• Readable roman type instead of heavy black-letter. Words were set in the clear roman face we still read today, and italics marked words the translators had supplied.^[2]
• Small and affordable. It was printed in compact quarto and octavo sizes a household could own and carry, not a lectern folio — so for the first time the study Bible was personal.^[1]

The notes, and their bite

The margins were the point. Thousands of notes explained hard words, drew doctrinal conclusions, and pressed the text's meaning on daily life. Many were straightforwardly Calvinist; some were pointedly political. Where the text described kings and tyrants, the notes did not hedge — and that is what made them dangerous.^[3]

When King James I of England reviewed the Bible at the Hampton Court Conference in 1604, he singled the Geneva notes out as “partial, untrue, seditious,” objecting especially to notes he read as licensing disobedience to a monarch. His remedy was a new translation with no marginal notes at all — the Authorized, or King James, Version of 1611.^[3] In other words, the King James Bible exists in part because the Geneva notes cut too close.

Its impact on the world

For a full century the Geneva Bible, not the King James, was the Bible the English-speaking world actually read. It went through around 150 editions and outsold the new Authorized Version for decades after 1611.^[2]

• It was the Bible of Shakespeare, whose plays echo its wording, and of the writers of the age.^[2]
• It was the Bible the Pilgrims and Puritans carried to America — the text they read on the Mayflower and in the first New England colonies.^[2]
• Its study apparatus set the pattern for every annotated Bible that followed, down to the study Bibles on shelves today.

1560 and 1599 notes — which notes are “the” notes

The Geneva Bible was revised over its long life. The original 1560 notes are Whittingham's team's. Later, the New Testament notes were substantially expanded using material from Laurence Tomson (1576) and, for Revelation, Franciscus Junius — and the widely reprinted 1599 editions carry that fuller, more strongly Reformed set of notes.^[1] So “the Geneva notes” is really two overlapping layers, and it matters which edition you are reading.

On harness.talk the verse text is served from a clean transcription of the 1599 edition, and the facsimile pages are the 1560 first edition. The note text is transcribed by hand from those 1560 pages, book by book, in the reformers' own spelling — see below.

For the books themselves — the two title pages set side by side, the dedications, and the story of the Bible patent that put a printer's name on the King James — see the title pages and the patent.

See them for yourself

The surest way to meet the notes is to look at the page they live on. Every chapter in the reader now has a “Compare the 1560 page” button that opens the actual first-edition leaf from the Internet Archive — the true marginalia, on the true page, in the public domain.

Note text · transcribed book by book

The notes are also coming back as clean, searchable text — transcribed by hand from the 1560 facsimile pages, in the reformers' own spelling, one book at a time. No usable public-domain transcription of the 1560 notes existed, and the only machine text on the facsimile is an OCR of the old type too garbled to publish, so we read the pages ourselves rather than invent the words. Each note is checkable against the page it came from. Where a book has not been transcribed yet, the margin stands on the facsimile and the API answers source_not_ingested for its note text. See the source registry for exactly which books are done.

References

1. Encyclopædia Britannica, “Geneva Bible.” britannica.com/topic/Geneva-Bible
2. The Bible and Holy Scriptures conteyned in the Olde and Newe Testament, Geneva: Rowland Hall, 1560 — first-edition facsimile, Internet Archive (public domain, CC0). archive.org/details/1560-the-geneva-bible
3. On King James's objections at the Hampton Court Conference (1604) and the decision to omit marginal notes from the 1611 Authorized Version. See Britannica, “King James Version,” britannica.com/topic/King-James-Version.