Message #160227

[Azrael]

 Queen Elizabeth with an exhortation to show no mercy to Roman Catholics, the violent notes with which it abounded were almost as critical of the Church of England as the Church of Rome. It was essentially a Puritan Bible and as such could find no favor with the ruling hierarchy. To offset its influence, Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, organized in 1564 a committee of bishops to produce an "official" translation. Known as the "Bishops’ Bible," this appeared in 1568 in a sumptuous edition adorned with woodcuts and copperplate portraits of Queen Elizabeth, the earl of Leicester, and Lord Burleigh. But unfortunately the bishops were neither as good scholars nor as good writers as the reformers. Their New Testament, which was practically Tyndale's, was satisfactory, but there was such an outcry against their translation of the Psalms that in the third edition in 1573 they restored Coverdale's old translation, printing it in parallel columns with their own. This edition was known in popular parlance as the "Leda Bible" because some of the type heads had been previously used for an edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses so that the initial at the beginning of the Epistle to the Hebrews happened to be a rather unsuitable representation of Leda and the

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