Why The Geneva Bible, 1560, Is Astonishing Me: Was God's Real Character Obscured in Later Translations?
Is God Much Nicer Than We've Been Told?
The headline of these readings is that the Geneva Bible was translated by dissident reformers who were in self-exile, in Geneva, Switzerland, in order to avoid martyrdom by Queen Mary, directly from the Hebrew; by people committed to getting God’s word into the hands of everyone, without mediation or institutionalization.
The Geneva Bible, and the Hebrew original to which I am comparing it, are both “blowing my mind”, as I wrote earlier, because these are completely different literary texts than are most received later translations of the Bible that I have read.
Specifically, throughout (at least up to Joshua, which is as far as I’ve read; I paused to re-read it to you all aloud from the start, with commentary) God in the Geneva Bible (and in the Hebrew) is much less punitive, much more tender and parental, much more patient and emotionally present, and far more reasonable and, frankly, lovable, than He appears to be in later translations. He is, at the risk of being offensive, hard to love or trust, from a human perspective, in later translations, in my humble experience; as He is inaccurately presented later often as being irrational, choleric, rigid, and focused on minutiae.
In comparing the Geneva Bible to the Jerusalem Bible (which I chose as a representative popular Bible that updates five centuries of Catholicism; hence, “the West”), and comparing both to the Hebrew original, I am astonished by how later translations concealed God’s tenderness toward His children and the intimacy of the human-God relationship! And also how later translations constantly foregrounded the religious institution as an institution, and inaccurately highlighted the role of the middlemen that came between humans and their Dad.
This mis-representation in later translations of the character of God — and, as a corollary, the consistent mis-representation in later translations of the role of human beings, as they morph from being (in the original Hebrew, and in the Geneva Bible) agents of personal responsibility who are always deeply loved, to being the hapless ciphers of sin and misery, in desperate need of middlemen to appease the wrath of the Master, that they later became - seems to be systematic and must be intentional at some level, as it is so consistent.
Did later translations deliberately obscure the fact of how much God loves us and wants us to thrive and do well, in His moral universe? This central message, if left un-obscured, would indeed (as it briefly did, before the 1560 Geneva Bible was censored) drastically alter the role of institutional religion, to being inevitably less central to humans than would be their active, dynamic, always-available relationship to a loving, everpresent God himself; and this message, if it had been left to descend to us intact through the centuries, would also have drastically empowered individual human beings.
This aspect of the Geneva Bible may well explain the courage of the Puritans, and the presumption, too, of the Founders, that they were entitled to build a New Jerusalem in the New World.
Please join me on this incredible journey as I read through the entire text, with commentary, and compare key passages to the Hebrew!
Dear Naomi,
Why not the 1599 Geneva Bible? Do you know the difference? Thank you so much for reading and also translating from the Hebrew. That is so helpful! Kris
Thank you twice over!! I am excited to look into The Geneva Bible......truely a friend on the soul plane....carry on and keep up the good work and I will do what I can on my side of things...never give up!Lori Santulli 🕊️