Coverdale’s Bible

BIBLIA: The Bible, that is, the Holy Scripture of the Olde and New Testament, faithfully translated in to Englyshe (1535)

Miles Coverdale — who did not have the languages and did it anyway

More about Miles Coverdale →

Bible Spirituality

The first complete English Bible, made by a man who was honest about not having the languages and did it anyway.

Catch rate: Not found in the wild
Base research: 430
Stat total: 420

Base stats

Every stat is a checkable fact about the actual book, not a designer's mood. Bars are drawn against the highest value any book reaches.

Stamina165

Contend75

Defend135

Popularity45

Total420

Why these numbers

The game's own explanation, as a reader sees it in the backpack.

Stamina 165

The whole of it, Genesis to Revelation, in English, complete. The first time that sentence had ever been true of a printed book.

Contend 75

Low, and second-hand, which never stopped being the charge against him: Latin and German at his elbow instead of Hebrew and Greek. It argues less forcefully than the three that went to the originals.

Defend 135

The easiest of the four to attack on scholarship, and its defenders have always answered the same way — it was there, and finished, and nothing else was.

Popularity 45

Slow to arrive, by way of the Latin and the German, though once licensed it was read everywhere, and his Psalms have been sung in English churches for nearly five hundred years.

Cited for this book

William Tyndale translated the New Testament and half the Old before he was killed. Miles Coverdale finished the work. He knew little Hebrew or Greek, so he worked from the Latin, Luther’s German and Tyndale’s English. His Bible was printed in 1535 and dedicated to Henry VIII. English cathedrals have sung his Psalms ever since.

Moves learned

By levelling up. A book that develops keeps what it knew and learns the rest on its new schedule.

Lv	Move	Type	Cat.	Pwr	Acc	PP
1	The First Complete One	History	Argument	84	100%	10
1	Random Verse	Bible	Argument	10	100%	30
44	Chapter…	Bible	Scripture	—	—	12
48	The Psalter They Still Sing	Spirituality	Argument	88	100%	10
52	Into Their Own Tongue	Exegesis	Argument	84	100%	10
56	A Boy That Driveth the Plough	Bible	Argument	88	95%	10

The quotes behind its moves

How to read these. In Scholar’s Dream, books argue with each other. Each thing a book can do in a debate is a move, and most moves carry a real quotation — the words the book puts on the table when it uses that move.

Strong against lists the opposing books and arguments a move was written to answer. Used against one of them, it hits much harder than usual: ×2 means twice the normal force, ×4 four times. It is the game’s way of saying: this is the sentence that answers that argument. Open an entry to read why.

“…the latter furnished the text from which, with the aid of Jerome’s Vulgate, the translations of Luther and Tyndale were made.”
Of Erasmus’ Greek Testament, in Schaff, History of the Christian Church VII, on the Bible in the vernacular (1888), public domain.public domain

Into Their Own Tongue

ExegesisArgument · power 84 · 100% accurate

In the gameEleven weeks in a castle under a false name, turning the Greek into German a ploughman could read out loud. The scholarship is real; the audience is the argument.

“If God spare my life ere many years, I will cause a boy that driveth the plow, shall know more of the Scripture than thou dost.”
William Tyndale, as reported in John Foxe, Acts and Monuments (1563). FOXE IS THE SOLE WITNESS and is an interested one — see research/SECONDARY-SOURCES.md §3. Public domain; no snapshot on hand.public domain

A Boy That Driveth the Plough

BibleArgument · power 88 · 95% accurate

In the gameTyndale said this to a learned man who claimed the church’s law mattered more than God’s. It explains why he translated the Bible, and he was strangled and burned for doing it.

Strong against

×4Nothing Outside the Textan argument · why?

Tyndale swore that a boy at the plough would know more Scripture than the learned men who said it could not be read. That is a claim that meaning is plain enough to reach a farm. Derrida wrote books and expected them to be understood, and every reader who has followed him has assumed the same.