The Geneva Bible
The Bible and Holy Scriptures conteyned in the Olde and Newe Testament (Geneva, 1560)
English refugees in Geneva — Whittingham, Gilby, Sampson and others
Small, cheap, numbered in the margin, and full of somebody explaining the hard bits — which nobody had ever thought to do before.
- Catch rate
- Not found in the wild
- Base research
- 940
- Stat total
- 1100
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.
Why these numbers
The game's own explanation, as a reader sees it in the backpack.
The whole Bible, from the originals, with the Apocrypha set apart and three hundred thousand words of notes. There is more here than in any other book a reader can carry.
Made by men who had watched their friends burn and had gone abroad to do this instead. It does not hedge.
Translated from Hebrew and Greek by a committee of scholars with Beza next door and Estienne’s texts on the table. Very hard ground to attack.
The fastest Bible ever made, and that is a design fact rather than a compliment: verse numbers, roman type instead of black letter, italics for words the translators had supplied, and small enough to hold in one hand.
Cited for this book
Made in Geneva by English refugees from Mary’s burnings, and it invented the study Bible: verse numbers so a sentence has an address, notes on the hard verses for people with no minister to ask, italics marking every word the translators supplied, and a page you could read without a lectern. Shakespeare’s Bible, Cromwell’s army’s Bible, the Mayflower’s. James I hated the notes — one says a midwife did right to disobey a king — and ordered a translation carrying none.
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 | Chapter and Verse | Bible | Argument | 92 | 100% | 10 |
| 1 | Random Verse | Bible | Argument | 10 | 100% | 30 |
| 44 | Chapter… | Bible | Scripture | — | — | 12 |
| 48 | The Marginal Note | Exegesis | Argument | 86 | 100% | 10 |
| 52 | Two Hundred Editions | History | Argument | 88 | 100% | 10 |
| 56 | Where the Word Is Preached | Ecclesiology | Argument | 93 | 100% | 5 |
| 60 | The Secret Testimony | Presupposition | Argument | 88 | 100% | 10 |
Read it: The Study Bible
The passages the Scriptorium holds on screen, word for word from a public-domain translation. Written in English.
“…printed there two editions of the Hebrew Bible, and an edition of the Greek Testament, with the Vulgate and Erasmian versions, in 1551, which for the first time contains the versicular division of the text according to our present usage.”
Of Robert Estienne at Geneva, in Schaff, History of the Christian Church VIII §160 (1892), public domain. The Geneva Bible of 1560 was the first English Bible to use it.
“This is the so-called ‘Geneva Bible,’ or ‘Breeches Bible’ (from the rendering of Gen. 3:7), which was for a long time the most popular English version, and passed through about two hundred editions from 1560 to 1630.”
Schaff, History of the Christian Church VIII §160 (1892), public domain.
“Wherever we see the word of God sincerely preached and heard, wherever we see the sacraments administered according to the institution of Christ, there we cannot have any doubt that the Church of God has some existence, since his promise cannot fail.”
Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion IV.1.9 (trans. Beveridge, 1845), public domain.
Made in Geneva by English refugees from Mary’s burnings, and it invented the study Bible: verse numbers so a sentence has an address, notes on the hard verses for people with no minister to ask, italics for every supplied word, and a page you could read without a lectern.
Shakespeare’s Bible, Cromwell’s army’s Bible, the Mayflower’s. James I hated the notes — one says a midwife did right to disobey a king — and ordered a translation carrying none, using the Geneva scholars’ text to make it.