From 1560 until well into the seventeenth century, the Geneva Bible was the most widely read translation of the Christian scriptures into English. Itself building upon but surpassing the prior efforts of William Tyndale and Miles Coverdale, the Geneva Bible exerted a strong influence on the language of the King James text and through it on English translations down to the present day.
The Geneva Bible, as its name suggests, was a project conceived of and carried out in exile, by a group of English exiles who fled Queen Mary’s reign for safety in the Swiss bastion of Calvinist thought. Surrounded by likeminded scholars who themselves translated the scriptures into languages such as French and Italian, the Geneva Bible was very much a group effort, although most scholars credit William Whittingham with oversight of the project as a whole.
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