Well, welcome back to another episode of five minutes in church history. On this

episode we are going to be visiting with the Bard and of course the Bard is

Shakespeare. In fact, one scholar has put together a book of biblical references in Shakespeare's plays,

and I have it in front of me, and it is a big volume weighing in at over 800 pages.

The Bible is all through Shakespeare. The first question is what

Bible did Shakespeare use? And as Shakespeare scholars look at the various

references they've come to the conclusion that he uses three Bibles.

The main Bible he uses is the Geneva Bible, and this of course was the Bible published in 1560.

This was published by the British and Scottish, the UK refugees that were there in

Calvin's Geneva and in 1560 they printed the Geneva Bible and it's very likely that Shakespeare owned one of these.

He also refers to the Great Bible, which was a Bible that was commissioned back in 1538 by Thomas

Cromwell.

It first appeared in 1539 and was widely circulated at the time of Shakespeare.

And the third Bible he uses is called the Bishop's Bible. That was a revision of the Great Bible. It was worked on between 1561 and 1564 and it was the work of a number of bishops and hence it got the title Bishop's Bible. So those three Bibles within the English

Bible tradition were the Bibles that Shakespeare used with the Geneva Bible being

the one he went to most often. Scholars figure this out by the text that

Shakespeare is using and the particular version that he's quoting. So in Richard II,

for instance, Shakespeare's line is,

Lions make leopards tame, yay, but not change his spots.

Of course, that's a reference to Jeremiah 1323. Can a leopard change his spots?

Fascinatingly, only the Geneva Bible has leopard at that text, All of the other English versions of Shakespeare's Day

have the word cat as in big cat, but it's the Geneva Bible that has leopard. Of the books of the Bible the he quotes the most. But interestingly enough, Shakespeare also had a fascination with

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