English Bible Versions

This volume was published in 1911 for the New York Bible and Common Prayer Book Society to celebrate the three hundredth anniversary of the King James Bible. The Rev. Henry Barker, described in the preface as 'a late presbyter of this church' but about whom little is known, gives a full historical account of the manuscript origins of the Bible, the development of the biblical canon and the early efforts, made by reformers such as Wyclif in the fourteenth century and Tyndale in the sixteenth, to translate the Bible into the vernacular and thus make its content more accessible to the laity. Barker provides a clear and factual account not only of the evolution of the Bible in English but also of the background of social and political change that fostered the various early translations.