Taverner's Bible

Taverner's Bible, the work of the English scholar Richard Taverner, was a learned but relatively short-lived revision of Matthew's Bible, published in 1539. Covering the complete Bible, it was drawn from Greek and prior English sources, taking the Matthew Bible — itself a compilation resting on the earlier English work of Tyndale and Coverdale — as its base text, with some consultation of the Greek. Its guiding philosophy was that of a moderate revision of the Matthew Bible, and it is accordingly classed as a revision rather than a fresh translation, with the Matthew Bible standing as both its predecessor and its base translation. Taverner's chief distinction lay in the attention of a trained Greek scholar to points of wording, but among its characteristics is that it proved less institutionally influential than the Great Bible, which appeared in the same period and was taken up for use in churches.