“In short, it was chiefly owing to the dissemination of copies of the Geneva version of 1560 that a sturdy and articulate Protestantism was created in Britain, a Protestantism which made a permanent impact upon Anglo-American culture.”
—Bruce M. Metzger, “The Geneva Bible of 1560,” Theology Today (1960)
The original Geneva Bible was produced by English exiles in Calvin’s Geneva and printed there in 1560. Its margins carried a running commentary that taught ordinary readers how to understand what they were reading. It crossed the Atlantic on the Mayflower and shaped how the Puritans and the Scots read Scripture.
Today we’re glad to publish The Geneva Bible Study Notes (1560), a new edition of this reading resource at Reformed Dogmatika.
It’s an interactive edition of the Geneva Bible carrying the Reformers’ original marginal notes, the annotations of the 1560 first edition, not the later revision that most online editions reproduce. We’ve published all twenty-seven books of the New Testament plus Genesis: twenty-eight books, 310 chapters, more than 4,500 restored notes, and the original book Arguments where the 1560 printed them. Click any marker in a verse and the matching note opens in the margin. You can read with the notes in the margin, inline, or off entirely, and switch between a daytime and a nighttime view.
The notes were restored directly from the 1560 first edition (Geneva: Rovland Hall) and checked against it note by note. Spelling and punctuation are modernized; the vocabulary and syntax are the annotators’ own, down to the -eth endings, and where a word has passed out of use entirely a bracketed gloss is supplied. The Geneva notes are a window into how the Reformers actually handled the text: election and assurance, the sacraments, the marks of the true church, the person and work of Christ, and the controversies of their own moment. To read them is to sit with the exiles of Geneva with an open Bible.
Our hope is that these old notes help you see further into the text, the way Thomas Fuller said the people once complained they could not see without “the spectacles of those Genevan annotators.”
Deepen Your Study
Join our community to receive Reformed reflections and resources delivered to your inbox.
